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
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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.