Solar Community Hubs: how multinational ‘sustainable’ technology companies are replacing church and state in their ‘civilising and philanthropic’ educational work

Abstract

ABSTRACT Since 2011, Dell, Intel, Microsoft and Computer Aid International have been implementing hubs to accelerate the process of digitisation and inclusion in the ‘global digital economy’ of ‘remote and low-income communities’ in the Global South. There are currently 25 such Solar Community Hubs in operation, aligned with the SDGs. The paper shows that through the socially accepted discourse of technology as neutral, apolitical and conducive to economic development, multinational companies and corporations in alliance with governments manage to insert diluted microcosms of the Global North – microcentres of ‘civilisation’ – for racialised and historically subalternised populations. In this way, technology multinationals become heirs to church and state in their civilising and philanthropic educational work of colonial origin. In particular, the Boa Esperança Solar Community Hub renders indigenous peoples productive for transnational economic powers, while absorbing their symbolic capital as ‘natural protectors of nature’, and modern, inclusive, sustainable and cool in the eyes of neoliberal folklorising multiculturalism.