Every empire arrives bearing gifts — mirrors that promise self-knowledge, horses that promise speed, steel that promises progress.
In 1519, Hernán Cortés arrived at the shores of the new world carrying all three, cloaked in the language of deliverance. Five centuries later, Silicon Valley parades the same vision, wrapped in the rhetoric of “universal abundance”. We are told that this is not conquest, but liberation.
Yet, I have come to distrust those who invoke “our future” while keeping silent about who gets discarded. When the conquistador needed gold, he claimed civilisation for barbarians. When the venture capitalist needs data, he claims opportunity for the masses. Progress, we are assured, comes free of consequence. But history, persistent and inconvenient, whispers otherwise.
Reid Hoffman proclaims that GPT-5 will empower India’s farmers and transform solopreneurs into moguls. But as I read his manifesto, I see no mention of those left behind — teachers displaced, artisans automated, millions whose one purpose is rendered obsolete. The gift on offer demands our surrender; the story asks for our complicity. It is the old genius of power: to make its victims celebrate the very thing that erases them.
This “weightless revolution” — the Silicon Valley myth — requires trauma to be invisible. To believe transformation is pain-free, one must silence the voices of the displaced, must erase the memory of Moctezuma greeting Cortés as a god only to watch his world turned to ash.
— Progress, stripped bare, is not a parade but a procession of ghosts.
The Spanish extracted 45 tonnes of gold and 7,000 tonnes of silver from the region, transforming Spain from a backwater kingdom into the world’s first global superpower. Meanwhile, 90% of the indigenous Aztec population vanished into disease and servitude.
And Cortés was hardly alone. Empire repeats itself with chilling familiarity: the British laying railroads across India, hailed as modernisation, while extracting raw materials at unprecedented speed and draining wealth that could never be replaced. Or missionaries bearing scripture, presenting the word of God as salvation, only to do away with ancient languages, ancestral deities, and entire cosmologies, replacing them with a single story that narrowed eternity to one sanctioned truth. The formula is consistent: the gift is never free — it is a hook, a new dependency, a tether that binds far more tightly than chains.
If Joseph Campbell was right, and every culture must live by its myth, then ours pretends erasure is evolution, that becoming irrelevant is somehow heroic.
— To believe transformation is pain-free, one must silence the voices of the displaced.
But consider the pattern, unbroken since the first empire. Arrival as salvation. Dependence through gifts. Extraction until exhaustion. Elimination of those declared expendable. In San Jose and Soweto alike, the story repeats: value is extracted, futures are sacrificed and the narrative is always that we are the architects of our own “liberation”.
Today’s myths are dressed in softer words, but they conceal no less violence. We hear of “access”, “democratisation” and “abundance”. Yet what of the worker whose shift is replaced by automation? The artist whose craft is consumed by generative algorithms? Progress requires they remain invisible — living absences whose silence props up the fiction that no-one has been lost.
Progress, stripped bare, is not a parade but a procession of ghosts. The conquistador needed only a few hundred loyal men to lay waste to a civilisation. Silicon Valley needs only our faith — faith that to vanish is to ascend, that tragedy is only the residue of laggards refusing change.
Let us remember: resistance to persuasion is not longing for the past, but insisting that abundance must answer for its casualties. Let us refuse the gift that requires silence. Let us demand an accounting — a reckoning with the cost of progress, so that when the next Cortés rides in, we meet him as equals. And if our surrender must masquerade as liberation, let us at least name the mask. To account honestly is not to deny invention, but to insist it serve all. Only then can abundance be truth, not myth; only then can progress shed its ghosts and claim to be more than conquest reborn.
• Kajee is a lecturer at Southern Utah University, a non-resident research fellow at the Korea Institute for Maritime Strategy and a researcher for the SeaLight maritime transparency initiative at Stanford University’s Gordian Knot Centre for National Security Innovation.
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