Are emerging technologies colonial?
Amidst the burgeoning discourse surrounding the transformative potential of data-driven technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), a recent panel discussion organised by the Ethics Lab explored the ethical and political significance of concepts like AI, data, and digital colonialism. Held on November 29th, 2023, the panellists included Everisto Benyera (University of South Africa), Catriona Gray (University of Bath), and Michael Kwet (University of Johannesburg), who collectively probed the relevance of these concepts within the African context and the broader global South. The speakers offered a compelling exploration of resistance strategies against the looming spectre of digital colonialism, underscoring the imperative for nuanced ethical deliberation in charting the course of technological innovation.
Great optimism often surrounds innovations in artificial intelligence and its promise of development. At the same time, ethics is often invoked to raise caution and critical questions about the (un)desirability of the futures imagined, articulated, and (re)produced through scientific and technological innovation. Colonialism and imperialism are examples of ethical critical frameworks used to think about their worldmaking dimensions of science and technology, evident in concepts like data colonialism as described in The Costs of Connection authored by Nick Couldry and Ulises Meijas (2019).
What conversations do concepts like AI/data/digital colonialism/imperialism enable us to have, and what are their current limitations? What is their relevance in Africa and the global South? And finally, what would resisting AI/data/digital colonialism involve?
According to the panellists, these concepts make several contributions. They maintain that technologies are not independent of (colonial) history, especially if we understand them as assemblages of institutional arrangements, ideologies, norms, values, ways of knowing, and assumptions about the world. Innovation occurs in a world system shaped by colonial encounters and legacies, like racialised hierarchies for example, such that its development cannot be separated from the social context of application. These concepts are also used to name and critique the effects of this reality, which include dispossession and global inequality in the production and exchange of data, as well as political, economic, ideological domination by emergent digital empires.
These insights notwithstanding, the panellists noted that efforts to draw continuities between emerging technologies and colonialism are sometimes too abstract. Michael observed that some accounts often fail to explicitly name a coloniser and colonised, a core and periphery, presenting a sanitised account of colonialism that is everywhere and coming from all fronts. Talk of data/digital/AI colonialism should, he argues, identify and challenge Big Tech and digital capitalism as an American project of empire. These concepts are also occasionally too reliant on metaphor and analogy, comparing data extraction to the historical appropriation of resources like land, natural resources, and labour. This misses an opportunity, Catriona contends, to consider how extraction and dispossession are embedded in, conditioned by, and reproduce colonial power relations, and how and why its effects are unevenly distributed.
From the global governance of mobility through exclusion and containment, to the erosion of individual and collective sovereignty, to the dehumanisation, displacement, and environmental degradation of cobalt and lithium mining, to exploitation on digital platforms, to southern contexts as laboratories of experimentation with technologies of occupation, the panellists underscored the precarious and necropolitical inscription of Africa and global south contexts in colonial and imperial data relations.
What then can be done to build alternative digital futures? There are opportunities in individual and collective software choices, governance, and policy spaces. It is worth nurturing an active citizenry conscious of its interests in taking charge of what is happening now, and there is also a need to democratise (some say decolonise) these conversations, freeing them from the dominance of tech oligarchies and elite institutions. Ultimately, we need alternative and compelling visions of the future. For example, Michael articulates a digital ecosocialist agenda premised, amongst other things, on socialising means of computation, wealth redistribution, anti-imperialism, and a planetary solidarity connecting the digital left to environmental and other radical social justice movements.