Dave5

Some people, mainly from the privileged West, think that colonialism is long over. Others are sure that colonialism has never stopped. This book explores a third possibility: that not only is colonialism still continuing, but that right now it is morphing into its most powerful version yet. We call this data colonialism.

Data colonialism is a landgrab that’s going on in societies across the world. We don’t mean a literal grab of land, but an act of seizing resources, any sort of resource, in an absolute way. Colonialism, while of course it is much more than this, was originally built from such landgrabs, but even historical colonialism seized much more than land: it seized the resources under the land and produced from farming the land, as well as the bodies to do that work.

Today what is being seized is the social life of human beings. The flow and texture of individual human lives are being seized by corporations —and sometimes governments too. They are being seized in the form of data. That data generates value: economic value for corporations and the value that governments get from controlling us more effectively. Either way, a new source of power is being created at human beings’ expense, in a new data landgrab.

https://networkcultures.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/ResistingDataColonialism_INC2023_TOD50.pdf