Data colonialism’s temporality differs from prior colonialism’s engagement with the past

Evidence

Gayatri Spivak once famously asked, “Can the subaltern speak?” Similarly, today we might ask: Can data colonialism’s subjects speak up against the structures that dispossess them? An affirmative answer is possible if we take seriously the temporal dislocation that postcolonial theory grasped so well when it defined itself as an “active transformation of the present out of the clutches of the past.” Except that today the dislocation is subtly different. Even though we have explored the roots of data colonialism in the past, the debates started here must address the kind of future that is already being created in the clutches of the present. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 637

Categorization

• XREF: The attention/surveillance school treats extraction as synchronic (real-time harvesting); this decolonial reframe insists the relevant temporality is the colonized future being pre-shaped now, which is a genuinely different tense. — connects to: Data colonialism’s continuity is functional, not literal, with historical colonialism. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 46; Data colonialism can only be understood within the longer history of colonialism and capitalism — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 57; Colonization video games normalize the 4X pattern of colonial extraction — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 273 (+1 more)
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: what does ‘active transformation of the present out of the clutches of the past’ mean concretely for data-resistance practices, and how would one operationalize a future-oriented decolonization?