“Data colonialism” / “digital colonialism”
Big-Tech data extraction framed as a new colonialism
Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias (The Costs of Connection, 2019) theorize “data colonialism” as the appropriation of human life through data; Michael Kwet (2019) frames US tech dominance of the Global South as “digital colonialism.” Critics — including sympathetic scholars — argue the term stretches “colonialism” into vagueness and, by dropping physical violence and land dispossession, risks trivializing the historical thing.
What happened
Stanford University Press published The Costs of Connection, giving “data colonialism” its book-length definition; the same year Michael Kwet’s article “Digital colonialism” (using South Africa as a case) appeared in Race & Class.
Data colonialism is, in essence, an emerging order for the appropriation of human life so that data can be continuously extracted from it for profit. (Couldry & Mejias, 2019)
Under each definition
No territory administered by a mother country; the authors themselves call it a new form against the backdrop of historical colonialism.
No settlers, no replaced native population.
The “US tech empire dominating the Global South” framing overlaps with neo-colonial dependency; critics say it’s corporate market power, not state-directed control.
An explicitly analogical extension of “colonialism” to datafication.
The case that the label applies
Proponents argue data extraction reproduces colonialism’s core “move” — appropriating a resource (now human life-as-data) treated as free for the taking — and that Big Tech’s control of software, hardware, and connectivity in the Global South is a genuine imperial power asymmetry, not just a metaphor.
The case against
Critics (some within data studies) argue the concept is “vague and fuzzy,” a “catchall”; that reducing colonialism to “appropriation” abstracts it from the land seizure, bodily violence, and administrative rule that defined it; and that “data extractivism” more accurately names the phenomenon without borrowing colonialism’s moral charge.
In their words
US multinationals exercise imperial control at the architecture level of the digital ecosystem: software, hardware and network connectivity…
In reducing colonization to a metaphor, the violent history of colonization and its continuation in modern computing are not adequately interrogated… data colonialism can be vague and fuzzy, a ‘catchall’.
The verdicts above are how each definition would most likely classify this situation — illustrative guidance, not court rulings. Colonialism has no treaty crime, so no application is a legal “finding”; every characterization is attributed to the person or body that made it. The lenses diverge most on two questions — whether there is a “metropole” and who counts as “indigenous” — and on the difference between a historical judgment and a moral analogy. See the Definition tab for each definition’s full text. Inclusion is documentation, not a finding.