Discourse on Digital Colonialism

"A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization."-Aimé Césaire

In the beginning, we were supposed to be set free. Our bodies that had been shackled, first by violent genocides and enslavement, then by its progeny, violent capitalism, were to be set free. Our existence, which had been constrained and diminished by doctrines of racism and patriarchy, entombed in murderous nationalisms, would transcend into their true multidimensionality. Digitally, we would be boundless, go anywhere, be anything, and talk to anyone. This was to be a third space, between the Earth we stood on and the heaven we could not yet reach: a cyberspace. This space would be an elevation of our experience, a public sphere in the scale of the universe. The vision was so revolutionary that its proponents sought to protect it from the market. And so, the internet was conceived free in structure and intent. It was offered free of charge, and we were promised decentralized, distributed authority. The internet would be a direct democracy where we would vote with our digital footprints. I am told that the vision materialized at first. The early internet was a community of curatorial efforts and conspiratorial exchanges by ordinary people who traded beloved bits of information and identity. Someone you trusted told you they trusted this other person and gave you their link, so you linked to them. You found a like-minded community and joined their chat room. Instead of the usual suspects—race, nation, gender, class, etcetera, this web was woven from that most ineffably powerful thing: culture. The early internet ran on what you loved to do and with whom you loved to do it. Then everything changed. Today, the digital world looks much worse than The Matrix. Capitalism has always exploited human labor, but now, the new surveillance capitalism extracts and exploits human attention. Now we are no longer the pickers; now we are the fruit. 

How did this happen? Why stay plugged into these platforms while they wreak havoc on everything we love? Why allow our beautiful, exquisite brains to devolve into validation-addled slot machines? Why let our cultural life be reduced to a series of transactions?

Digital Colonization

It is because we are being colonized, in a way. I chose that word because that word best describes the problem in a way that also suggests a solution. I don’t know about you, but I was not born free in the 20^th century, only to be colonized in the 21^st.  

Digital colonization is how I describe the systematic exploitation of human culture--how we know, connect, and express ourselves by social media platforms seeking to exploit us for profit. It works like its analog version. By the start of this century, we were entirely in the time of "the end of work." To different degrees, depending on who we were and where we lived, we came into this century painfully aware of our disposability in the "eyes" of the faceless, shapeless, borderless gangster capitalism that dominated the planet. Jobs that meant anything or could sustain a good life disappeared for most humans in the global South, and in the global North, meaningful and good lives increasingly became the luxury of the few. It seemed that the decimation of the planet’s resources might force much-needed change. Running out of things to plunder from Earth and its inhabitants would stop global corporate plundering. Then, in a genuinely hellish plot twist, capitalism reinvented itself. Like a vampire that could smell a new source of blood, capital recognized a new, bottomless resource to plunder—human data and attention. Now as then, capitalism requires a process for capturing resources for sustenance. Social media is that process.

Making Us Ripe for the Picking

By now, we have numerous accounts of how this works,  from scholarly texts to Netflix documentaries. A former senior executive of Facebook, Chamath Palihapitiya, famously summarized the problem when explaining why his children could not use social media.

“I can control my decision, which is that I don’t use that shit. I can control my kids’ decision, which is that they’re not allowed to use that shit...  The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works.”

In the last few years, industry whistle-blowers have revealed that social media is free because it runs on advertising revenue that depends on our eyeballs being glued to the flicker of clicks and likes.

Tristan Harris uses the phrase human downgrading to describe the techniques social media companies use to make capturing and monetizing our attention efficient: digital addiction, cyberbullying, social comparison, disinformation, superficiality, polarization--you know, all the ways they have broken us. Social media platforms, by design, distort how people understand, connect, and communicate. On these platforms, in order to learn information, be in community, or express ourselves, we must agree to sell ourselves, and allow our data to be mined and our attention to be captured. To be social online, we must allow doom scrolling, ads, endless dopamine spikes, and crashes. This self-trafficking, as I call it, is the cost of the so-called free platforms. Of course, capitalism has always worked by getting us drunk on its Kool-Aid, and a degree of ideological manipulation is not new. What is new is that the encroachment is now intimate and existential. Social media has trained us to accept that our social life itself, our very existence, not just our labor, is to be exploited.

Liberation & Culture (Remixing Cabral for the Digital Age)

This is very dire except for one thing: where and when we have been colonized, we have always resisted. The beating heart of that resistance has always been culture. One of the most formidable philosophers of the relationship between culture and liberation was the African revolutionary Amilcar Cabral. In a foundational speech from 1970, Cabral explains why cultural domination is an essential tool of colonization: 

History teaches us that, in certain circumstances, it is very easy for the foreigner to impose his domination on a people. But it also teaches us that, whatever may be the material aspects of this domination, it can be maintained only by the permanent, organized repression of the cultural life of the people concerned.

According to Cabral, colonizers face a dilemma. To ensure their success, they must take away people's cultural resistance. To do this, they can destroy the people, ruining their ability to extract from them. So, the second-best thing the colonizer can do, according to Cabral, is degrade the people’s culture and alienate them from it. Colonization for Cabral then is centrally about this process of diluting people’s culture so you can more efficiently exploit them. Today, surveillance capitalism distorts human culture to corral and exploit human attention more easily. Will it progress to neutralize or paralyze it?

Most importantly, Cabral stresses that cultural resistance must be a grassroots, bottom-up mass movement. It has to rest with those of us deemed least able to command power: “The liberation movement must furthermore embody the mass character, the popular character of the culture--which is not and never could be the privilege of one or some sectors of the society.” Translated for today, this means that the resistance does not reside with the technologists or their enablers, no matter how well-meaning they say they are. Capitalism has never restrained or regulated itself and surveillance capitalism (with its impending AI enhancements) will be no different. We are the only ones who can resist.

In Defense of Things Human

My son, who is 23, has spent the last decade of his life amused by my social media antipathy. I understand. After all, I am a troglodyte from when phones were plugged into the wall… I learn a lot from him about how he experiences social media, and I am comforted to see him and so many others who thrive in our pre-cyborg state. I know and feel the liberatory effects of the digital age. Black cybercultures, for example, are a consistent beacon of alternate possibilities, sources of what Dr. Andre Brock calls our excess of life. After all, we Black people are practiced in making freedom out of the absence of freedom. Nevertheless, I despair when considering that all the mayhem these platforms have caused us is minimal compared to what open-source AI will do. I am terrified at our learned helplessness in the face of this overwhelming encroachment into our interior lives, the place where our will to freedom, our humanity, abides.