An intellectual history of digital colonialism

Abstract

In recent years, the scholarly critique of tech power as a form of digital colonialism has gained prominence. Scholars from various disciplines—including communication, law, computer science, anthropology, and sociology—have turned to this idea (or related ones such as tech colonialism, data colonialism, and algorithmic colonization) to conceptualize the harmful impact of digital technologies globally. This article reviews significant historical precedents to the current critique of digital colonialism and further shows how digital rights activists from the Global South have been actively developing and popularizing these ideas over the last decade. I argue that these two phenomena help explain why scholars from varied disciplines developed adjacent frameworks simultaneously and at this specific historical juncture. The article also proposes a typology of digital colonialism around six core features. Overall, this article encourages historicizing current debates about tech power and emphasizes the instrumental role of nonscholarly communities in knowledge production.

Introduction

Consider these five observations.

1. The African continent is home to around 2,000 languages, approximately one-third of the world’s languages (Doumbouya et al., 2021). As of May 2024, Apple’s Siri, Google Assistant, and Amazon’s Alexa collectively service zero African languages.

2. In 2019, Daniel Motaung, a recent graduate from South Africa, accepted his first job as a content moderator for Sama, a sub-contractor used by Facebook to moderate content in various African languages and heralded in tech communities as a paragon of so-called socially responsible outsourcing. After accepting the job, Daniel was relocated to Kenya, signed an NDA, and was then revealed the content he would be reviewing. For $2.20/h, he was subjected to a non-stop stream of content described by one of his colleagues as “mental torture” (Perrigo, 2022). Faced with this dehumanizing work and poor working conditions, Daniel and some of his colleagues started organizing to create a union and to advocate for better pay and mental health support. Soon, they were intimidated; as Daniel was filling out trade union papers, he was fired. Today, he is suing both Sama and Facebook in Kenyan courts for union-busting and worker exploitation.

3. What is the link between your smartphone and the Democratic Republic of Congo? Approximately 8 grams of a mineral named cobalt. Southern Congo is reportedly home to 3.4 million metric tons of cobalt, almost half of the world’s known supply. Cobalt is instrumental for batteries that power cell phones and electric cars. Local workers in cobalt mines are facing appalling and dangerous conditions. Researchers estimate that in one city alone, Kolwesi, thousands of children work in mining (Niarchos, 2021). Almost none of the industry’s profits go back to the local population.

4. In Johannesburg, the company Vumacam has been building a CCTV network of over 5,000 cameras (Hao & Swart, 2022). Private security companies use the video footage in conjunction with AI analytics software to identify footage that triggers security alerts. This has become standard practice for security companies, which are increasingly turning to facial recognition—a technology found to be racially biased (Buolamwini, 2023). For this reason, local activists argue that it will contribute to reinforcing already profound racialized inequalities. Effectively, these technologies are new components of an old system of racialized surveillance tied to the country’s history of apartheid and racial segregation.

5. In 2013, Mark Zuckerberg launched Internet.org. Framed as a philanthropic project, the initiative promised to bring connectivity to the two-thirds of the world’s population that was not online then. Zuckerberg vehemently denied any financial incentives behind the initiative, instead explaining that he and his company believed connectivity to be a human right. In the name of progress and benevolence, they developed various technological experiments that reached over 60 countries in the world and millions of people. But these projects were not part of a philanthropic organization funded by Facebook; they were part of the connectivity arm of the corporation. One such project, Free Basics, sought to provide access to a set of services free of data charges. In 2022, leaked internal documents revealed that people who had been promised free data charges access by Facebook in the Global South had, in fact, been charged for these data (Scheck et al., 2022); in 2021 alone, this group of users paid nearly 100 million USD. No plans have been announced to repay them.

Taken together, these observations capture some of the main issues that animate the critique of tech power as a form of digital colonialism. Put in simple terms, this critique holds that (primarily U.S.-based) tech companies today play a societal role reminiscent of former colonial powers. These companies, driven by an ethos of global expansion, design digital infrastructures to fit their economic interests. Through aggressive promotion and deployment, they establish a monopolistic position that creates a strong societal dependency on their products. Meanwhile, these companies contribute to the exploitation of low-wage workers, especially in the Global South. They deploy technologies designed to maximize profit, without accountability and with many harmful consequences for democracy, the environment, and marginalized communities. They are spreading peculiar cultural practices and racialized ways of experiencing the world that reflect the biases of a small group of predominantly White, male and American software engineers. And much like colonizers proclaimed that humanistic virtues drove their civilizing mission, these corporations claim to do all this in the name of “progress,” “development,” “connecting people,” and “doing good.”

This critique will feel very familiar to scholars interested in the social impact of digital technologies. In the last 6 years, scholars from many disciplines have turned to the idea of digital colonialism (or variations such as techno-colonialism, tech colonialism, data colonialism, algorithmic colonization, or digital coloniality, to name a few) as a novel explanatory framework to conceptualize the societal, economic, and political role of digital technologies on a global level. These include scholars in law (e.g. Coleman 2019; Mann and Daly 2019), computer science (e.g. Birhane 2020), anthropology (e.g. Amrute, 2019), communication and social theory (e.g. Couldry & Mejias, 2019a; Madianou, 2019; Oyedemi, 2021; Ricaurte, 2019), sociology (e.g. Casilli, 2017; Kwet, 2019), and more (see Table 1). This critique seemed to reach peak scholarly prominence when in 2022, the Association of Internet Researchers chose the theme “Decolonizing the Internet” for its annual conference, describing tech giants as “new colonising forces.”

Table 1.

A scholarly wave of critique of digital colonialism—indicative overview (2019–2021).

Year	Main discipline(s)	Key term(s)	References
2019	Law, Communication	Digital colonialism	Mann & Daly (2019)
2019	Communication	Data colonialism	Couldry & Mejias (2019a)
2019	Communication	Data colonization	Ricaurte (2019
2019	Communication	Digital colonialism, Data colonialism	Milan & Treré (2019)
2019	Law	Digital colonialism	Coleman (2019)
2019	Anthropology	Tech colonialism	Amrute (2019)
2019	Communication	Technocolonialism	Madianou (2019)
2019	Sociology	Digital colonialism	Kwet (2019)
2019	ICT, Development	Digital colonialism	Young (2019)
2019	Education, Development	Digital neocolonialism	Adam (2019)
2019	Development, Anthropology	Digital colonialism	Arora (2019)
2020	Cognitive science	Algorithmic colonization	Birhane (2020)
2020	Computer science	Algorithmic coloniality	Mohamed et al. (2020)
2020	Archeology	Digital colonialism	Stobiecka (2020)
2020	Digital humanities	Digital cultural colonialism	Kizhner (2021)
2021	Sociology	Colonialisme numerique	Al Dahdah (2021)
2021	Communication	Digital coloniality	Oyedemi (2021)
2021	Law, Indigenous studies	Technocolonialism	Durán Matute and Camarena González (2021)
2021	Communication	Blockchain imperialism, Techno-colonial	Jutel (2021)
2021	Geography	Digital neocolonialism	Mouton & Burns (2021)
2021	International relations	Digital colonialism	Wright (2021)
2021	Law	Digital colonialism	Borges Silveira & Moura Júnior Faleiros (2021)
2021	Postcolonial studies	Cybercolonialism	Tuzcu (2021)
2021	Law	Digital colonialism	Arewa (2021)
2021	Communication	Digital imperialism	Ogden (2021)
2021	Law	Digital colonialism	D’Cunha (2021)
2021	Anthropology	Digital colonialism	Marwick, & Smith (2021)

This critique is part of a broader reckoning with the harmful impact of the tech sector or what is more colloquially known as the Tech Lash. In 2013, The Economist promised that “the tech elite will join bankers and oilmen in public demonology” (Wooldrighe, 2013). Today, the Tech Lash is here. Following a string of public scandals, pressure from digital rights activists, scrutiny from journalists, and critique from scholars, the dominant collective perception of Big Tech as an evident force for good has been shattered. Conversations about the oppressive dimensions of predictive algorithms and facial recognition technologies, the dangers of the lack of data privacy, or the harms of online misinformation are no longer confined to the niche of tech policy and activism; they are now routine features of the broader public discourse about digital technologies. This reckoning has taken different intellectual facets, from calls for regulation and ethical design that are grounded in liberal democratic theories (Reich et al., 2021) and opposition to surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019) to work in critical data studies inspired by intersectionality and anti-racism (Noble, 2018). Growing calls to challenge “digital colonialism” have been among the driving forces behind this reckoning. While related to these other efforts, the critique of digital colonialism is distinct, notably by foregrounding global contexts that are too often ignored or treated as peripheral.

This article proposes an intellectual history of the critique of digital colonialism. I ask: Why did scholars from various disciplines turn to this idea to conceptualize tech power? Why did they develop related frameworks simultaneously and at this specific historical juncture? My objective is not to present my own theory of digital colonialism, although I aim to provide a helpful overview of this scholarship by highlighting commonalities and tensions across frameworks. Neither do I intend to make a normative case for endorsing the idea, though my analysis will reveal my sympathy for (and, at times, frustration with) the digital colonialism critique and its value for research and advocacy. Instead, I am interested in understanding the strands of thoughts, actors, contexts, and dynamics that gave rise to this wave of scholarship. By unearthing some of the origins and driving forces behind the critique of digital colonialism, my goal is to offer a contextualized and multi-sited history of this idea.

The article starts by providing evidence of the scholarly rise of the critique of digital colonialism. I discuss various concepts and frameworks developed in recent years across disciplines and put forward a typology of six recurring features found among them. I also highlight tensions across frameworks, particularly in their prescriptive dimensions. I then turn to what I take to be scholarly antecedents and precursors to the idea of digital colonialism. I show that they predate the advent of the Web and can be traced back, at least, to post-World War II (WWII) debates about media imperialism, including debates in the 1970s around the New World Information and Communication Order. In the third section, I broaden the analytical focus by turning to civil society’s contribution to the emergence of the critique of digital colonialism. I show that digital rights activists have been actively developing and popularizing these ideas over the last decade. I draw on cases from Kenya and India, and writings by activists and artists, to illustrate the prominence and circulation of the critique in civil society simultaneously with its emergence in academic publications. The conclusion outlines the three main contributions of the article and discusses their implications for future research.

The scholarly rise of the critique of digital colonialism

Talking about the global expansion of tech power as a form of digital colonialism has become increasingly widespread in academia. Since 2018, there has been a surge in scholarly publications drawing connections between tech companies and colonialism. An ironic search on Google Scholar for articles featuring the term “digital colonialism” in 2018 yielded 59 results. The same search for the period 2019 to 2023 reveals a remarkable increase to 1,160 results, an almost 2,000% surge. Other related concepts have emerged in that time frame including “technocolonialism” (Madianou, 2019), “algorithmic colonization (Birhane, 2020), “data colonialism”, or “digital coloniality (Oyedemi, 2021), to name a few. Table 1 provides an indicative list of relevant scholarly critiques published between 2019 and 2021. This list, compiled over the years by the author, is not claiming to be exhaustive, especially given the breadth and quantity of relevant work published since 2021. Nonetheless, the table captures the undeniable scholarly uptake for variations on the critique of digital colonialism across various disciplines, from computer science, law, and anthropology to sociology, media and communication studies, and international relations. So, what makes tech power colonial, as suggested by this expanding literature? To answer this question, I put forward a typology outlining six main features of this critique. This typology attempts to summarize recurring components of the critique; it provides some conceptual and definitional clarity by way of introduction to this burgeoning scholarship.

The critique holds that digital colonialism involves a profound ‘unequal concentration of power’ (1). In 2019, Michael Kwet, trained in sociology, published an article in Race and Class aimed at digital colonialism. His analysis constitutes a critique of the political economy of digital technologies, whereby the concentration of ownership and control of different pillars of the ecosystem (software, hardware, and infrastructure) in the hands of a few U.S. organizations “constitutes a twenty-first-century form of colonization” (Kwet, 2019, p. 4). While this concentration of power might seem primarily economic (private tech companies) and geographical (United States vs. Global South), critiques often articulate how these inequalities intersect with a broader range of inequalities, including those related to gender, race, and immigration status. Anthropologist Sareeta Amrute (2019) makes this clear by arguing that “tech colonialism” not only refers to the exertion of domination of the Global North on the population of the Global South but also concerns a broader range of populations, including women, Black, Indigenous, and Latinx communities in North America, as well as immigrants in Europe.

The phenomenon of digital colonialism is understood by its critics to be ‘violent and harmful’ (2). These harms occur at various technological layers (hardware, software, and infrastructure); they happen both in the functioning of digital technologies (upstream) and in their societal impact (downstream). In her article “The Algorithmic Colonization of Africa,” cognitive scientist Abeba Birhane argues that “the AI invasion of Africa echoes colonial era exploitation” (2020, p. 389). Referring to Kenya’s recent national biometric ID project—which involved the Kenyan state and a French company, Idemia, tasked with technical implementation—she argues that the project would exclude racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, with damaging consequences in terms of employment, access to public services, and travel. Similarly, Paola Ricaurte makes violence a central feature of her analysis of the links between data and the coloniality of power. For her, the growing centrality of digital technologies in our societies “contributes to deepening all forms of structural violence” (Ricaurte, 2019, p. 352). Violence is not only involved in the impact of the technologies but also in how these technologies effectively work. For instance, computer scientists Shakir Mohamed, Marie-Therese Png, and William Isaac, in their article on “Decolonial AI,”, highlight the exploitative work conditions of “ghost workers,” such as data annotators and content moderators (like Daniel Motaung) in “previously colonized geographies” (2020, p. 668).

Another fundamental tenet of the critique is ‘extraction’ (3). Gabrielle Coleman, publishing in the Michigan Journal of Race and Law, describes digital colonialism as a new scramble for Africa “where largescale tech companies extract, analyze, and own user data for profit and market influence with nominal benefit to the data source” (2019, p. 417). Extraction is similarly at the center of the concept of “data colonialism” by communication scholars Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias (2019a, 2019b). For them, the logic of global data extraction goes along with a growing reach of the broader process of social quantification: “instead of natural resources and labor, what is now being appropriated is human life through its conversion into data. The result degrades life, first by exposing it continuously to monitoring and surveillance (through which data is extracted) and second by thus making human life a direct input to capitalist production” (Couldry & Mejias, 2019b, p. 14). This warrants their central claim that we are witnessing a new stage in the history of colonialism and capitalism: the age of data colonialism. Their take departs from most other accounts in at least one major way: for them, data colonialism is happening to everyone around the world, though it is more acutely felt in the Global South and by marginalized communities. While many accounts of data and digital colonialism draw a parallel between the historical extraction of land and resources and the current extraction of data, others emphasize the continuing material extraction that makes data extraction possible in the first place: “The extractive nature of tech colonialism resides in the minerals that need to be mined to make the hardware for products” (Amrute, 2019). Similarly, Oyedemi discusses cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo, its centrality to the current digital ecosystem, and its connection to the colonial exploitation of the country’s natural resources (Oyedemi, 2019, p.2047).

The critique further holds that digital colonialism establishes ‘dependency’ (4). By aggressively exporting technologies around the world, foreign tech companies seek to lock an ever-increasing number of people into their products, ultimately establishing control of new markets. For Kwet, “If South Africans integrate Big Tech products into their society, the United States will obtain enormous power over their economy and create technological dependencies that will lead to perpetual resource extraction” (2019, p. 6). For Birhane, “the West’s algorithmic invasion simultaneously impoverishes development of local products while also leaving the continent dependent on Western software and infrastructure” (2020, p. 396). Looking at digital technologies in the humanitarian response to refugee crises, Madianou emphasizes that the driving forces of “technocolonialism”—as she calls it—“reinvigorate and rework colonial relationships of dependency” (2019, p. 2).

Digital colonialism involves various forms of ‘cultural imperialism’ (5), namely the establishment of a dominant group’s culture, knowledge, and perspective as a universal norm. This is manifest in the “one-size-fits-all imperative” behind how Big Tech companies enter Global South markets (Birhane, 2020) and in the homogeneity and superiority of Silicon Valley engineers imposing their technologies—and underpinning values, language, and culture—around the world (Amrute, 2019). It is noticeable in the growing centrality of data as the prime way of knowing and arranging social life and in how, as Ricaurte puts it, the belief in the power of data “crowd out alternative forms of being, thinking and sensing” (2019, p. 252). The cultural imperialism of digital colonialism seems wide-ranging, from English as the default language in tech products and coding to platforms spreading peculiar patterns of cultural production, to social quantification and the belief in the power of data—themselves cultural constructs—becoming a dominant epistemology across all spheres of social activities.

Lastly, digital colonialism relies on a discourse of ‘benevolence’ (6) meant to tamper, if not obfuscate, the violence of this system. The primary culprits, Big Tech companies, tell a simple, single story about the benefits and values of digital technologies. Framed as evidently good, connectivity is associated with progress and human rights. In this view, we are led to believe that these technologies are a gift and a seemingly philanthropic contribution. Oyedemi, looking at Facebook’s expansion in Africa, describes this as “benevolent capitalism, a mode of capitalist exploitation designed as charitable acts in the pursuit of capital” (2019, p. 2045). Madianou highlights how, behind a humanitarian ethos, the adoption of digital innovation in responses to refugee crises ends up reproducing colonial power asymmetries, extraction, and discrimination. Amrute, for her part, discusses the “malevolent paternalism” of tech colonialism to highlight that “solutions are always proffered in the name of and for the good of the colonized” (2019).

This six-feature typology bears similarities to the definitional work done by Amrute (2019) but departs from it in one primary way. Where her goal was to define the social phenomenon of “tech colonialism,” my objective here was to delineate the contours of the critique of digital colonialism. Considering this, we can offer the following definition:

The critique of digital colonialism takes aim at the social system where a handful of key actors, through digital technologies, operate on a global scale (unequal concentration of power) and extract profits, data, labor and natural resources (extraction); ensure dependency on their products while reproducing, accelerating or even creating new forms of violence, and imposing distinct cultural norms and values (cultural imperialism) – all of it in the name of progress and helping (benevolence).

While I emphasized recurring features across this expanding literature, it would be a mistake to fully homogenize these different conceptualizations. This becomes clear when considering the prescriptive dimensions of these works. Some advocate for the nationalization of data, while others call for engineers to be more reflexive and reconsider their positionality; some call for regulating technologies, and yet others call for embracing open-source technologies and decentralization; some see promises in data privacy, while others see it, at best, as limited and, at worst, as a diversion. There are many other differences. While many focus on U.S. tech corporations (thus emphasizing companies as opposed to state actors traditionally central to theories of colonialism), others, like Wright (2021), use the idea of digital colonialism to critique China’s expansion of surveillance technologies. Some use the notion of digital colonialism in passing, almost as a self-evident heuristic device (Young, 2019), while others attempt to develop the critique as an overarching conceptual framework (Couldry & Mejias, 2019b; Kwet, 2019; Madianou, 2019; Tuzcu, 2021). Mouton and Burnes argue that the concept of “digital colonialism” should be replaced by that of “digital neocolonialism” to successfully “document and analyze more diffuse forms of domination that operate through the imposition of new normative frameworks and involve a complex web of public and private actors” (Mouton & Burns, 2021, p. 1899). For their part, Couldry and Mejias developed the framework of data colonialism as distinct from digital colonialism, a choice that itself leads to contentions. Gray challenges the universalizing dimension of their concept, calling instead “for more integrated and historicized analyses of data practices and their entanglements with colonial power” (2023, p. 16). Mumford (2022), meanwhile. criticizes the concept for being more concerned with resource extraction than with the epistemic critique of decolonial thought that inspired it. Still, for all their differences, these recent publications—because they prominently emphasize links between tech power and colonialism—bear a striking intellectual resemblance.

Some have called this wave of scholarship the decolonial turn in data and technology research (Couldry & Mejias, 2023). Others, like Moosavi (2020) or Táíwò (2022), might see in it an example of a broader “decolonial bandwagon” in academia. Rather than emphasizing the newness of this wave or dismissing it as a fad, I would argue that we need to broaden our understanding of where it comes from—both in time and social spaces. I will now turn to some historical precedents of scholars examining the links between digital technologies and colonialism before examining the recent circulation of these ideas in non-scholarly communities.

Precursors of the critique

The critique that digital technologies embody, enable, or recreate colonial power relations is not new. In what follows, I outline several insightful antecedents to show some of that scholarly ancestry. Each of these will be known to several readers, for whom my account will appear partial and brief. Taken together, however, they showcase the breadth of disciplinary influences that come to bear on the current wave. In part, this work of historical contextualization will help us understand why the current critique of digital colonialism is not confined to a single subfield or even field but instead spreads across a wide range of disciplines.

“The colonialist, imperialist and racist powers have created effective means of information and communication which are conditioning the masses to the interests of these powers”: these were the words used during the nonaligned media seminar that took place in March 1976 in Tunis (Golding & Harris, 1996, p. 95). The seminar brought together 38 Member States from the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and 13 observers. Formally established in 1955, the NAM galvanized anti-colonial struggles and decolonization movements across the developing world post-WWII. In its fourth meeting in Algiers in 1973, NAM actively turned to the decolonization of information, communication, and culture. When the seminar in Tunis happened 3 years later, this was a time that one of the observers at the seminar called the “decolonization offensive” in “the history of ideas—and the real world developments out of which the ideas emerge” (Nordenstreng, 2010, p. 2). The Tunis meeting is generally regarded as the moment where the proposal for a “New International Order in Information” (NIOO) first emerged, later becoming the “New World Information and Communication Order” (NWICO). This idea of NWICO captured the aspirations of the NAM to address global inequalities inherited from colonialism, which played out in information and communication technologies.

In subsequent years, these calls for decolonizing information would take center stage at the UN and UNESCO through the ensuing NWICO debate. The global inequalities in international news flows, including the concentration of economic power in cities like Paris, New York, and London, were at the center of this debate. Tunisian information minister Mustapha Masmoudi—a leading figure in the movement—noted: “Information in the modern world is characterized by basic imbalances, reflecting the general imbalance that affects the international community (…) Almost 80 percent of the world news flow emanates from the major transnational agencies; however these devote only 20 to 30 percent of news coverage to the developing countries” (Masmoudi, 1979, p. 172). By and large, participants in the NWICO debate sought to confront the unequal political economy underpinning the international communication system and the concentration of ownership and governance mechanisms into the hands of a few Western corporations and former colonial countries. This was the case for news provision but also for the infrastructures that allowed information circulation, particularly the then-emerging satellite broadcasting technology. These debates culminated in the publication in 1980 of the MacBride Report, which challenged the “free flow of information” position defended by Western countries and contributed to the United States and the UK withdrawing membership from UNESCO.

The significance of the NWICO debate is well-established in media and communication studies, though its history is rarely known beyond the discipline. Canonical histories of NWICO often present this debate as a reaction to a wave of modernization theories and media development initiatives emerging from Western scholars and institutions. Recently, historian Sarah Nelson (2021) offered an alternative history. Contrary to this dominant narrative, she unearthed in the archive of UNESCO the testimonies of news professionals and telecom engineers from the Global South involved in consultation in the early 1960s, who routinely advocated for “decolonizing international telecom infrastructures and the international organizations that regulated them” (Nelson, 2021, p. 31). In response, UNESCO brought in American social scientists to lead media development efforts during the 1960s, thus contributing to relegating the initial structural critique to the background. The NWICO debate then was less a reaction to modernization theory; instead, as Nelson puts it, “nonaligned activism for media sovereignty boiled over in frustration over dreams of multilateral telecom and media development repeatedly deferred and denied” (2021, p. 33).

In the aftermath of the NWICO debate, communication scholar Thomas McPhail published the book Electronic Colonialism (1981). He built on the work of anti-imperialist, political economist of the media Herbert Schiller, whose foundational Mass Communication and American Empire (1969) argued that the United States developed a new kind of empire post-WWII through the global imposition of its systems of commercial mass communication. When the book came out, Kaarle Nordenstreng brought dozens of copies to a 1969 UNESCO meeting in Montreal, and the book became essential reading throughout the NWICO debate (Nelson, 2021, p. 50). Building on Schiller’s work on media imperialism and the lessons of NWICO, McPhail would go on developing his conceptualization of “electronic colonialism” throughout the 1980s and 1990s. He defined it as “the dependent relationship of poorer regions on the post-industrial nations which is caused and established by the importation of communication hardware and foreign-produced software, along with engineers, technicians, and related information protocols” (McPhail, 2011, p. 18). His critique epitomizes a political economy analysis of international communication that would continue to find a firm footing in communication studies throughout the 1980s and 1990s—and one that conspicuously resonates with the current critique of digital colonialism.

At the same time, anthropology saw the rise of a strand of thought critiquing the concept and practice of “development,” which shared similarities with the critique of electronic colonialism. Post-WWII development was predominantly conceived as modernization. In this perspective, “underdeveloped” countries should try to emulate the characteristic of “modern,” Western societies: “this ‘evolution’ of society referred primarily to processes of industrialization, urbanization, democratization and the use of advanced technologies” (Scott, 2014, p. 33). Against this dominant paradigm, some anthropologists embraced what came to be known as post-development theory. Most notoriously, anthropologists Arturo Escobar (1995) and James Ferguson (1990) took issue with how development projects not only failed in their stated goals but also constituted as tool of control, ultimately re-entrenching colonial power dynamics and advancing the continuing hegemony of Western values and interests. In their analysis of the rhetoric and practice of mainstream development, both saw technology as a central instrument (Escobar, 1995, p. 185; Ferguson, 1990, p. 97). Both drew on and contributed to a growing critique of neoliberal globalization and deregulation, which was particularly potent among indigenous rights movements and alter-globalization activists worldwide.

Despite this pushback, both within and outside academia, the late 1990s and 2000s saw the rise of a wide range of development projects that put emerging digital technologies at their center. Such projects—falling under different umbrellas such as C4D (communication for development) or ICT4D (information and communication technology for development)—primarily presented technology as a silver bullet to solve complex development issues (Scott, 2014), thus mixing humanitarian discourses with market logics characteristic of the growing digital economy. Scholarly contestations of these projects emerged across media, communication, and development studies inspired in large part by post-development critique and the gradual circulation of postcolonial theories across the humanities and social sciences, including communication studies (Kumar and Paramewsaran, 2018; Shome & Hegde, 2002). Over the years, this scholarship activated a series of critiques usefully summarized by Scott (2014, p. 188): technological interventions fail to address social structures; they can harm local media industries and exacerbate inequalities; they create dependency and often rely on colonial imagery and paternalistic narratives—ultimately sustaining global power relations.

From an initial emergence in literary and cultural studies, postcolonial studies (and their broad focus on identifying the lasting impact of colonialism despite its supposedly formal end) eventually influenced scholars in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. By the late 2000s, a group of human–computer interaction (HCI) and computing scholars put forward the idea of postcolonial computing as an analytical orientation to reconsider design practices in the field of HCI4D—whereby HCI projects are put forward to solve “development” issues for the “developing world.” In a striking echo of more recent critiques of digital colonialism, they describe how the global flows of technologies promoted by development non-governmental organizations (NGO) mirror “the structural flows of goods and money in colonial relations” (Irani et al., 2010, p. 5), with colonial centers using low-cost labor to extract raw materials from colonies and sending finished products on the opposite path. In a follow-up article, they discussed the One Laptop Per Child Project (OLPC), a prominent example of technological intervention that promised to tackle global poverty and inequalities in access to education by providing children in the “developing world” with laptops. In contrast to OLPC’s framing, Philip et al. critically highlighted the labor that made these laptops possible in the first place: “the standing reserves of feminized Asian labor that manufactures the XO laptop, like many of the world’s computers (2012, p.11).”

One year later, communication scholar Dal Yong Jin coined the notion of “platform imperialism” (2013). Focusing on the global rise of American tech platforms such as Google and Apple, Jin asked whether digital technologies were playing a key role in driving a new form of imperialism. He identified several core characteristics of platform imperialism, including platform capitalization, global expansion, and the use and control of intellectual property (IP) laws to protect the growing capital accumulation of intangible assets. Trained in the political economy of the media, Jin knew that many of these questions were not new, but rather the re-activation of prior debates about media imperialism with a long history, especially among critical political economists of international communication.

From NWICO and electronic colonialism to postcolonial computing and platform imperialism, these are some of the concepts and debates that I take to be precursors to the current scholarly critique of digital colonialism. Interestingly, each of these moments appears to emphasize different features of the typology outlined in the first section. NWICO and electronic colonialism focused largely on unequal concentration of power, cultural imperialism, and dependency. The critique of development and C4D highlighted dependency and the discourse of benevolence, while postcolonial computing explicitly underscored the dynamics of extraction and violence. Seen in this context, the current wave of critique of digital colonialism appears less as an epistemological turn or rupture and more as an additional step in a long and multifaceted legacy of confronting ongoing colonial domination through media and technology—and the evolution of this critique across different contexts from that of “information” and “electronic media” to that of “connectivity,” “platform,” “data,” “algorithm,” and today, “AI.”

These precursors testify to the tremendous breadth of disciplinary contributions, from anthropology, development, postcolonial studies, political science, and economics, as well as science and technology studies (STS), information science, and a wide range of sub-fields across communication and media studies. This helps shed light on the disciplinary expansiveness of the current digital colonialism moment, as seen in Table 1. Importantly, these precursors are not part of a unified intellectual tradition, nor are they strictly equivalent to the current wave. The NWICO debate largely emerged from an anti-colonial framework, while critiques of C4D drew more on postcolonial studies to emphasize both continuities and changes in colonial power relations. In contrast, the recent wave draws more on the input of Latin American decolonial theories, with Quijano’s notion of coloniality of power, for instance, taking center stage in Ricaurte (2019), Mohamed et al. (2020), Oyedemi (2019), and Couldry and Mejias (2019a, 2019b). The precursors I discussed here can thus be understood as salient tiles in a larger mosaic of intellectual influences.

Most significantly, all these scholarly precursors are fundamentally tied to social movements and calls for social change. The NWICO debate involved scholars, activists, state actors, and media professionals and should be understood in the context of the broader post-WWII anti-colonial movement that led to the formation of the NAM, Third-Worldism, and its associated critique of global capitalism and U.S. imperialism. Similarly, 1990s post-development theory is entangled with a critique of structural adjustment plans and neoliberal globalization led by alter-globalization activists and Indigenous rights movements, the same communities equally essential to understanding the emergence of Latin American decolonial theory. Decolonial scholars, in particular, explicitly align themselves with social movements, generally approaching knowledge production as a collective project. In the last section, then, I turn to the entanglement of scholarly and non-scholarly communities in advancing the recent critique of digital colonialism. In doing so, I complement what might look like a genealogical approach to intellectual history with a more social approach that considers the broader socio-cultural contexts and history within which ideas emerge.

Harbingers of the critique

If one way to explain the disciplinary expansiveness of the current wave is to look at antecedents, another is to consider the convergence of two trends. On one hand, the pervasiveness and growing influence of digital technologies compelled scholars from an ever-wider range of disciplines to study them. On the other hand, postcolonial and decolonial ideas have grown (not without contestation) more influential, with seemingly no scholarly discipline avoiding calls to be decolonized (for a critical overview, see Táíwò, 2022). The scholarly rise of the digital colonialism critique, then, would result from the generative convergence of the seemingly rapid rise of tech power and the comparatively slow fermentation of postcolonial/decolonial ideas. As a result, scholars in different disciplines end up looking at a similar phenomenon (increasing pervasiveness of digital technologies) through adjacent frameworks; these scholars are sometimes in dialog with each other and sometimes not, a phenomenon characteristic of the logics of academic silos.

But this is only part of the story, for the response to the rise of tech power is far from happening only within the confines of scholarly communities. In the past decade, a wide range of actors—activists, artists, journalists, and tech policy experts—have been the harbingers of the critique of digital colonialism. They may not have written about it in academic books and publications or framed it as a new and sophisticated theoretical intervention in scholarly debates. Yet, they have been consistent intellectual contributors to these ideas and their circulation. In what follows, I provide an interstitial view into this phenomenon.

In 2014, a young artist named Tabita Rezaire released a video called Afro Cyber Resistance. In it, Rezaire shares her thoughts about the Internet, Africa, and colonization. She speaks straight to a webcam and is surrounded by a visual assemblage of online clips, screenshots, pictures of phones, and computerized voice-over sounds:

As Ricardo Dominguez, the founder of Electronic Disturbance Theatre, puts it: ‘the Internet is the Wild West’. Indeed, the West controls the Internet, in terms of domain ownership, content input and data utilization, while Africa remains the least visible continent on the Internet. The fantasized global online culture is still mainly a one-way flow, from them to the rest of the world. Considering the Global South context, we can ask ourselves if the Internet is a colonized space. (Rezaire, 2014, p. 186)

A French-born, Guyanese and Danish new media artist, she produced this video art project while in Johannesburg, where she lived for several years. Afro Cyber Resistance was an early manifesto exploring the possibilities of resistance to digital colonialism, inspired by the practices of South African artists like Bogosi Sekhukhuni and the art collective CUSS GROUP.

Meanwhile, in India, Mark Zuckerberg had just landed to promote his latest pet project: Internet.org. Branded as a philanthropic initiative to provide “free” Internet access to countries throughout the Global South, Internet.org was about to launch in the country. At the time, nearly 1 billion people yet to be connected to the Internet, India was a strategic priority. But Internet.org was met with tremendous pushback (Prasad, 2018). A group comprising digital rights activists, developers, and tech policy experts came together to launch a campaign called Save the Internet to oppose Facebook’s project—and, more broadly, the practice of zero-rating (free-of-data-charges access to services) which they decried as a violation of net neutrality.

A year-long, highly publicized national debate ensued. The primary focus of the campaign was about net neutrality: what does it mean in practice, why Indians should value it, and why the Facebook project violated it. At a surface level, this was a rather niche technical digital policy debate, the likes of which rarely make the front page of newspapers. Some of the campaign’s undertones, however, were resolutely anti-colonial. Activists routinely compared Facebook to the East India Company, which historically made way for British colonialism in the country (Malik, 2016). Some compared Facebook’s strategy to that of Nestle multinational corporation handing out free baby formula in the 1970s to spur consumption and create dependency under the guise of development assistance. Generally, activists grounded their advocacy in the importance of self-determination and national sovereignty to make space for local entrepreneurs to develop digital offerings capable of competing with foreign corporations. In other words, this was a struggle against digital colonialism, something that came in peculiar focus at the end of the campaign. In early 2016, the India Telecom Regulatory Authority voted to forbid zero-rating and effectively ban Internet.org. In response, Facebook board member Marc Andreeseen tweeted: “Anti-colonialism has been economically catastrophic for India for decades. Why stop now?” Online backlash ensued from many in the tech community in India (Shahani, 2016), and led to widespread news coverage about Facebook and colonialism, including Adrienne Lafrance from the Atlantic penning an article titled “Facebook and the New Colonialism” (2016).

These worries echoed beyond India and more broadly throughout the global digital rights community. At the height of the campaign in India, 65 organizations from 31 countries—including many in Latin America, Asia, and Africa—co-signed an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg expressing their concerns about the project. In a way, the Internet.org debate was for the critique of digital colonialism what the Snowden leaks were to the critique of U.S. digital surveillance: a landmark moment bringing unprecedented public attention to a story that epitomized the broader issue motivating much of these activists’ work, world view, and worries.

Yet, this pushback did not prevent the global expansion of Internet.org, which Facebook re-branded as Free Basics and kept on exporting to new countries, particularly throughout the African continent (Nothias, 2020). When Zuckerberg visited Kenya and Nigeria in September 2016, Nanjala Nyabola, a Kenyan writer and activist, wrote an article highly critical of Facebook’s Free Basics. Dubbing it an “African dictator’s dream,” she not only took issue with Free Basics expanding Facebook’s control and access over data but also worried that it heightened the risk of state censorship; because Free Basics works through a partnership between Facebook and telecom operators, and because many telecom operators in African countries are fully or partially state-owned, Free Basics could facilitate online censorship by repressive states (Nyabola, 2016). A year later, the collective of bloggers Global Voices released a report about Free Basics that reignited critiques of “digital colonialism” (Solon, 2017). This report would be referenced by Ogden (2021), and more generally, the Internet.org/Free Basics debate became often mentioned in scholarly writing about digital colonialism in subsequent years. For example, we find it discussed in Arora (2019), Kwet (2019), Coleman (2019), Madianou (2019), Oyedemi (2021), and Couldry and Mejias (2019b); Casili (2017) would draw on LaFrance’s journalistic telling of the debate, while Belli (2017) would use Chakravorti’s (2016) account.

It is the nexus of foreign-owned digital technologies intersecting with complex local politics that led Nyabola to publicly speak out against digital colonialism. In 2017, Kenya held presidential elections. When the results came in, the opposition party opposed the results, arguing that the electronic transmission of the votes had been tampered with. At the heart of this contest was a French IT company called OT-Morpho, to which the election commission had outsourced the electronic voting process. When the Kenyan Supreme Court requested access to the servers, OT-Morpho refused; the servers were located in France and thus out of legal reach (Passanti & Pommerolle, 2022). Without this material evidence, the court invalidated the election, and the country went back to the polls. For Nyabola, that something as sovereign as one country’s national vote could be physically stored in a foreign country and legally owned by a foreign corporation was another worrying example of digital colonialism.

This transnational aspect of digital communication inspired Tabita Rezaire to develop, that same year, a new project called “Deep Down Tidal” (2017). In it, she furthered her interest in electronic colonialism by focusing on the infrastructural foundations of the modern Internet: fiber optic undersea cables. As Starosielski (2015) puts it, where most people imagine the Internet through the metaphor of the cloud and images of satellite, the Internet, in fact, lies out at the bottom of the ocean. Rezaire takes the ocean as her point of creative departure. Her video art explores how these undersea cables were laid on top of the telegraph cable lines that European countries in the 19^th century laid out as part of their colonial expansion. Through video assemblage and her signature automated voice-over narration, she draws connections between water as a site of connectivity and colonial power; these cables follow the routes of the telegraph but also those of the slave trade. With “Deep Down Tidal” (a double entente title referring to the oceanic tides and the streaming service Tidal), Rezaire invites the audience to rethink the ocean as a key site to understand the historical continuities between colonization of physical lands and digital spaces. Her work would gradually gain notoriety in digital rights circles. In the same year, activist Beatrice Martini would feature Rezaire’s work on her blog as part of a reading list on the theme “decolonizing technology”—a reading list later be referenced in Adam’s study (2019).

It would take one more year for Nyabola to publish her book Digital Democracy, Analogue Politics (2018a), in which she expanded on her understanding of digital colonialism, focusing on the Cambridge Analytica (CA) scandal. The British political consultancy firm had recently been exposed by investigative journalists from Channel 4 and the Guardian for its unethical and data-mining practices. Using an online quiz circulating on the Internet, CA collected private data on 87 million people; this trove of data would inform the company’s work in political branding and targeting strategies in various campaigns, most notoriously the 2016 US elections. CA had also been operating in Kenya during the 2013 and 2017 presidential elections. Their strategies ran the gamut, from fully rebranding Uhuru Kenyatta’s Jubilee Party to allegedly spreading online misinformation and coordinating targeted SMS campaigns. Nyabola recalls how, in the 2013 elections, Kenyatta ran on a political message to oppose foreign interference in domestic politics: “Simply calling this irony doesn’t do the situation justice: a political party went on a crusade against neo-colonial interference while paying a British company to package and propagate that message” (Nyabola, 2018b). Such foreign interference was not new, but the central role played by digital technologies signaled an evolving battleground shaped by the mediation of new types of data and companies, creating added levers of influence and control.

In 2018, Renata Avila published the essay “Digital Sovereignty or Digital Colonialism?” where she wrote: “we are witnessing today a real confrontation between control and freedom, not only of the individual, but of entire populations and regions, enhanced by technologies and massive collection and analysis of data (…) Are we witnessing a new form of digital colonialism?” In an interview that same year, she further explained: “Digital colonialism is the new deployment of a quasi-imperial power over a vast number of people, without their explicit consent, manifested in rules, designs, languages, cultures and belief systems by a vastly dominant power” (Avila, 2018). Avila is a seasoned digital rights activist and international lawyer from Guatemala. She represented Indigenous victims of genocide and human rights violations in Guatemala and was part of the legal team defending Wikileaks; she was on the board of the nonprofit Creative Commons and worked as chief digital rights advisor at the World Wide Web Foundation. When she wrote about digital colonialism in 2018, the critique was not new to her. For several years, she had been engaging various stakeholders at conferences and panels on issues related to digital colonialism; in 2016, she led a conversation on digital colonialism at Re: Publica, a prominent conference on the Internet and Society hosted in Berlin. In 2017, she was part of Mozfest—a conference organized by the Mozilla Foundation—where she spoke on a panel on the topic “Decentralization and Dignity against Digital Colonialism.”

Avila was not the only one at this conference to have digital colonialism on their mind. Anasuya Sengupta, an Indian activist, came to talk about her project Whose Knowledge. The project began as the co-founders took issue with the over-representation of Western content on the Internet: “20% of the world or less shapes our understanding of 80% of the world” (Graham & Sengupta, 2017). Whose Knowledge’s mission, then, focused on centering the histories and knowledge of the majority of the world that is underrepresented on the Internet, including through organizing collaborative and collective editing sessions of Wikipedia pages. One of their project partners was Mark Graham, a professor at the Oxford Internet Institute, who a year earlier had been a public opponent of Facebook’s Free Basics/Internet.org project (Graham, 2016). A year later, in 2018, Whose Knowledge would organize the first version of their “Decolonising the Internet” conference in South Africa—the same title used 4 years later by the Association of Internet Researchers for its conference in Ireland.

Conclusion

This article focused on the wave of scholarly critique of digital colonialism emerging in the late 2010s. This critique gained prominence across various disciplines at approximately the same time. In this article, I argued that this critique should be understood as part of a long and multifaceted intellectual legacy—one that spans across scholarly and activist communities to address colonial dynamics that continuously play out in and through communication technologies. Over the years, various groups contributed to this critique, including digital rights activists, journalists, artists, and scholars. It was a collaborative effort that took shape through art installations, advocacy campaigns, publications, panels, conferences, interviews, news coverage, and coalition work—all happening synchronously in different parts of the world and, ironically, facilitated by digital technologies. In a way, this intellectual history of digital colonialism provides a counterpoint, or rather an inverted mirror, to the well-established literature on digital utopianism (Turner, 2008).

This article makes three broad contributions. First, it proposed a typology of the main features of the critique of digital colonialism. Primarily, this typology serves an explanatory function to introduce the literature and highlight recurring components of this critique. Still, it may be helpful for analyzing the social phenomenon of digital colonialism. The typology could be used to evaluate cases of digital colonialism: the more features a case involves, the stronger the claim that it constitutes digital colonialism. It might be that not all six features need to be observed simultaneously for a situation to be understood as digital colonialism. Some features might be necessary, some sufficient, and yet others optional. The typology could also be useful to identify distinctive subsets of digital colonialism, for example, some combining mainly extraction and violence, and others benevolence with unequal concentration of power. More work on the social phenomenon—as already undertaken by many scholars in critical data studies, such as Mwema and Birhane (2024)—will help us better understand how these different features interact, and how they might work in sequence or constitute distinctive stages of digital colonialism (such as its conditions of possibility, its impact, and its public framing).

The second contribution is to historicize the current scholarly wave by highlighting a range of significant precursors. Historicizing helps us understand that while the phenomenon tackled by the critique might seem new, the critique itself has a long tradition with plural roots. The precursors discussed here are not part of a single intellectual tradition, nor do they exhaust the range of influences that had a bearing on the current wave. Udupa and Dattatreyan (2023), for example, usefully showcase the historical influence of media anthropology and critical cultural theory while highlighting the limits of parallels between historical and digital colonialism. We find echoes of the current critique in Hall’s (1999) study of virtual colonization, in Capurro’s (2000) discussion of the information society during the first decade of the Internet, and in Fernández (1999) condemnation of early techno-utopianism through the lens of postcolonial theory; in policy debates around global inequalities in Internet governance (Hill, 2014), intellectual property and copyright law (Wittkower, 2008), and Indigenous data sovereignty (Kukutai and Taylor, 2016). My account is necessarily situated and thus incomplete, and I hope this article invites adjacent, overlapping, and contrasting histories, including ones that go beyond the anglophone focus of this study. Still, the precursors discussed here are significant milestones with striking similarities to the current critique and they help understand the disciplinary expansiveness of the current wave.

To global communication scholars, many of the debates discussed in the second section will be familiar; however, they likely would not be to computer scientists or legal scholars, making this article a hopefully helpful entry point for them. Even for communication scholars, there is value in bringing back attention to these precursors (Balbi et al., 2021). For instance, none of the articles discussed in the first section (including several from communication studies) substantively referred to the NWICO debate. Irrespective of whether this means that NWICO has become so canonical in the field to the point of being obvious or if it amounts to a troubling form of epistemic amnesia, this silence constitutes a missed opportunity to draw important lessons for our current moment. Take the MacBride report: a contemporary readthrough reveals explicit discussions of many of today’s core debates around tech power, including monopolies, corporate consolidation, data access, language biases, and the need for new types of global governance bodies. A more substantial engagement with this history could have helped identify and apprehend many of our current challenges.

Just as it is important to learn from anti-colonial experiences to inform resistance to digital colonialism (Schneider, 2022), it is necessary to look at their limits. NWICO, for example, was ultimately unsuccessful in bringing about the kind of changes that the non-aligned hoped to see, in part, according to former Assistant Director General of UNESCO Antonio Pasquali (2005, p. 198), because intellectuals did not manage to mobilize more popular support. This would suggest that a crucial challenge for the current wave will be to make its opposition to digital colonialism palpable, relevant, and appealing to everyday people dealing with many other urgent social challenges. Similarly, a sobering look at NWICO’s history highlights other areas of concern for the current wave, such as how an overemphasis on macro structures of domination can fail to account for local agency and contingencies, and how anti-colonial rhetoric can pave the way for reactionary nationalist policies.

Third and last, I argued that to understand the widespread emergence of the critique in scholarly communities, we ought to consider the diverse communities that contributed to its development and popularization outside academia. The fact that activists inform critical interdisciplinary research is evident to decolonial scholars and to those involved in community-engaged research, and it is certainly not new, as Nelson's recent retelling of NWICO's history makes clear. Similarly, my article highlighted multifarious contributions that led to the current wave of scholarly critique and recognized them as intellectual contributions. Here again, my article provided a partial view. There are many additional relevant examples, from artist Morehshin Allahyari's years-long multimedia project on “digital colonialism” (2016–2020) to a 2019 talk on digital colonialism by South African human rights lawyer Nobukhosi Zulu to Julian Assange's criticism of Google's power as “digital colonialism” in the aftermath of the Snowden revelations. This expansiveness across geographies and sectors also helps us understand the disciplinary spread of the scholarly critique.

Recognizing and understanding the role of non-scholarly communities in scholarly knowledge production invites different, more inclusive, ways to tell the history of our disciplines and concepts. The fact that most actors discussed in the third section are feminist women of color speaks volumes. It resonates with Nelson’s observations of a racialized divide of the intellectual labor between communities from the Global South and primarily Euro-American scholars—and it underscores the importance of feminist theories and practices, including Black feminism and feminist data justice, to the current wave. By expanding the epistemic boundaries of the critique of digital colonialism, this article follows in the footsteps of works that call to address patterns of unequal labor distribution and intellectual recognition in communication studies along gendered, racialized, and geographical lines (Chakravartty et al. 2018; Willems, 2014).

The critique of digital colonialism—and the social phenomenon that the critique targets—shows no signs of stopping. Take Worldcoin, an iris biometric cryptocurrency project championed by Sam Altman, the founding CEO of Open AI. When users sign up to enroll, an orb takes a scan of their iris and links it to a unique digital ID to be used in the future for various transactions. Helmed by the WorldCoin foundation and U.S. tech company Tools for Humanity (backed by notorious Silicon Valley VC firm Andreessen Horowitz), the project’s self-promoted goal is to build “an economic future that welcomes and benefits everyone.” In practice, to attract its first users, the project targeted poor populations and unregulated territories in the Global South through aggressive promotional strategies (Guo & Renaldi, 2022). Worldcoin employees presented the project as a form of “social assistance giveaway” (Guo & Renaldi, 2022) to collect people’s emails, phone numbers, and biometric data; in return, they offered “free” cash (either in Worldcoin cryptocurrency or local currency) or freebies such as AirPods. By now, this is a very familiar—but continuously troublesome—playbook bearing the typological hallmark of digital colonialism: a U.S. tech company seeks to capture a market and extract data from impoverished communities in the Global South by offering “free” things and promising to do it for the good of the world.

Meanwhile, scholarly critique of digital colonialism is ongoing and keen on terminological novelty. Recently, Ugar (2023), a philosopher, talked about “techno-colonialism,” while interdisciplinary scholars Jutel (2022) and Salih (2024) talked, respectively, of “crypto-colonialism” and “platform coloniality.” The tech sector reacts to this critique with a mix of silence, contempt, defensiveness, and occasional adoption, as evidenced, for instance, by researchers at Google’s AI research lab, DeepMind, authoring the previously mentioned article on “Decolonial AI.” Though surprising at first, the latter seems to align with Silicon Valley’s tradition of co-opting countercultural ideas and warrants further research. Meanwhile, governments in the Global South rarely adopt the critique, preferring to either embrace what they see as public/private tech partnerships or advancing their own brand of techno-politics, such as India’s digital public infrastructure. Perhaps paradoxically, the critique appears to find some political resonance in the context of the regulatory fight over Big Tech and digital sovereignty in the European Union. Too often missing from these debates is how people negotiate digital colonialism in everyday life and—even more conspicuously—what they make of this critique. At the same time, insightful work is underway to move beyond North/South binaries and look instead to the complexity of South-to-South flows (e.g. Avle, 2022). All this points to a vibrant and urgent research agenda, which will be enriched by considering what the long history of this critique teaches us, what it missed, and who made it.

Data availability

The third-party data underlying this article—be they scholarly publications, news articles, or civil society material (report, video, blog posts, etc.)—are all available online (either in the public domain or behind paywalls).

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the many people who provided generous and critical feedback on the article over the years. These include the digital rights activists and scholars with whom I worked at the Digital Civil Society Lab, the four reviewers from the Journal of Communication, and the audience members who engaged with early versions of this article, including at the research seminar of the School of Media and Communication, University of Leeds; at the research seminar of the Media and Communication department at LSE; at the PACS seminar at Stanford University; at the Transit Talk at Villanova University; and at the Privacy Research Group at NYU. Many thanks also to Wayne Chinganga for his research assistance in the early stages of the project, and to Wendy Willems for hosting me as a visiting scholar during the writing of the first draft.