Digital Colonialism and the Denial of Human Vulnerability

The essay investigates the colonial logic that, according to certain theorists, characterizes digital technology society. Upon closer inspection, the spread of these technologies, rather than representing UNCORRECTED PROOF a “liberation march of humanity,” appears to reproduce old colonial logics of domination, exploitation, expropriation, hierarchization, and dependence. However, since it does not constitute colonialism in the traditional military and political sense, some prefer to speak of coloniality. After providing a conceptual clarification, the essay identifies a pivotal point of this approach in the “great asymmetry” that sustains such colonialism: between those who extract, connect, and exploit data expropriated from users, making it their own, and the users from whom this data is taken. This asymmetry underpins a form of “primitive accumulation,” reminiscent of the unilateral appropriation of land carried out by historical colonialism at the expense of indigenous populations. In both cases, the notion of “discovery” appears as a determining epistemic act. Finally, the essay analyzes a concrete case of digital colonialism: the non-consensual, or oseemingly consensual, expropriation enacted through end-user license agreements (EULAs). Specifically, the case of Zoom in 2023 is examined, with the modification of its Terms of Service (ToS) that would have allowed broader management of users’ data and content. In conclusion, the essay hypothesizes a connection between this colonial-style assertion of dominion and Freud’s narcissistic wounds, of which AI would represent a fourth example.