Algorithmic Colonialism: Data Extraction, Encoded Bias, and the Struggle for Digital Sovereignty
Birhane, Benjamin, and the decolonial turn in AI ethics: data extractivism, the New Jim Code, and alternatives to corporate control.
Steps
- 1
- Reading· ~12 min
Race After Technology: The New Jim Code and Encoded Bias
Ruha Benjamin's work connects the algorithmic colonialism framework to the specific history of racial classification and control in the United States, arguing that the appearance of technological neutrality is itself a mechanism of domination.
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- Reading· ~12 min
Data Extractivism, Surveillance Capitalism, and the Global Infrastructure of Control
The structural economics of algorithmic colonialism: how data is extracted from populations in the Global South and from marginalized communities, processed by corporations in the Global North, and used to generate profit and power that flow upward rather than outward.
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- Reading· ~12 min
Decolonial AI: From Critique to Constructive Alternatives
The move from diagnosis to proposal: what it would mean to build AI systems that serve rather than exploit the communities they affect, and what philosophical, technical, and political conditions a genuinely decolonial AI would require.
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- Argument Map· ~11 min
Algorithmic Colonialism: Complete Architecture
Map the full intellectual landscape: from the continuity thesis through surveillance capitalism, the New Jim Code, decolonial AI ethics, and the debate about whether the colonial framework is the most analytically productive way to understand digital power asymmetries.
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- Dialogue· ~10 min
Dialogue: Is the Colonial Framework the Right Lens for Digital Power Asymmetry?
The most important methodological dispute within the field: whether the colonial analogy generates more analytical precision than alternatives, or whether it risks misidentifying the problem and thereby misdirecting the remedies.
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- Reflection· ~9 min
Reflection: Technology, Power, and Your Own Position
The most personally searching questions this framework raises: about the technology you use, the systems you work within, and what a genuinely critical and constructive response to algorithmic colonialism might look like from your specific position.
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