To start, we must recall what made historical colonialism distinctive. Colonialism was a form of economic and social organization dominated by major colonial powers such as Britain, France, Spain, and later the United states. It is now usually regarded as historically closed, ended by the decolonising movements of the later twentieth century, although in politics and other areas, neocolonial forms of power live on. Now it is the continuity from the older colonialism to a new form of colonialism — data colonialism. There were four key components to historical colonialism: the appropriation of resources; the evolution of highly unequal social and economic relations that secured resource appropriation, including slavery and other forms of forced labour as well as unequal trading relations; a massively unequal global distribution of the benefits of resource appropriation; and the spread of ideologies to make sense of all this. For example, the reframing of colonial appropriation as the release of natural resources, the government of inferior peoples, and the bringing of civilization to the World. In describing the transformations underway today as data colonialism, we use the term colonialism not because we are looking for a metaphor but because it captures major structural phases within human history and specifically within capitalism. Colonialism has not been the standard reading of what is changing in contemporary capitalism. Yet it is becoming increasingly clear that capitalism’s current growth cannot be captured in terms of ever-more ambitious business integration or the ever expanding exploitation of workers.
Historically, colonialism was a form of
