|
Top-level
@JulianOliver the use of "decolonisation"/"colonisation" in this context weakens the word and what colonisation often was: a brutal regime full of violence, death and cultural genocide. Also, using the concept of "digital colonisation" just because in this particular case, the group affected was from an non-angloeuropean indigenous background in itself shows a good amount of racist ideas, imho. tl,dr: Words have meanings. Don't abuse words 4 comments
@wizzwizz4 @JulianOliver I feel you have a very different idea about the core of colonialism. In my book, it is the exploitation of a territory and its indigenous population by a foreign power for profit purposes with the goal to replace that population's power and culture with your own. the difference in this case being that in the data Mgmt case, noone is being exploitative, and Microsoft et Al has no interest in removing Maori culture. The mere capability to do evil (censoring culture) is not evil in itself. In fact, an argument can be made that being unable for evil does not make you a good actor, only capability and self-restraint does. Finally, even if the big data companies deliberately censored some parts of indigenous culture in their databases, that still would not be colonialism or cultural holocaust: the Maori rituals or cultural items are not dependant on being described in the net, they survived just fine for centuries with not a computer in sight. |
Gregory's Server
@Matemann @JulianOliver Colonisation is not a past-tense thing; it's an ongoing phenomenon. You're describing the violent aspect, but colonialism is also about autonomy and power relations; I don't think the analogy is so much of a stretch. Colonialism with less murder is still colonialism.
People who control large swathes of digital infrastructure have the capacity to shape and censor culture on a large scale, even if they're not using that power at the moment.