While the Sarawak government pushes AI and “digital transformation,” rural communities still have to fight for basic infrastructure like electricity. Photo courtesy of TONIBUNG.
The Sarawak government has been talking a lot lately about its grand plan for a “digital transformation” – an ambitious leap into the future to become a “digital powerhouse” by 2030. Official speeches frame this in terms of inclusivity and innovation: a “state where no one is left behind,” where AI, automation, and data will propel Sarawak into the ranks of smart, connected economies. It’s a story that casts the government as forward-thinking and benevolent, harnessing digital tools not just for economic growth, but for social inclusion, education, and rural transformation.
But this framing hides – or outright ignores – a stark contrast between the government’s grand development vision and its decades-long neglect of basic services for Indigenous communities.
In the Upper Baram, for example, rural and Indigenous communities remain cut off from even the most basic infrastructure. Many longhouses are still without roads, clinics, or reliable electricity, let alone stable internet. The rhetoric of AI innovation hubs, “smart villages,” and “drone agriculture” is also just plain obtuse, when communities who have thrived and successfully farmed their land for generations are seen as “lagging” behind.
The state’s digital agenda is promoted as inclusive development, yet it continues to marginalize the very people it claims to uplift. The emphasis on “digital upskilling” and AI adoption obscures deeper, unresolved structural issues: insecure land tenure, lack of free, prior and informed consent, the erosion of food sovereignty, and the deterioration of Indigenous governance systems. These are not issues that can be “innovated” away by the introduction of AI training workshops or digitized bureaucratic portals. A “digital transformation” under these terms isn’t then a radical break from the kinds of development the government brought in the form of mass logging and plantations – it’s the same top-down, extractive approach, just rebranded and less visible
Take Sarawak Premier Abang Johari’s proposed “DeepSar” platform (a play on DeepSeek) – an AI model to collect and process Indigenous languages, oral histories, and stories. Framed as a cultural preservation tool, it raises critical questions about data ownership, consent, and control. Whose knowledge is being digitized? Who has access to it, and who profits from its storage and use? Without explicit guarantees of community ownership and data sovereignty, projects like DeepSar risk reproducing the same old colonial logic of extraction – the transfer of Indigenous knowledge from communal, lived contexts into external systems of control. The medium has changed, but the power relation has not.
Sarawak’s digital economy policies frequently cite “inclusive growth,” yet their structure presupposes that development must flow from the center outward, from government and corporate actors to rural populations, rather than from within communities themselves. This assumption disregards the complexity and adaptability of Indigenous knowledge systems, which have long served as sophisticated frameworks for environmental management, governance, and resource use.
There are already functioning models of innovation rooted in these systems. For generations, communities have relied on adat-based (traditional laws and customs) governance to regulate forest access, mediate disputes, and maintain ecological balance. Indigenous institutions are not static or stuck in the past but living systems capable of integrating technology on their own terms. In practice, Sarawak’s “digital transformation” has become the latest iteration of the civilizing mission – a new mode of extraction that seeks to transform Indigenous societies under the guise of technological advancement. The logic is the same: development as intervention, technology as salvation, and Indigenous systems as backwards objects to be modernized.
If the government truly seeks a Sarawak “where no one is left behind,” it must begin by redirecting its digital investments toward the priorities articulated by rural communities themselves. Use technology to deliver basic livelihood services like healthcare and reliable infrastructure and support locally-driven digital literacy programs in native languages. Strengthen rural access to identity documentation, education, and government services and ensure that community knowledge is documented only with free, prior, and informed consent and remains under the ownership of those who produce it. Sarawak does not lack innovation; it lacks recognition of the knowledge systems that have sustained its Indigenous communities for hundreds – if not thousands – of years.