The Spanish conquest followed a three-phase legalistic pattern now echoed digitally.

Evidence

On December 4, 1492, Columbus escaped the onshore winds that had prevented his departure from the island that we now call Cuba. Within a day he dropped anchor off the coast of a larger island known to its people as Quisqueya or Bohio, setting into motion what historians call the “conquest pattern.” It’s a design that unfolds in three phases: the invention of legalistic measures to provide the invasion with a gloss of justification, a declaration of territorial claims, and the founding of a town to legitimate and institutionalize the conquest. The sailors could not have imagined that their actions that day would write the first draft of a pattern whose muscle and genius would echo across space and time to a digital twenty-first century. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 548

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to how Zuboff will map colonial extraction onto surveillance capitalism’s claim structures.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does the ‘conquest pattern’ map precisely onto how platforms declare their terms of service?