CONCEPT
Digital Colonialism
The reproduction of colonial power structures through digital infrastructure—English-language dominance, epistemic hierarchies, extraction of data from periphery to center.
Digital colonialism names the structural reproduction of colonial relationships through technology. While formal political colonialism ended in the twentieth century, its patterns persist in digital systems: linguistic hierarchies that privilege English, epistemic frameworks that treat Western knowledge as universal, economic arrangements that extract data and resources from the Global South while concentrating benefits in the Global North, and governance structures that give communities no voice in decisions affecting them. The term, developed by scholars including Ramesh Srinivasan, identifies technology not as a neutral force but as infrastructure that carries and amplifies existing power relations.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The British Empire established English as the language of administration, commerce, and education across a quarter of the globe. Post-colonial nations retained English as a prestige language—a gateway to international markets and international institutions. This linguistic hierarchy was never merely linguistic. It was economic, political, and epistemological. It determined not just which words could be spoken in which rooms but which forms of knowledge counted as legitimate, which modes of argument were considered rigorous,