The European countries met in Berlin in 1884 and used a map to divide the African continent among themselves. They distributed the continent’s mineral wealth, labour, and land as if they had never belonged to anybody before. That moment’s arrogance has long been seen as the epitome of colonialism at its most blatant. Less frequently recognised is the fact that a more subdued but structurally comparable process is currently in progress, one that does not call for governors, gunboats, or treaties signed under duress. All you need is a smartphone, a platform, and an unreadable terms-of-service agreement. Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias, two of the most important scholars working on the intersection of technology and power, gave this process its most precise name: data colonialism. “The old colonialism grabbed land, resources, and human labour,” they wrote. “The new one grabs us; the daily flow of our lives, in the abstract form of digital data.” It is important to take your time reading that phrase because it sums up what is currently happening to billions of people in the Global South on a scale that surpasses any prior extraction and with an invisibility that makes resistance exceedingly challenging.

We often hear that data is the new oil. The metaphor is largely deceptive and somewhat helpful. In geological formations, oil is a limited resource that can be measured, observed, and detected when it runs out. Every search, purchase, communication, and step tracked by a wearable gadget, and face scanned by a security camera are examples of the continual texture of everyday human existence from which data is collected. In theory, this data is limitless. The amount of data generated increases with the number of people who live, interact, and travel. The people of the Global South are not a market to be serviced, but rather a resource to be processed by the five big companies that collectively control the vast majority of the world’s digital infrastructure: Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple. 

Each of the four interconnected systems that make up the mechanics of data colonialism is both individually defensible and collectively destructive. The first is the process known as “platform capture,” which occurs when foreign digital platforms take over as the standard infrastructure for information, communication, commerce, and finance in nations with insufficient resources to develop domestic alternatives. As the Yale Review of International Studies observed, the data produced by Asian populations is “used to make money by Google, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft in Silicon Valley or Tencent and Huawei in Shenzhen,” while governments that store their most sensitive information on Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure “effectively outsource a part of their sovereignty, relying on foreign corporations to guard their digital fortresses.” The infrastructure on the platform is not neutral. It’s jurisdiction. Its advertising logic, data retention policy, terms of service, and content moderation guidelines are all developed in corporate headquarters in California and applied to communities in Lagos, Karachi, and Nairobi without their input.

Dependency on infrastructure is the second mechanism. There is an unequal distribution of the physical cables, satellites, and server farms that transport the internet. The submarine cable map: a visualisation of the actual physical arteries of the global internet, reveals the architectural reality of digital power: cables converge on a handful of nodes in the Global North, meaning that data generated in Accra, Dhaka, or Bogotá must physically route through networks owned and controlled by foreign entities before it can travel anywhere, including to destinations within the same country. Because it is ingrained in the internet’s hardware, this generates a structural dependency that is difficult to overcome by regulatory reform. Google, Microsoft, and Meta are not engaging in philanthropy when they........

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