Tierra Común: The Origin of the Idea

Historical colonialism hasn’t died: it is still a part of the economic and cultural structures and the political and geopolitical relations of many countries in the so-called Global South.  This inherited colonial structure goes on playing a fundamental role in the operation of large corporations, including Big Tech.

But now a form of colonialism distinctive of our time is joining traditional forms of colonialism: a colonialism which grows and expands through mechanisms that have a new character and use resources that also are new: data. We refer here to data colonialism on which both of us have written: Nick and Paola. Its target is not physical territory, but the domain of human life, our experiences and activities.

We want to emphasize that data colonialism expands the coloniality of power. Extractivism in the domain of data involves forms of dispossession that reproduce power over race, class, gender, and also the natural world. It has its roots in epistemologies that have been assumed to be universal within the process of rationality/modernity that Aníbal Quijano wrote about. That’s why we call for a right to recognize other epistemologies which are in tension with the extractivist and neocolonial logic of data that is anchored in a capitalist and patriarchal system. We have the political objective of making visible those whose bodies and lands have been primarily affected by this form of violence.

The idea that, far from waning, colonialism is in the process of renewing and regenerating itself once more, driven by two power centres, the USA and China, but now at an even greater depth and without geographical limits – that is not a comforting idea. Nevertheless, this is the reality that we have to address and confront. How? Through learning from the peoples and communities that have been resisting colonialism for centuries. Through solidarity, through the spirit of community (ayni), through the reciprocity of a relational order, and through new “resources of hope”, as Raymond Williams put it.

The Tierra Común website is offered as a resource of hope. The idea for Tierra Común emerged in a discussion after dinner in Mexico City last November. We were discussing the implications of a talk about data colonialism that Nick had just delivered that day with Ulises Mejias, and we were thinking about the possibility of organizing ways of continuing that debate. Paola explained that international flights within Latin America were so expensive that it would probably be impossible to do this. The difference between the economic realities of Europe where Nick lives and Latin America where Paola lives had been uncovered with the greatest clarity.

And at that same moment the need to create a structure like Tierra Común was also clear: that is, a space where, through the opportunities that online connection provides us, we might create opportunities to speak together and gather resources for thinking about the costs of that very same connection. For, to sustain ideas, we must build solidarity with others who can speak, think and imagine with us.

That night we imagined events on data colonialism not only in Mexico City, but in Bogota and Buenos Aires, La Paz and Quito. Events at which academics, activists and everyone could meet and, in their own space, set out their perspectives on this new colonialism of digital data, with the possibility of building an archive of those initiatives in a common site.

We imagined a website, a ‘land’ in a sense, where we could confront the dispossession of our personal data, that is extracted from our lives in its microscopic details by technology corporations. A land perhaps where various resources could accumulate – texts, videos, podcasts, teaching resources, images – and contribute towards building a path of resistance.

We need media through which we can design the shape of a time when we don’t have to trade in our freedom in order to communicate and share information with each other: we need media that don’t require us to choose between protecting the intimacy of our private life and participating in the shared life of society.

We imagined that night a future in which a country could nurture its civil society without, at the same time, enriching distant corporations. We imagined a future in which the development of scientific and social knowledge did not depend on exposing citizens’ lives to continuous surveillance by external forces over which they have little influence.

We imagined a time of connection, a land of community, where we can realize our common goals without at the same time individuals and communities finding themselves subjected to an order of extraction that has neither limits nor historical precedent.