Digital Colonialism

Discussion

Nathan Schneider:

"I will use digital colonialism as a capacious shorthand for the above terms – emerging forms of abuse by governments and corporations through their control over Internet technologies.

If we are serious about the laden language of the colonial, we should be ready to learn from struggles against pre-digital empires and colonial regimes. This means recognising the danger of context collapse through “leapfrogging”, as Frederick Cooper (2005) puts it, when applying the language of military domination to feats of data extraction and digital labour arbitrage. In the apt phrase of Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2012), “decolonization is not a metaphor”. To name the colonial is a call to conflict.

Theorists and practitioners of anticolonial resistance have persistently stressed the centrality of self-governance in everyday life as both the means and the end of their movements, alongside acts of outright insurrection. By self-governance I mean to evoke other terms like autonomy, autogestión, autogestió, community control, self-determination, self-management, self-organising, self-rule, sovereignty, swaraj, and more – together encompassing how groups of people become impervious and intolerable to those who want to govern them by governing themselves. The aspiration to be “ungovernable” has appeared among thinkers ranging from the philosophers Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben (Thaning, Gudmand-Høyer and Raffnsøe 2016) to former Black Panther Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin (Anderson 2020), each seeking to assert the vital personhood of people caught in dehumanising systems. Such systems utilise “governmentality” to extend their power into subjects’ lives (Li 2007). Scholars of governance tend to regard it as something done to – or at best, for – most people, rather than something they do themselves (Levi-Faur 2012). Self-governance against colonialism is something else, something people do to govern while becoming ungovernable.

To become ungovernable under digital colonialism, how should we be learning to self-govern?"

(https://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/1281/1457)