Neo-colonialism in the open
Once a space of generalized expressivity, today a mere field of economic-commercial struggle, for neo-colonial-capitalist conglomerates. The Internet is no longer what it was once envisioned to be. The end of a utopia?
While the first generation of inventors and developers of the Internet and the web dreamed of a space of communication and human interaction where the walls of political tyranny would collapse by themselves to make way for intercultural and global communication, today's reality shows that the colonization of the digital world by Silicon Valley companies is a series of paradoxes that give rise to a new form of feudalism in the current transitions from economic capitalism to digital capitalism
Basically, capitalism is a vast movement of outsourcing of labor, of taking over entire sectors of the economy, and of disrupting production processes and working conditions. Industrial and colonial capitalism is now being superimposed by digital capitalism with the objectives of a declared neocolonial war.
In "The Costs of Connection" the two authors Nick Couldry, Ulises A. Mejias, invite the reader to a dive into the virtual universe of surveillance capitalism, control, quantification of the social and the grip of commercial and profit logics, in these new laboratories of value production, where the greatest precariousness rubs shoulders with the free work of users of various social sharing platforms, where aspirations to individual autonomy and collective fulfillment are diverted to the benefit of the minority of Silicone Valley and where surveillance is massified in an unprecedented way via new digital technologies.
From Industrial Colonialism to Digital Colonialism
What can be understood from the pages of this book is that the fundamental pillars of the colonization of the digital world are not totally different from the objectives of colonialism in the past.
From the outset, the researchers pose the urgent question about the nature of our use of social networks, the Internet, and various digital applications and gadgets: connection is not free, and our presence on the web has a cost that we cannot determine.
The answer to this question will lead researchers, first of all, to dissect the logics of technological domination from the emergence of the first technological innovations to the birth of large firms and multinationals in order to "dismantle" the phenomenon of digital colonialism.
Understanding these logics of the commodification of the social will certainly allow readers to come to the conviction that the value of their presence on virtual spaces is not linked to considerations of freedom of choice, expression or opinion, but to the transformation of their browsing activity into a commercial process to extract value with almost zero costs, if not non-existent: users are the new slaves in the era of digital feudalism.
The digital revolution is ultimately a euphemism; it is the evolution, the authors explain, from the current economy based largely on the manufacturing of material goods to an economy of services, with a strong component of robotized work.
According to the two researchers, we are currently witnessing a double movement: on the one hand, the growth of the development of an industry of increasingly personalized and robotized services, and on the other hand, the evolution of the manufacturing economy transformed by a new digitalization of production that relies on "the collection and analysis of huge volumes of data" (Big Data).
The world today is going through a great recomposition whose winners are none other than the neo-capitalists and neo-colonialists. Our virtual presence, and even our way of life, are becoming a real work (Digital Labor) with a minimal cost if not non-existent.
GAFAM or the new patriarchs of the digital age
In the end, contrary to what the message of freedom conveyed by the GAFAMs suggests, these large and well-known digital companies have abused their domination by monopolizing the digital economy, sweeping away the privacy of users and breaking down the barriers between the privacy of consumers through targeted advertising, thus making the spaces of expression on platforms more vulnerable to mercantile manipulation. A move that is becoming legitimate by a certain de facto power of hegemony and domination illustrated by these successive scandals, the biggest of which is perhaps the Cambridge Analitica scandal in 2018.
The human dimension of online communication has been transformed and "commodified": the platforms dominating the webspace have proceeded to establish the most suitable conditions to proceed with an unbalanced exchange. The personal data of users will be the medium to transform all virtual interactions, and all aspects of online social life, into a profitable extraction objective". This process is none other than "colonization by data". this is the concept by which researchers Nick Couldry and Ulises Ali Mejías try to analyze the key dimension of the development of digital neocapitalism today.
For the researchers, social life is now "colonized by the instrumentalization of digital data" of individuals. Although the term "colonialism" may seem metaphorical, the analysis presented in the chapters of this book clearly illustrates that the same exploitative logic that historically prevailed in the colonial movement for Western industrial capitalism remains the same today.
Just as colonial powers yesterday despoiled, bridled, and exploited the wealth of occupied territories and confiscated it through the force of material terrorism, human life and the presence of individuals in digital spaces today is influenced by the same logic of exploitation occupied for the benefit of large Silicon Valley corporations developing information technologies to extract economic value for almost nothing in return. "This is not an approximation to other experiences of oppression, but a new and distinctive exercise of power," they write.
By "data" the authors mean to describe the flows of information that emerge through the various processes of human interaction to the technological infrastructures of collection and processing (the databases). This is the starting point for generating huge profits for GAFAMs from the exploitation of data. In this sense, the process of generating, storing and exploiting data sums up a capitalist approach to appropriating social life by converting human communication into market value.
The difference is that the old colonial movement despoiled the land through arms and the imposition of hegemony through physical violence, but today the movement of neo-capitalism, which the authors call "colonialism by data", is done by manufacturing and imposing the values of this movement through the material structures of information technologies: in this case the conditions of use and access to the web, to which the user must voluntarily comply, are in fact the ideology of surveillance by which GAFAMs secure consent, or voluntary servitude, from the uses.
The Fragile Foundations of Digital Ideology
The two researchers identify the main pillars of the ideology of colonization of the digital world in four elements that are not fundamentally different from the objectives of colonialism in the past. First, the detour and appropriation of sources of wealth, monopolizing the communication channels on the web. Secondly, the appearance of great imbalances in economic and social relations at the global level, which - in the interest of the dominant powerful states - allow them to continue to exploit these riches of the digital sphere.
On the basis of the above, another imbalance concerns the distribution of benefits from the terrible exploitation of individual and state data extracted at the lowest cost and without added value for the providers.
Just as the discourse promoting the benefits of colonialism and its civilizational virtues was in the past, the ideological narrative accompanying today's movement of digital neo-colonialism led by technophiles, theorists of the new economy, prophets of the global village, and theorists of the new digital civilization (the information society and the information superhighway), are working to legitimize the status quo imposed by the Web multinationals.
More serious than the lie, the falsification undertaken by this technophile operates sabotage of the critical spirit and unfortunately of any attempt of resistance to the neo-colonial hegemony. For instead of naming the real, the prophets of the digital civilization are busy structuring the social unconscious, around slogans such as "the society of transparency", "digitalization", "technology at the service of the human", "augmented humanity", and "artificial intelligence".
In order to legitimize the exploitation of data generated by individuals as they surf the web and social network platforms, the neo-feudalists, who are none other than the experts, researchers, and capitalist guardians of the Temple of Capitalism and its gendarmes the IMF, the OECD, and the WTO. whose mission is to justify the established order, which the two researchers call "the logic of extraction. This is the conceptual tool that paves the way for the assimilation of the ideology of digital capitalism and "colonialism by data".
The logic of extraction
The logic of extraction as analyzed by the authors is based on five pillars.
First, the Economic Rationality: considering that the data generated by online users as available and free of charge and without value because it has been produced in ordinary social interaction contexts, rather than on the basis of the economic law (work-value) and that the data thus becomes available and exploitable by the web service providers and companies operating in the technological sector.
Since the data has not been produced on the basis of market laws, the notion of ownership does not exist. The "legal rationality" is that the issues of "confidentiality" and "privacy" are not contained and not governed by any legal formula.
Then, "cultural rationality", or when the slogan "digital revolution" absorbs citizen participation in accumulation processes. This is a mistake, according to the researchers, because by exhibiting bits of their lifestyles, interests, and aspirations on social networking platforms, individuals gradually unravel their private lives and accept that spotlights are shone on the few spaces of intimacy and privacy.
Moreover, the concept of "privacy" is gradually receding in the face of the extinction of the boundaries between the public sphere and the private sphere, without ignoring the risks associated with the fragmentation of the confidentiality of personal information, the object of the covetousness of intelligence services and spying and surveillance devices.
On the other hand, "technical rationality" makes the exploitation of data a "primordial" objective of the evolution of the world, and one of the locomotives of human creativity, these are the "false slogans of digital capitalism and colonialism by data" indicate the authors.
This terrible expansion of digital capitalism clearly shows that Karl Marx's theory on the expansionist and exploitative nature of capitalism has not aged a single day and is still valid and relevant in the reflection on the nature of capitalism in modern times.
Finally, "The Rationality of Growth" states that financial capitalism, in the process of replacing industrial capitalism, makes the colonization of the social universe by data such as the new, the tool of a new era of modernization.
It is worth remembering that after the crisis of the Internet bubble in the early 2000s, new confidence had to be re-established to attract venture capital investments. The notions of Web 2.0 and social media have emerged to give the impression that the business model of the new platforms is radically different and promises huge economic benefits. Web 2.0 and social media are therefore also catchwords of the neo-capitalist ideology.
It is important to remember that for Marx, Capital is self-expressive, that is to say, that value and accumulation are inherent characteristics of it. Capital must increase permanently, otherwise, companies, branches, or entire economies enter a crisis phase, and this is why GAFAMs remain very attached to an economic model that makes inexhaustible personal data their main source of profit.
Post-colonialism: a model for reflection
The theoretical construction of the authors in the reflection on the actuality of colonialism through data is to make a parallel: just as industrial capitalism changed society by transforming human activity (work) into a social form with an abstract dimension, through commodification, digital neo-capitalism transforms, this time, the human universe itself, that is to say, all the anthropological, cultural and symbolic dimensions of human life, into a new abstract social form: data, also destined to exploitation and commodification. Let's imagine, with the authors, the explosion of what is called "Empire Cloud" (data cloud) with the terrible number of those tools and gadgets connected to various networks, which in 2017 amounted to about 27 billion connected devices. This number will reach about 125 billion connected objects by 2030.
This is not a purely theoretical work, but rather a manifesto for the liberation of the webspace, and for the citizen reclaiming of spaces of expression commodified by the logic of profit. The authors rely on the theoretical heritage of the thinkers of the so-called "post-colonial" current, whose philosophical foundations originate in texts on the periphery of the Western center. Through Couldry and Mejias, the reader is introduced to the work of Edward Said, Franz Fanon, and Paulo Freire, among others.
The intellectual value of the research of Couldry and his colleague Mejias in this book is a form of theoretical and intellectual engagement, which beyond analyzing the digital reality - including the social reality - also tends to put the finger on the structural imbalances caused by devastating capitalism, and this, in order to allow the readers to initiate themselves to critical reflection in order to try to change somewhat an imposed (digital) reality.
It is in the very last paragraph of their book, that the authors warn against the voluntary submission of web users. "The path to liberation from data colonialism will begin when we regain the ability to connect and communicate as human beings who have always possessed this ability. It is when we decide that the current costs of connection are neither necessary nor mandatory. The struggle must be global: it is important for humanity as a whole (...) it confronts capitalism as a whole, not just digital media and social networking platforms.
Tahar Kaidi
