Digital Colonialism

 Digital colonialism is the new deployment of a quasi-imperial power over a vast number of people, without their explicit consent, manifested in rules, designs, languages, cultures, and belief systems by a vastly dominant power. In the past, empires expanded their power via the control of key assets, from trade routes to oceans, from railways to precious metals. Now, we additionally also have technology empires that control data and computational power to dominate the world. Just think of how dependent the local information ecosystem is on the whims of Silicon Valley. Here’s one example: In Sri Lanka, Bolivia, Slovakia, Serbia, Guatemala, and Cambodia Facebook introduce experimental changes to the news feed that instantly reduced visits to pages of publications and organizations at the end of 2017. Never mind volatile politics or media freedom. Users were never asked because the relationship with Facebook is neither fair nor democratic. 

We do not need to resist it, we need to end it. We need accelerated regulatory reform in the spirit of antitrust legislation. We need to contain the expansion of big tech and their ability to extract data from people on abusive terms. We need reinvented knowledge and data commons, and we need to innovate collaborative, publicly funded forms of artificial intelligence for the common good. This is not a job for grassroots movements alone. To burn down digital colonialism we need governments, municipalities, regions, cooperatives, collective forms of social innovation, and collaboration. We need everyone to become aware of what’s at stake, so we can take back our public infrastructure, and build our own sustainable platforms for the future.