The Clearing: Documenting Mother Nature in Cambodia
His latest work is 'The Clearing,' which premiered one year after Cambodia jailed five activists from the award-winning environmentalist group Mother Nature for plotting against the government, after they had sounded the alarm about river pollution and land reclamation projects.
Ball spoke with The Diplomat's Luke Hunt about The Clearing, which follows Chandaravuth, the group's most outspoken member, and his colleagues in the months leading up to their incarceration as they continued on a collision course with Cambodia's rulers.
The Mother Nature environmentalists refused to buckle under pressure, and the severity of their sentences – up to eight years behind bars – shocked many people in Cambodia.
Environmental activists, NGOs, and human rights groups have urged the government to release them, noting the Phnom Penh Appeal Court has indefinitely postponed the activists' appeal of the conviction.
'These activists should never have been imprisoned. These young men and women pose no threat to the Cambodian state,' the rights group Licadho said in a statement earlier this month.
Ball's work has been published and broadcasted by Mongabay, BBC, CBS, New York Times, South China Morning Post, and Insider.
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Unlike other Southeast Asian countries implementing strict data localization, Singapore emphasizes flexible cross-border data flows while maintaining oversight. As Diganta Das and Berwyn Kwek showed in a December 2024 paper, Singapore's Smart Nation initiative provided digital infrastructure for comprehensive urban governance, encompassing real-time data collection and AI-driven public services. The city-state attracted massive foreign investment, hosting 'approximately 87 data centers' by 2024 (60 percent of Southeast Asia's total capacity) with Google, Microsoft, and Meta establishing major facilities. However, these data centers remain foreign-owned and operated. Singapore's AI Singapore initiative, despite substantial funding, still requires Google Cloud partnerships to access cutting-edge AI capabilities. While Singapore's digital governance demonstrates greater flexibility than its neighbors, the fundamental computational architecture remains under foreign control. Even the most successful data center hub in the region cannot escape the structural dependency on foreign-owned AI development tools and infrastructure that defines the contemporary global technological hierarchy. The Path to True Technological Independence Data localization policies in Southeast Asia have only achieved the political simulacrum of 'technological sovereignty.' The aim of these policies is to keep the data at home and regulate extraction, while the entire process, infrastructure, and material framework remains structurally controlled by foreign corporations. What we are witnessing is something a tad more sophisticated than just 'digital colonialism,' as many scholars have pointed out. There is a deeper form of structural relation that maintains unequal control of power and value production. Like gravity, which invisibly shapes physical phenomena while remaining imperceptible to direct observation, the material structural relations governing computational infrastructure operate beneath policy debates about data flows and control. In other words, beneath talk of 'data flows' and 'data localization' lies a spectrum of material transactions and relations that moves downward to computational infrastructure and concrete global market relations. This spectrum encompasses Amazon extracting over 50 percent of sellers' revenue and Apple demanding 30 percent tribute on app purchases, while Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud control 67 percent of global cloud computing. Data compiled by Oxford revealed that only 32 countries possess AI-specialized data centers, with over 150 countries having no computational infrastructure whatsoever. The specialized GPU manufacturing, advanced semiconductor fabrication, and cloud computing architectures enabling AI development remain concentrated in core economies like the United States and Europe, creating technological and economic checkpoints that transcend basic policy. The world-system is not only socio-economically configured. There are also deep structural patterns that stratify, divide, and rank the technological development of societies. The old dynamic of 'development of underdevelopment' fundamentally covers the structured international division of labor and technological capacity and ownership. As such, if developed societies are capital-intensive, modernized, industrialized, and digitalized, it is precisely because the periphery persists as an extractive economy, exporting agro-mineral products and providing 'super-exploited' cheap non-skilled labor. AI will only deepen this divide, intensifying the international division of humanity through computational dependencies that determine technological sovereignty. Unless fundamental transformations challenge the structural foundations of this technological hierarchy, the concentration of AI infrastructure will further entrench Global South dependency in the digital age.
