Data colonialism and its discontents
A conversation with Paola Ricaurte and Sebastián Lehuedé
Spring and its warm weather is finally on its way, and this episode of the Anti-Dystopians will have you asking — did an astronomical observatory really build a swimming pool in the desert????
This week, I spoke to Paola Ricaurte, an associate professor in the Department of Media and Digital Culture at Tecnológico de Monterrey and faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and the co-founder of the Tierra Comun Network, and Sebastián Lehuedé, a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Centre of Governance and Human Rights and a Technology & Human Rights Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard University. We discussed Paola and Sebastian’s work on data colonialism, decoloniality and feminism, AI and territory in Latin and South America.
I asked them what is the connection between historic forms of colonialism and what technology infrastructures are being built now? Why are tech companies building data centers in the desert? How are local communities resisting these infrastructures? And what are alternative ways of imagining our future?
As always, you can listen to it here or subscribe here (Spotify) or here (Apple Podcasts). If you like us, please rate, review and share the Anti-Dystopians to help us get new listeners.
Further reading from the episode:
By Paola:
Artificial Intelligence and the Feminist Decolonial Imagination
Ethics for the majority world: AI and the question of violence at scale
Data Epistemologies, The Coloniality of Power, and Resistance
By Sebastian:
Territories of data: ontological divergences in the growth of data infrastructure
Big Tech’s New Headache: Data Centre Activism Flourishes Across the World
Towards a Terrestrial Internet: re-imagining digital networks from the ground up
Other Reading:
Tweet of the Week
On Elon Musk’s belated April Fool’s Twitter update . . .
