The plantation, the factory, and the data center
The plantation, the factory and the data center emerged at separate points in history, but together they reveal a sustained mode of extractivism and unequal exchange that continues to shape our world. Plantations and factories provided the ‘cheap’ labor necessary to transform ‘cheap’ nature into wealth. Today, data centers facilitate access to a new resource: ‘cheap’ data about our lives, extracted not through force but through our active participation in the process. In this manner, as Nick Couldry and I argue in The Costs of Connection, datafication transforms ordinary social life into an input to capitalism, continuing the chain of extraction started by the plantation and the factory.
This chain of extraction has deep colonial roots that we need to uncover. By looking back into history, we can grasp that datafication is not just a capitalist or ‘modern’ moment. It is in fact the present-day continuation of colonialism. It is accumulation through dispossession on a more fundamental scale than even the capitalist exploitation of labor. What the ongoing datafication of our lives illustrates today is that extraction is not the pre-history of capitalism, it is its underpinning force. Dispossession is necessary for capitalism to function, and data colonialism represents the re-actualization of a latent colonial impulse in capitalism that has never left, much like the other legacies of colonialism (institutional racism, eurocentrism, etc.) have never left.
Thus, as the Latin American dependistas of the 1960’s and 1970’s suggested, the problem is not that modernity excludes us, but that it includes us. The dependistas showed that financial and technological penetration by multinational corporations from the North prevents self-sustained growth in the South, which explains its underdevelopment. Capitalism perpetuates the unequal exchange that colonialism established: the peripheries provide the raw materials and the labor, while the center uses its know-how to transform the raw materials into something it can sell them back. The same thing is happening today with data. We produce it, but its processed form comes back to us at a cost, the minimal integrity of the self. It is, at best, a form of dependent development in which the peripheries (us) remain constantly underdeveloped.
The other way in which datafication represents a colonial movement is that it signifies the opening of a new frontier of extraction, giving rise to another great bonanza of accumulation through dispossession. The landgrabs of colonialism represented one such moment. They created what Naomi Klein calls “sacrificial zones”: territories, resources and peoples destined to serve as fuel for profit maximization. The grabbing of our social lives through data represents another such frontier. The new sacrificial zones are our social lives, as abstracted through data. This is why the data center is emerging to occupy its place besides the plantation and the factory as a site of rampant extraction.
And so we are proposing to decolonize data in the same way that other things need to be decolonized, which is to say: in messy, unpredictable, and creative ways. The ‘gift’ of data colonialism is that it unites its victims with new clarity. Colonies were not meant to form linkages, solidarities. But technology created those links, and they can now be used to collectively imagine what resistance and new forms of connection can look like.
I hope Tierra Común can be a place for sharing this reality.
