Digital Colonialism

This event will take place in the Skylight Room (9100), at the CUNY Graduate Center. Free and open to all. Please register to attend.

Join us for a panel discussion on digital colonialism: the use of digital technology for political, economic, and social domination of another sovereign country or people. Science, technology, and infrastructure have always been crucial to colonial conquest, but today the United States controls a vast digital empire. Digital colonialism includes everything from transoceanic fiber-optic cables to cloud server farms, to social media platforms and AI-based surveillance services.

This panel discussion will focus in particular on the role of digital technologies in so-called environmental conservation strategies like carbon offsetting. In recent years, Indigenous peoples in vulnerable ecosystems have been targeted by tech firms like ONE Amazon, which promise to use AI to preserve their languages while also offering carbon offsets to polluting companies in Global North countries. Indigenous peoples' territories are essentially being digitally enclosed, as monitoring systems are set up on every hectare of their land, and environmental preservation is financialized through the creation of NFTs and other digital tokens.

This panel is timed to coincide with both Earth Day and the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.

About the Panelists

Gloria Ushigua (she/her) is the co-founder and president of the Sápara women’s organisation Ashiñwaka, which has been defending the Sápara people’s ancestral land and environmental rights in Ecuador since their land rights were granted in 1992, due in large part to the activism of women from this organisation. The Sápara territory retains its original biodiversity in the Amazon rainforest, including oil and mineral deposits, ancient growth trees, and other “resources” desired by private and State-owned companies. Protecting the integrity of the territory Sápara call home is an ongoing battle. When Sápara territorial rights were threatened by a government plan to open oil blocks in Ecuador’s Southern Amazon, Gloria led successful efforts to keep the oil in the ground. In addition to land defense, Ashiñwaka is a safe haven for Sapara women experiencing domestic violence and sexual abuse, and has enabled women to participate in international political spaces such as UNPFII and the COP climate change negotiations. Ashiñwaka were recently awarded a prize by the Lush Foundation. Read more about this here.

Michael Kwet is a Senior Researcher of the Centre for Social Change at the University of Johannesburg. A pioneering scholar at the forefront of digital colonialism, Michael is editor of The Cambridge Handbook of Race and Surveillance (2023), author of Digital Degrowth: Technology in the Age of Survival (Pluto, 2024), and founder of the forthcoming website, PeoplesTech.org. He has also published at outlets like Al Jazeera, The New York Times, The Intercept, Wired, Mail & Guardian, and Truthdig.

Vikas Kumar is a tech worker at Google who organizes with No Tech for Apartheid and the Alphabet Workers Union. In his spare time, he makes leftist comedy music on YouTube.

Jonathan Beller is Professor of Humanities and Media Studies and co-founder of the Graduate Program in Media Studies at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn. Beller is also Distinguished Visiting Professor of English, Film, and Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. His work explores the rise and role of images, screens and screen cultures in political economy, with an emphasis on concerns relevant to struggles against racial capitalism, colonialism, imperialism and heteropatriarchy. Through studies of cinema, painting, photography and computing, Beller has introduced key concepts for the critique of political economy including “attention economy,” “the attention theory of value,” “computational capital,” “the computational mode of production,” “computational colonialism,” “informatic labor,” and “economic media.”

About the Moderator

Ashley Dawson is a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York, where he teaches postcolonial ecocriticism and environmental humanities. He has published numerous books on aspects of the fight for climate and environmental justice, including, most recently, Environmentalism from Below (Haymarket, 2024) and Decolonize Conservation! (Common Notions, 2024). Dawson is the Climate Justice Fellow for 2024-25 at the arts organization Culture Push, and is also a faculty fellow at Social Practice CUNY. He is currently creating a series of short documentary films about the impact of energy infrastructure in NYC.

This event is hosted and organized by the Center for the Humanities, and co-sponsored by the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics, and the Digital Humanities Program at the CUNY Graduate Center, along with New York City DSA’s Tech Action Group, and Social Text.

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