Digital colonialism

the dark face of racism

Abstract

This review focuses on the book Digital Colonialism: towards a hacker-fanonian critique, by Deivison Faustino and Walter Lippold (2023). In the pages of this powerful and challenging book, we find the proposition of bringing to the public debate a topic neglected by hegemonic digital colonial studies: its relation to racism. After all, as the authors say, there is no capitalism without colonialism and there is no colonialism without racism. Racism, especially anti-black racism. During the construction of their ideas, they point out that it is not about demonizing or attacking the informational world, but rather thinking about how it is used to maintain the ideologies of power established by capitalism, or even neoliberalism. The authors problematize the logic of digital colonialism, with its contemporary slave form, and seek to point out ways for a genuine emancipation of subalternized nations, in relation to those who control the production and execution of technological knowledge in the informational society. To enable possible ways out of this paradoxical and uncanny scene, they resort to Fanon's revolutionary ideas - anti-colonial cannibalization - assimilation, transformation and creation; along with the hacktivism movement. This seeks to transgress in search of access and the construction of an effective democratization that allows technodiversity.