@ntnsndr Finished reading Governable Spaces yesterday on a flight and it's really gotten me thinking about how I can contribute to making a more democratic Internet :)
Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back
Ulises A. Mejias and Nick Couldry
"Large technology companies like Meta, Amazon, and Alphabet have unprecedented access to our daily lives, collecting information when we check our email, count our steps, shop online, and commute to and from work. Current events are concerning—both the changing owners (and names) of billion-dollar tech companies and regulatory concerns about artificial intelligence underscore the sweeping nature of Big Tech’s surveillance and the influence such companies hold over the people who use their apps and platforms.
As trusted tech experts Ulises A. Mejias and Nick Couldry show in this eye-opening and convincing book, this vast accumulation of data is not the accidental stockpile of a fast-growing industry. Just as nations stole territories for ill-gotten minerals and crops, wealth, and dominance, tech companies steal personal data important to our lives. It’s only within the framework of colonialism, Mejias and Couldry argue, that we can comprehend the full scope of this heist.
Like the land grabs of the past, today’s data grab converts our data into raw material for the generation of corporate profit against our own interests. Like historical colonialism, today’s tech corporations have engineered an extractive form of doing business that builds a new social and economic order, leads to job precarity, and degrades the environment. These methods deepen global inequality, consolidating corporate wealth in the Global North and engineering discriminatory algorithms. Promising convenience, connection, and scientific progress, tech companies enrich themselves by encouraging us to relinquish details about our personal interactions, our taste in movies or music, and even our health and medical records. Do we have any other choice?"
#DigitalColonialism: "Some people think that colonialism is long over, while others are sure it has never stopped. This book explores a third possibility: not only is colonialism still continuing, but right now it is morphing into possibly its most powerful version yet. This is data colonialism.
In 2020 Tierra Común was formed: a network of activists and scholars, mainly from Latin America, to resist colonialism that operates through data and digital technologies. This book was written collaboratively by members of Tierra Común. It is intended as a toolkit for understanding what data colonialism is, who it harms, and how it can be resisted.
The book’s theoretical framework explores the historical roots of today’s data practices in colonialism and racism, and the colonial entanglements that shape data extraction and AI like all forms of modern science. It examines key examples of how data practices today operate in colonial ways, their implications for identity, life and being at the most fundamental level."
#AI#GenerativeAI#Imperialism#DigitalColonialism#Surveillance: "As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to captivate the collective imagination through the latest generation of generative AI models such as DALL-E and ChatGPT, the dehumanizing and harmful features of the technology industry that have plagued it since its inception only seem to deepen and intensify. Far from a “glitch” or unintentional error, these endemic issues are a function of the interlocking systems of oppression upon which AI is built. Using the analytical framework of “Empire,” this paper demonstrates that we live not simply in the “age of AI” but in the age of AI Empire. Specifically, we show that this networked and distributed global order is rooted in heteropatriarchy, racial capitalism, white supremacy, and coloniality and perpetuates its influence through the mechanisms of extractivism, automation, essentialism, surveillance, and containment. Therefore, we argue that any attempt at reforming AI from within the same interlocking oppressive systems that created it is doomed to failure and, moreover, risks exacerbating existing harm. Instead, to advance justice, we must radically transform not just the technology itself, but our ideas about it, and develop it from the bottom up, from the perspectives of those who stand the most risk of being harmed." https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20539517231219241
If you'd like to get a rough feeling on how well your ad-blocking strategies are (uBlock Origin, Pi hole, AdGuard, AdNauseam, ...), give this test tool a try:
Truth be told we wish that there was a #DigitalColonialism warning system that one could enable in the #addOn that simply checks the #IPAddress of sites to warn when a site is served by (scAm)azon, Akamai, Goo', Micro-shaft, Cloud(G)lare, Oracle, F'book, TwxtsiteBuyer, Apple, Alibaba and Tencent…
…and just simply warn the user of such Digital Colonialism.
12 day to get from the UK to Sydney ... Very unlikely ... This is outrageous ... The reason they do this, is because they are a-holes ... Royal mail told me it flew out on the 12th Oct ... Auspost holds the parcels because they can
#DigitalEconomy#DigitalColonialism#VC#SiliconValley: "As countries in the Global South have long been plundered for labor and precious natural resources, today’s digital economy is extracting data from its citizens. And as the new dirty jobs of the digital economy are outsourced to the Global South—for instance, content moderators and data labelers in Kenya and the Philippines scouring the dregs of social media to protect the public from extreme and graphic material—we are witnessing the construction of a new age of digital sweatshops, where the most dangerous work is offshored to be performed by workers with the fewest protections.
The tech industry likes to present itself as presiding over a new industrial revolution that will change the world forever. It’s a more apt comparison than they might realize. As Dr. Onoho’Omhen Ebhohimhen of the Nigeria Labour Congress explained to us, noting that the effects of the digital economy, such as algorithmic management of workers, “is akin to reproducing the first Industrial Revolution, where workers were bonded and locked up, worked for 20 hours or more in a day, and had no right to a family life.”
Yet, it doesn’t have to be this way. Digital innovation can disrupt economies in favor of collaborative, solidarity-based forms of decent and quality work, where all can flourish. So, how might we democratize the digital economy so workers have agency and are able to shape the future alongside the technologists and venture capitalists of Silicon Valley?"
"The signing of the National Ticketing Solution contract with supplier Cubic means New Zealanders will soon be able to use a single payment system across all public transport networks.
People will be able to pay for bus, train and ferry trips using contactless credit or debit cards, Apple Pay and Google Pay."
"Much of the rest of the world, meanwhile, finds itself in a state of digital colonialism, in which mostly U.S.-based transnational tech corporations own and control the core components of the digital ecosystem, while actively preventing interoperability in order to monopolize the market and orient their services to maximize user engagement, ad impressions, and thus power and profits."