Data Spice & Digital Colonialism
Data is the new spice and how today’s tech giants might be considered a form of digital colonialism. Everything is a remix.
In the 17th century as Western European trading companies set to sea it would take them months to reach the various colonies, extract wealth such as spices and return home. Today, in the blink of an eye, data packets make these journeys, the wealth they extract is potentially more valuable; our data. The new spice.
As colonialism and mercantilism operated through networks of shipping routes, roads and ports in the 17th century, so today do technology giants control their gains through the networks of undersea cables and massive data centres. App stores are more than trading markets, they’re carefully controlled trade routes where the company dictates the terms of passage. Amazon’s web services controls the shipping lanes through their vast networks.
There is a striking similarity between historical and modern resource extraction. I write this as both a form of critique but also to help us think about the role of technology giants in our modern society. Something Yanis Varoufakis, a Greek economist, calls “Technofeudalism”, which in a way it is.
Unlike the trading companies of yore, none of these tech giants set out with the intent to be globally impactful or to be colonisers and none of them really want to be either. It is also why we see the pushback from the European Union and other governments regarding data sovereignty and privacy laws. The actions of tech giants are based more on business logic than the explicit intent of imperialism, though it can be a bit muddled at times.
As anthropologist Margaret Mead noted, cultural pattens are often reproduced without explicit intent.
When Meta’s oversight board makes a decision it affects billions of people around the world. For X (Twitter) it is the same. It is the kind of power that would have those trading companies of old blush with envy. Today, data is the new spice, but unlike spices, data as a commodity multiplies with use. This has created networks of dependency more intricate, complex and binding than the first waves of colonialism.
In that first wave of colonialist expansion, power was much more visible. The East India companies, for example, often had troops with them, canons on their ships. Today the power is waged through algorithmic warfare, the mining and harvesting of spices through our devices. So while the vessels and the power systems may have changed, we still see traces of the first waves of colonialism today.
The Dutch East India Company and others became “company states” where they controlled colonies. We see this to a degree with tech companies. Facebook’s oversight board effectively functions as a supreme court. Amazon’s marketplace rules effectively work like a form of commercial law. Google’s requirements for SEO can be seen much the same as business regulations from a government agency.
Ee can even see a form of emerging digital language hegemony through the predominance of English in programming language. This can exclude non-English speakers from participating in digital cultural creation. For example, Python’s English-based syntax creates an inherent advantage for English speakers.
A reaction to Western digital colonialism can be seen in how China, Russia and North Korea developed their own operating systems to counter Windows and Linux. And how they also created their own internal internet infrastructures.
There is also a degree of algorithmic colonialism where the majority of algorithmic systems are based on Western value systems. It is in large part why algorithms are so bad at content moderation. They don’t understand cultural nuances in other societies. We might even say there is time zone colonialism with the standardisation in many countries working around US time zones, and for many too, Beijing time zones.
Then there are the “civilising missions” of some tech giants such as Facebook’s “connecting the world” or Google’s “organising the world’s information.”
Sociologist Emile Durkheim had a theory that he called “social facts” which the ways people in society act, think and feel that are external to the individual and have a form of coercive power. An example today is the “like” buttons on social networks, they exist outside the individual, but exert a powerful force on our behaviours.
They way we engage with platforms are social facts as well. They are external to us (we didn’t create them), they can be coercive (try running a business without Google or Microsoft) and constraining since we must work within their frameworks.
Even algorithms have become social facts today. Algorithmic rankings are opaque at best and exist independently of individual will. They impact our behavioural norms (optimising for engagement), social hierarchies (verified accounts like blue ticks) and collective representations (trending topics.)
There are many more comparisons and this article could become a book (hmmm…), but while these technology giants may not have set out to become Digital Empires, their patterns and systems are reflective of earlier colonialist systems and approaches. Thinking about them in this way can help us determine the future and how they will play in the shaping of our world.