Three Decolonial Questionings of the Digital

In what ways is decolonisation a past questioning the digital? Below, I scratch the surface of three possible answers to this question drawn from the rapidly expanding scholarship on the politics of the digital. They all share an understanding of decolonisation as the ongoing process of dealing with the traces – economic, social, cultural and otherwise – of colonialism in the contemporary world.

Decolonising Digitally

A first answer is that ongoing decolonising processes are afforded by the digital that opens for the possibility of de-colonising through the digital. The digital is a space for nurturing decolonising political strategies and, more than this, to gather support for and build alliances around such politics. Decolonial activism has made astute use of the internet, as illustrated by the Mexican Zapatistas, the Arab springs or the Hong Kong Umbrella movement. In fact, today decolonising processes more frequently than not take place in the expanded place where the “online” and the “offline” are merged and connected. Amazonian Indigenous people are protesting against colonialism online. This said, the “web-romanticism” that once marked understanding of the liberating potential of the internet is gone. The fate of digitally mediated activisms has been sobering. Moreover, the pervasive surveillance, manipulation and exploitation of the digital for personal, political and economic reasons – extending and transforming past colonial practices – are severely limiting the prospects of decolonising digitally from within digital infrastructures. Yet, activists have not relinquished the digital. They have adopted “pragmatic strategies” working with the digital from within rather than criticising it from without. Of course, part of such decolonial activism is directed at the digital realm itself.

Decolonising Digital Infrastructures

A second answer is that the decolonising of the digital has become a core stake for ongoing decolonial processes. The digital is neither a mere tool for decolonial politics nor simply a “platform” where decolonising struggles play out. Rather, digital infrastructures perpetuate the marks of a colonial past. They are made by large public-private, often-military research projects, by the GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft) and by an unruly undergrowth of enterprising innovators. They encompass the “Global South” that supplies much of the engineering, labour, data and space for experimenting required for these infrastructures to operate. Moreover, many countries, including China, Iran, Brazil and North Korea, are developing their own digital technologies and asserting their “cyber sovereignty”. However, priorities and control remain overwhelmingly with the “markets” and national security agencies of the “Global North” (the US in particular). The consequences are built into the infrastructures that enshrine the primacy of security and consumerism, visible even in the politics of DAESH recruitment videos. Activists and academics hence point to the significance of decolonising the digital itself. So does Google’s AIUX design team, affirming the import of “redistributions of power” and “broader system change” to achieve “racial equity in everyday products”! In fact, all GAFAM have programmes dealing with the traces of colonialism in the digital that aim to make infrastructures more “inclusive” and “diverse”. Such claims testify to the commercialisation of everything, including revolution. Ironically, the decolonisation of digital infrastructures is pursued not only by radical “cyber activists” or governments in the “Global South” but also by the companies operating these infrastructures.

Decolonising Digital Subjectivities

A third answer is that the decolonising of digital subjectivities has become so fundamental for the ongoing processes of decolonisation that it is now a condition of their possibility. The algorithms sorting, classifying, channelling and modulating data flows are not only shaping the business models connected to personalised advertising practices of companies and the profiling of intelligence or border control agencies but also the gains made from the ransomwares or leaks of the hackers (or information system specialists) who manage to tamper with them. More radically, and in part through these processes, algorithms “make up people”. Can the digital subject (activist or historian of colonialism), marked by data colonialism, speak to articulate it? They are defining for what people experience, learn, think, feel, and so their development, thoughts and doings. They shape their within in a “sticky” way. They enshrine invisibility, bias and stereotypes as Joy Buolamwini problematizes in her work. Moreover, many people connect or export central part of their selves to the digital without. Memory is exported to calendars remembering appointments, the sense of space to apps that calculate routes, the appreciation for wine to wine-tasting apps, the ability to fall in love to dating apps, etc. “Subjectivities” have become digitally mediated and individuals turn into “divididuals” distributed across the digital space. The subjectivities of smartphone-addicted teenagers but also of political activists and scholars are increasingly digital. Historians of decolonisation are no exception. Their sources, tools, publications and scientific exchanges are increasingly digitised. Decolonisation may be a past that keeps questioning us. However, that questioning is not a given. Can the digital subject (activist or historian of colonialism), marked by data colonialism, speak to articulate it? While the answer is uncertain, it is clear that cultivating  openings in the design of digital infrastructures is a condition of possibility for this to happen.

These are three obvious, common, ways of connecting decolonising processes and the digital. Obviously much more could (and should) be said about the broader implications of these connections for decolonising politics – and perhaps politics tout court. There is scope for continuing the conversation.