Colonizing Infrastructures (Core Post 2)

Colonizing Infrastructures (Core Post 2)

Looking at the ways how this week’s readings handle the materiality and socio-economical impact and consequences of infrastructures, the idea of infrastructures reinforcing and even embodying colonial ideologies seems to be inevitable.

Employing arguments from the article Data Colonialism by Couldry  and  Mejias there are visible connections between colonialism and the way how digital-material infrastructure expand creating and determining socioecological environments, reinforcing oppressive practices. Couldry and Mejias talk about the “predatory extractive practices of historical colonialism”(337) and  “a new social order, based on continuous tracking, and offering unprecedented new opportunities for social discrimination and behavioral influence.”(336) Looking at how digital infrastructures give way to high-speed transfer and in doing so enable not only the creation of global capitalism, by making an accessible certain type of media commodities (such as streaming services) but also constitute a global network for surveillance and control.

Without explicitly building up a grand theory of infrastructure as bearers of colonial practices Lisa Parks does a great job of getting into the particularities of how infrastructures “behave” in countries that are culturally, economically and socially different as the ones that impose and sometimes even force their infrastructures. “Much ICTD work is underpinned by development ideology—blind faith in the capacities of ICTs to “modernize” and “enhance” the lives of anyone fortunate enough to come within their reach.”(Parks, 116) The gesture of bringing modernity and civilization to the “Other 3 Billion” seen as “technologically disenfranchised”(117) is distressingly similar to the gestures by the Spanish missions spreading Christianity and harrowing diseases at the same time. To adapt digital technologies to cultures that predominantly create an unbalanced situation complicated further by the fact that, as Lisa Parks point out, “early adopters were situated within the village’s center, which was not only connected to the electrical grid but also to historically colonial institutions such as the hospital, the mission, and the schools.”(118) On another note, Edwards points out the ways how expectedly invisible infrastructures often fail or function in a non-ordinary way outside the western world. (3)

In the context of digital infrastructures discussed as bearing traditions of colonial practices I would love to see more research similar to Lisa Parks’. Research that is able to detangle the complexities of local socio-economic situations exposed to Western means of building infrastructures making  their oppressive practices visible and yet at  the same time proposing ways in which these infrastructures can be adapted to serve local communities.