With horrifying images of exploding IOF robots in Gaza, ICE’s deepening relationship with Palantir to develop AI systems to track and deport immigrants, and the devastating environmental impacts and water consumption of AI data centers, Weaving Our Worlds hosted our monthly study in struggle conversation on Technocolonialism.

What is Technolocolonialism

“The notion of technocolonialism captures how the convergence of digital infrastructures with humanitarian bureaucracy, state power, and market forces reinvigorates and reshapes colonial legacies.” – Mirca Madianou

Technocolonialism describes how technology is a key tool of colonial expansion. Technocolonialism is not only Big Tech and the concentration of power through corporate giants in the technology and information industry. Technocolonialism is not only about the surveillance creep or privacy violations. Technological innovation today is itself a carceral and colonial tactic embedded in a long history of imperial, capitalist, and state violence.

Source: Technocolonialism: when technology for good can be harmful by Mirca Madianou, here

Technocolonialism is driven by:

  • State and imperialist logics of racial surveillance and securitization
  • False claims of neutrality and solutionism (“easy and effective solutions”)
  • Big Tech and capital accumulation

History of Technology for Harm

“We are talking about the long history —lanterns (which Black, mixed-race, and Indigenous folks in the eighteenth century were required to carry if not in the company of a white person), rowdy sheets (colonial crime intelligence and profiling ledgers), sentry boxes (telegraph boxes that gave white, “reputable” citizens a direct line to police power in the early twentieth century), rogue galleries (image galleries of individuals criminalized by police bureaus), calipers (to catalogue biometric data from those in police custody), pin maps (analog “hot spot” mapping techniques used to criminalize entire neighborhoods and communities).”

Source: Sarah T. Hamid on Abolishing Carceral Technologies in Logic Magazine here

AI is a landgrab

The latest extraction rush is driven by the vision of an economy driven by Artificial Intelligence (AI). “Stargate Project” intends to cover North America with data centers, connected through a mega- surveillance & extraction infrastructure. As part of this, the largest AI computer data center park on earth, the $70 billion Wonder Valley, is being opposed by the Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation (in so-called Alberta) on their traditional territory.

Source: Refusing Artificial Intelligence and Nuclear “Manifest Destiny” by Cultural Survival, here

What are Carceral Technologies

“Carceral technologies are those that are bound up in the control, coercion, capture, and exile of entire categories of people.” – Sarah T. Hamid

These include: CCTV, face printing, DNA and biometric databases, acoustic gunshot detection, drones, electronic monitoring, AI and risk profiling algorithms—all of which function as weapons in the hands of law enforcement or prison administration.

Source: Sarah T. Hamid on Abolishing Carceral Technologies in Logic Magazine here

Digital control & occupation of Palestine

Israel considers itself the pioneer of surveillance technologies, developing a technology of colonial occupation in Palestine and profits from selling it globally.

“Surveillance of Palestinians has always been an integral part of Israel’s colonial project. Before the creation of the state of Israel, squads from the Zionist paramilitary group the Haganah roamed Palestinian villages and cities, gathering information on Palestinian residents… A plethora of new technologies, such as phone and internet monitoring and interception, CCTV, and biometric data collection, have enabled Israel to surveil the population it occupies on a massive, intrusive scale.”

Source: Surveillance of Palestinians and the Fight for Digital Rights, by Marwa Fatafta and Nadim Nashif here

Borders Controls and Digital Surveillance

“From robot dogs at the US–Mexico border to Israeli drones used by EU’s Frontex flying over the Mediterranean Sea to algorithms deporting 7,000 students from the UK, technologies now impact every aspect of human migration… Border technologies exacerbate the divisions between those who are able to enter freely via an e-gate at the airport by way of a powerful passport and those who are deemed unwelcome and dangerous, relegated to data subjects in this techno-imperialism of exclusion.”

Source: Smart borders kill – New frontiers of violence and erosion of rights at the world’s borders by Petra Molnar, here

EU’s Deadly Smart Borders

The EU’s New Pact on Migration and Asylum ushers in a deadly new era of digital surveillance, expanding the digital infrastructure for a regime already based on the criminalisation and punishment of migrants and racialised people. The Pact will mandate a range of technological systems to identify, filter, track, racially profile, assess and control people, including collecting and sharing personal data and biometrics between enforcement agencies across the EU.

Source: The EU Migration Pact: A dangerous regime of migrant surveillance, PICUM here

Canadian Tech and Conservatism

“After years of supporting the Liberals with donations and policy advice, Canada’s entrepreneurs and investors have soured on the party. They point to rising taxes, a drop in business investment and an exodus of tech talent as evidence that the government has failed them. The alliance echoes what’s happening in the U.S. between the second Donald Trump administration and Silicon Valley tech billionaires.”

Source: Inside Canadian tech’s not-so-quiet shift to the right by Catherine McIntyre, Laura Osman, Murad Hemmadi, here

An Abolitionist Tool for Organizing Against Algorithms

Stop LAPD Spying Coalition has developed an abolitionist model for analyzing and resisting algorithms. The Algorithmic Ecology decenters the algorithm itself, looks at the different actors that shape the algorithm and whose interests the algorithm serves, with the ultimate goal of dismantling the actors creating algorithmic harm.

It goes beyond technology-centered critiques of algorithms, and is a roadmap to lay bare different digital technologies intent to cause harm to Black, Brown, Migrant, and poor people, just like all policing programs and tech before it.

An Abolitionist Tool for Organizing Against Algorithms, Stop LAPD Spying Coalition and Free Radicals here

Follow!

Carceral Tech Resistance Network: against the design and experimentation of technologies by police, prisons, border enforcement, and commercial partnerships

#NoTechforICE: movement for a surveillance-free future

Stop LAPD Spying Coalition: building power toward abolition of the surveillance police state

No Tech for Apartheid: Google and Amazon workers organizing against computing contracts with IOF

Glitch: ensuring internet tech does not extend or replicate discrimination to Black women

Equinox Initiative for Racial Justice: towards care, not control

Tech Policy Press: intersection of technology and democracy.

Electronic Frontier Foundation: defending digital privacy, free speech, and innovation.