It is unsettling to see history repeat itself in precisely the same way. At the end of the 1800s, during the Berlin Conference, European countries divided up the African continent among themselves, with no Africans present to represent their people. Today, tech companies are dividing up the digital future of Africa, and again, very few Africans are present to represent their interests at the negotiation table. In the colonial era, colonial powers built railways to transport raw materials from Africa to factories in Europe. Today, high-tech companies are building data centers and laying fiber-optic cables to move data generated in Africa to servers located in Silicon Valley. The method of extraction remains the same, only the type of raw material has changed.

Take into account the fundamental mechanics. Facebook’s Free Basics program is being marketed as a philanthropic initiative throughout Africa and offers limited internet access to users exclusively via the Facebook service. This program markets itself as providing everyone with accessibility to information and services, but its structure speaks otherwise. While you may be able to use some applications on your mobile phone, you do not have full access to all of the applications and websites on the internet. This is more of a digital enclosure, as the user is limited to only what the company has chosen to allow through their product. In 2016, when India banned Free Basics due to issues with net neutrality, it illustrates how the infrastructure determines the nature of the dialogue based on the identity of the provider.

At the core of the philosophical analysis of Digital Colonialism is the same question that has historically been asked about traditional colonialism: Who has the authority to define what constitutes progress? Colonial officers believed at their core that they brought “civilization” to Africa, while executives from Technology companies believe at their core that they bring “connectivity” to the continent. Both colonial officers and executives from Technology companies believe that the model of development they have successfully implemented in their home countries (London or Silicon Valley) will be equally successful in Africa (Lagos or Nairobi). This assumption is what Michael Kwet, the person who first coined the phrase “Digital Colonialism,” identifies as the primary source of the problem. The problem is not based on any idea that technology itself is “bad.” However, because technology is developed in one part of the world and then transferred to another, it inevitably comes with the inherent power relations of the original place of development.

The disparity created by the data economy exacerbates the existing asymmetry between wealth and power worldwide. For example, when a farmer in rural Kenya uses an app to research local crop prices, he creates a data footprint that is uploaded through the internet to a server located in the United States (VR or OR). The server then uses algorithms to analyze this data, extract incremental knowledge from it, and return this knowledge to the farmer, typically at a significant markup. In this model, the farmer provides the raw material (labor) and market but captures none of the value created by the new knowledge. This is the purest form of extraction. During the colonial period, companies extracted gold and rubber; digital companies now extract personal behavior and attention.

The unique characteristic of digital colonialism is that it is........

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