Everyone these days, touting the benefits of the internet, talks about how digital technology has reduced the world into a “Global Village”. The whole world, the suggestion seems to be, is at one’s fingertips. Even if one ignores the implications of the vocabulary of reduction used here, one must necessarily ask some questions when confronted with this position. The first, of course, is how much of this reduction is actually homogenization? Is this global neighborhood actually worth the stripping away of nuance that it entails? And finally, if the world is now a village, then who is the chief?
This brings one to the question of what is perhaps best termed “Technological Colonization”. Like regular colonization, technological and/or digital colonization displaces resources in a way that benefits a Eurocentric (or powerfully located) user base while simultaneously depriving the bases it gets its resources from of the advantages of new technology. Unlike regular colonization, technological and/or digital colonization is more covert in its workings and is almost always treated as a given. The position of the chief is deeply embedded in how the internet is constructed and for the same reasons, it is also uncontested. The following sections will analyse a few ways in which technological and/or digital colonization is rampant in the contemporary state of scientific and industrial architecture.
Production.
It is a fact known by most that multinational conglomerates often take to hiring from Third World countries so as to be able to pay their employees less for the same amount of work as their First World employees. Companies often take advantage of the poor working conditions and the minimal alternatives available to employees in these countries to exploit them and derive more labour from them than they are getting paid for. Workers in the Third World often lack adequate representation in higher levels of authority to demand fair wages and better working conditions resulting in them getting paid peanuts compared to their First World counterparts.
This problematic resource extraction extends beyond just exploitative labour practices. Massive technological enterprises often exploit mostly Third-World countries for their lithium resources and other materials that are essential for technological development, and they often use local labour to do that. Workers endure hazardous conditions, meager wages, and environmental degradation so that these companies can have enough of the resources that they require. As a result, local communities often lose access to clean water and fertile land, and are uprooted from their homes. Despite being the primary stakeholders, they often have little say in the decision-making processes that impact their lives and environments.
It would be remiss to not mention generative AI and how it appropriates, in addition to everything else, entities of cultural and ethnic importance. GenAI, if not regulated, can tend to use images and text that are culturally significant and produce bastardized versions of the same which lack a nuance and understanding of what makes that entity significant for a community and how it can hurt cultural sentiments to usurp these elements without sanction.
Dissemination.
One could attempt to problematize the fact that the language of the internet is largely English as many times as one has the heart to, but it will still necessarily remain so. The language of most new technology is also English and it is even impossible to code without a basic understanding of the language. The internet and digital technology in general perpetuate the cultural hegemony of the English language and that will unfortunately not be rectified any time soon since that is the way the internet and most technology have been created since their very initiation. Without some knowledge of the English language, it is hard to produce or consume most products of new technology.
A study on neo-imperialism in the Global South by US-based agencies and organisations by Kwet et al uses South Africa as a case study to propose that Big Tech multinationals have a monopolistic hold over the digital ecosystem and the intelligence agencies of the Global North partner up with these corporations “to conduct mass and targeted surveillance in the Global South” which also results in what they call “tech hegemony” with the US being the center where all the power is concentrated.
Miranda Fricker in her book titled Epistemic Injustice, talks about two types of injustice related to knowledge. The first, testimonial injustice, has to do with who is allowed to add to the pool of knowledge, whose word is considered credible, and who is considered the “expert” in various matters of epistemic significance. The second is what she calls hermeneutic injustice and that largely has to do with the politics of who is allowed to know, and who has access to this figurative pool of knowledge. Digital technology is problematic on both these fronts, especially since the ways in which it perpetuates these forms of epistemic injustice are often covert. Due to the widespread availability of resources on the Internet, it is widely assumed that these resources are available to everyone for use and most requirements for qualifications for dignified white-collar jobs often take place on the basis of this assumption, but the Internet, rife as it is with information, is not really available to everyone everywhere, and the tendency to forget that is quite unfortunate yet pervasive. So is the tendency to believe that everyone everywhere can utilize new technology to give rise to newer technology that addresses their specific needs.
Consumption.
Most products of modern science are made for a user base which is predominantly western. The resources for them come from the Third World. The labour for them comes from the Third World. However, the Third World cannot afford them. This is true for almost all healthcare products made by the West. More often than not, products of modern science and technology are not even made keeping the Third-World user base in mind.
Take Spotify, for example. The company introduced Spotify Wrapped, an annual review of an
individual's music consumption patterns in 2016. Since then, a lot of music applications have
followed suit, but Spotify Wrapped has now become culturally significant. There are memes,
opinion pieces, and general social media users pontificating about the implications of their
Wrapped. General concerns with data surveillance aside, the fact that most Indian music aficionados inevitably find “Filmi” in their top genres says a lot about how the development of these features often dismisses the national contexts of the user if they are not of Western origin. All Indian music is categorized under “Filmi” or “Bollywood music” because the developers did not consider the fact that there are other kinds of music in India and even the music used in movies have diverse genres and are worthy of being representations of the same. After all, English songs are mostly, with due diligence, assigned genres and are not simply categorized into genres indicative of their sources.
Moreover, default non-personalized recommendation algorithms often privilege Western news over news from any other corner of the world. In a vicious cycle of cause and effect, they show a new user the sort of news that generates the most traffic and it is generally assumed that the new user will be more interested in the coronation of King Charles than the ongoing human rights crisis in Manipur because the algorithms value revenue generation over all else. Not to mention the deeply ingrained Eurocentric ideals of beauty that online advertisements often subject the unsuspecting user to do not help the overall notions of Western superiority. According to the Internet, everything aesthetically pleasing, everything politically important, is western until and unless other information is actively sought out.
It is disheartening to see that even digital technology, something that emerged after the Second World War when most colonized nations had been liberated, could not rid itself of the implications of colonization. The benefits of digital technology are numerous, but their distribution is far from equitable. The global village then necessarily has a master and the one wielding the baton is the White Man.
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