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Data Spice & Digital Colonialism
Data is the new spice and how today’s tech giants might be considered a form of digital colonialism. Everything is a remix.
In the 17th century as Western European trading companies set to sea it would take them months to reach the various colonies, extract wealth such as spices and return home. Today, in the blink of an eye, data packets make these journeys, the wealth they extract is potentially more valuable; our data. The new spice.
As colonialism and mercantilism operated through networks of shipping routes, roads and ports in the 17th century, so today do technology giants control their gains through the the network of undersea cables and massive data centres. App stores are more than trading markets, they’re carefully controlled trade routes where the company dictates the terms of passage. Amazon’s web services controls the shipping lanes through their vast networks.
There is a striking similarity between historical and modern resource extraction. I write this as both a form of critique but also to help us think about the role of technology giants in our modern society. Something Yanis Varoufakis, a Greek economist, calls “Technofeudalism”, which in a way it is.
