Decolonizing Information Narratives

1. Introduction

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a narrative refers to “an account of a series of events, facts, etc., given in order and with the establishing of connections between them; a narration, a story, an account”. Importantly, the entry goes on to state that in structuralist and post-structuralist theory, it refers to “a representation of a history, biography, process, etc., in which a sequence of events has been constructed into a story in accordance with a particular ideology [emphases added].” In what follows, I interrogate some contemporary narratives about ‘the information society’ from a critical race theoretical and decolonial^[1] perspective with a view to constructing a ‘counter-narrative’ purporting to demonstrate the embeddedness of coloniality^[2] in such discourses^[3]. My approach is informed by a concern to draw attention to three issues: (1) the presence of various strands of apocalyptic^[4], millenialist / millenarian^[5] and utopian thinking – technological, economic, political, religious and racial – that contribute to shaping the generally tacit (and masked / obscured) background ‘horizon’ against which the (post-)modern information society is conceptualized; (2) the ‘entanglement’ of such strands in rather complex ways, thereby disrupting the possibility of straightforward linear / sequential accounting which is arguably basic to historical narrative^[6]. In this connection, I am particularly interested in exploring the tacit operation of different ‘root metaphors’^[7] – specifically, those relating to time and process – within modern conceptions of history which remain hegemonic in information society discourses notwithstanding the impact of post-structuralist and anti-foundationalist critiques of modern approaches to history^[8]; and (3) the need to consider the ‘entanglement’ of (1) and (2) in relation to the emergence of global, systemic and structural race / racism / racialization at the onset of colonial modernity during the long durée of the 16^th century CE, and what I refer to elsewhere as the algorithmic ‘re-iteration’ of this systemic phenomenon in various paradigmatic incarnations up to the contemporary era [9].

In addition to presenting concrete examples of information society discourse due to Floridi, Fuchs, Hofkirchner and others that might be subjected to critique with reference to the aforementioned three issues, I am concerned to sketch the contours of a critical race theoretical and decolonial critique of how the idea of ‘colonialism’ has been mobilized in contemporary discourses about ubicomp, the IoT (Internet of Things) and Big Data / datafication. By way of a useful segue into such discussions, in what follows I engage with and offer some brief reflections upon an early critique of ‘colonial’ narratives embedded within 1990s ‘cyber’ discourse with a view to pointing out similarities and differences to contemporary discourses, and the persistence of coloniality in information narratives.

2. Decolonizing Cyberspace

Just over twenty years ago, in a somewhat polemical essay entitled ‘alt.civilizations.faq: Cyberspace as the Darker Side of the West’ [10], the cultural critic Ziauddin Sardar argued that “at the end of the second millennium ... the standard grand narrative appears to be going through a new and interesting twist: the darker side of the West is bouncing back on itself. The very materials with which the West painted all Other civilizations is now acquiring a life of its own and is threatening to recast the projected image as well as the self-perception of the West.” (p.15) Against the backdrop of the long durée history of European colonialism commencing with the Columbian voyages of 1492CE, Sardar went on to state that “when the West ran out of physical landscapes to conquer, it moved into mental territories [and] when mental and cultural territories are exhausted, the West moves on to conquer the reality of Other people. The end of modernity ushers in the all-embracing totality of postmodernism. In Other peoples’ reality, Other ways of knowing and being, Other identities, postmodernism has discovered new spaces to conquer and subdue ... For the conquest to continue unabated, new terrestrial territories have to be found; and where they don’t actually exist, they must be created. Enter, cyberspace [emphases added].” (p.16) According to Sardar, the next phase of the colonial project was being enacted via the burgeoning ‘frontier’^[9] of a Western-constructed cyberspace with its attendant colonization of ‘other’ realities (ways of knowing and being) and their reduction to digital form as data and information (pp.19-20).

While Sardar is at least partially correct in his assessment of where Western colonial energies have been re-directed following the anti-colonial decolonization struggles of the 1960s which resulted in formal independence for various formerly colonized peoples, I would suggest that his focus on Western re-colonization of the ‘other’ (concomitant with colonization of the Western ‘self’) through a Western-constructed postmodern/postcolonial ‘virgin terrain’ of cyberspace as virtual reality (or VR)^[10] fails to anticipate more recent developments that pointing to a re-colonization of the ‘other’ (and of the Western ‘self’) through technologies such as mobile and cloud computing, pervasive computing, ubicomp and the IoT, and the recent ‘turn’ to Big Data / datafication^[11]. Put another way, contemporary expressions of ‘digital expansionism’ [14] gesture less towards the ‘virtualization’ of the real through its representation within simulations and VR, and more to the augmentation of reality through the embedding of RFID and related technologies, the aim being less one of replacing the territory (reality) with the map (simulation), and more of collapsing the distance between territory and map, to state things in terms of a Borgesian metaphor^[12].

Yet I would suggest that Sardar’s most penetrating insight in terms of what follows herein is his assertion that “the mythic notion of the frontier is constructed to bring the past into an organised, reinterpreted unity whose main function is to give new interpretative emphasis to desired aspects of how the dominated territory is to be controlled in the future and establish that ‘progress’ has been achieved [emphases added].” (p.39)^[13]

3. Entangled Apocalyptics, Algorithmic Racism and the Myths of History

In this section, each of the above three issues is discussed further with a view to preparing the way for mounting a decolonial critique of some contemporary information society discourses.

3.1.      Entangled Apocalyptics

My approach to thinking through the ‘entangled’ logics of race, religion, technology, power etc. in relation to the apocalyptic, millenialist and utopian thinking tacitly shaping dominant information society discourse is informed by a concern to identify what I consider to be transformative events of an arguably decisive nature from a critical race theoretical and decolonial perspective^[14]. In an earlier work [19], I described the ‘Big Bang’ of ‘race’ associated with the Columbian voyages of discovery in 1492 CE and the infamous Valladolid debates of 1550-1551 CE, and the need to interpret both these phenomena against the background of the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453 CE and to the launch of the Crusades in 1095 CE; however, drawing on historical narratives presented by Noble [20], Davis [21] and others, there is a need to complicate the above picture by entangling these histories with 9^th century technological developments within Europe and various post-Augustinian millenialist/millenarian ‘turns’ (or reversals) – including that of the Cistercian monk, Joachim of Fiore (c. 1135-1202) whose ‘Theory of the Three Ages’, allegedly based on vision while reading the Book of Revelation, led to an interpretation of the Christian Trinity as history^[15]. I argue that these historical strands come together in ways that have abiding importance vis-à-vis the world system and the role of technology in furthering hegemonic projects: for example, Noble argues that since its rise in medieval monasteries, technology has been implicated in the Christian desire to restore humanity to the perfection of Adam prior to his fall – that is, the ‘pre-lapserian’ state of being (and knowing) – and from the 13^th century onwards, technology has been presumed necessary in a millenarian struggle – rather, war – between Jesus and the forces of evil (or ‘the Antichrist’), the outcome of which will inaugurate the eternal heavenly kingdom. Crucially, as Noble, Daniel [23] and Almond [24] show, the Antichrist has been identified in different periods within European history as the prophet Muhammad, Muslims or the Catholic papacy^[16]. I want to suggest that this struggle remains significant in the context of the shift in the early 2000s from a neo-liberal to a neo-conservative politics, marked by an increasingly apocalyptic reading of world events by strategists within the globally-hegemonic US government concerned to wage a ‘War on Terror’ [22], and that this trajectory continues to be pursued by the present regime, albeit marked by a turn towards protectionism and a disturbing embrace of overt white supremacist ‘Alt-Right’ politics of an apocalyptic variety^[17].

While conceding the obvious fact that there are various ways to engage with Biblical narratives, including those that support the reversal of the relationship between history and apocalypse previously described, I want to suggest that the historicizing of the Trinity effected by de Fiore contributed to setting in motion a train of apocalyptic developments aimed at what historian Eric Voegelin referred to as ‘the immanentization of the eschaton’; furthermore, that such historicism, wedded to an increasingly positive view of the redemptive power of technology vis-a-vis recovery of the ‘pre-lapserian’ condition of Adamic perfection, ensured that such historically-immanentist and ‘sedimented’ utopian logics of ‘three-ness’ continued to be re-produced – or rather, re-iterated – in various conceptual frameworks including, crucially, contemporary information society schemes such as those presented by Floridi, Fuchs and Hofkirchner^[18].

3.2.      Algorithmic Racism

According to Coleman [28], “race as we know it is an ‘algorithm’ inherited from the age of Enlightenment.” (p.184) I want to suggest that not only is race an algorithm, metaphorically-speaking, but that following the ‘cybernetic turn’ of the 1950s, the continued rise of informational, computational and algorithmic logics (technical, social, cultural, economic, political etc.) has resulted in a situation wherein the racial algorithm has engendered algorithmic formations of race^[19]. Furthermore, at a time when sociology, anthropology and other related disciplines are being subjected to interrogation from postcolonial, decolonial and other ‘critical’ approaches, attempts are being made to recast these disciplines in algorithmic (computational, informational) terms – an algorithmically-metonymic ‘turn’^[20]. I am interested in considering such metonymic shifts in terms of the possibility of their constituting an ‘iterative’ transformation of the signified (meaning) attached to race, the ‘floating signifier’ [29], within what I would suggest is the ‘algorithmic logic(s)’ of race / racism within colonial modernity.

‘Algorithmic Racism’ (AR) [9] is a methodological framework, metaphorically-grounded in the figure of the algorithm, for conceptualizing the relationship between processes of racial formation (or racialization) within ‘Western’^[21] historical experience in relation to its (various) ‘Other(s)’^[22]. AR postulates the existence of a historically-contingent, yet sedimented and ‘dispositional’, ‘meta-process’ linking racialization processes, and is motivated by a concern to assist with the disclosure of continuities masked (obscured, occluded) by transitions between different materializations – that is, ‘iterations’ – of race / racism in different historical epochs, and a fortiori in the transition from colonial modernity to the contemporary postmodern/postcolonial era. In this ‘algorithmic’ narrative, the history of ‘Western’ processes of racialization involving ‘paradigmatic’^[23] shifts from ‘religious’ to ‘philosophical’ to ‘scientific’ and latterly ‘cultural’ expressions of race / racism constitute re-articulations – or rather, ‘re-iterations’^[24] – of the difference between the human (European) and the sub-human (non-European)^[25].

In terms of the focus of this paper, I aver that AR has utility in exposing the “dark postcolonial underside” underpinning and tacitly informing developments associated with the rise of ubicomp, the IoT and Big Data / datafication, and facilitating parallel developments associated with Transhumanism and/or techno-scientific posthumanism, both rhetorical and ‘material’, in terms of disclosing the persistence of asymmetric race hierarchies and the ‘algorithmic’ (re)production of race / racism.

3.3.      The Myths of History

Briefly, I want to suggest that decolonizing information narratives requires decolonizing narrative requires a critique of linear / sequential conceptions of history, and not merely in terms of the perspective from which historical accounts are produced – that is, in terms of embodiment and situatedness in relation to considerations of power – but also in terms of the paradigm / framework within which such accounts are articulated – that is, in terms of the body-politics (who) and geo-politics (where) of knowledge. My approach to critical engagement with the notion of history / ‘the historical’ is informed by the comparative and combinatorial approach to consideration of the different views of macro-historians from different periods and geographical locations presented in Galtung and Inayatullah [34]. While more recent approaches within the information society literature tend to frame macro-historical transformation with reference to the language of complex dynamical systems^[26], and while world systems theorists such as Wallerstein [35] have endorsed such approaches as means by which to overcome a hegemonic Eurocentric universalism and progress (sic) towards a more ‘genuine’ universalism, it is arguably the case that the basic ideas on which such schemes tacitly draw are traceable, albeit in modified and/or eclectically-combined form, to those described in [34]^[27].

4. Decolonizing Information Narratives

Having elaborated each of the three issues informing the background to my critical race theoretical and decolonial engagement with contemporary information society discourses, I want to explore, albeit in brief, how the idea of ‘colonialism’ is being mobilized in discourse about ubicomp, the IoT (Internet of Things) and Big Data / datafication, and how such articulations are both tacitly informed by, and contribute to reproducing, coloniality – that is, the operation of colonial logics. My attention is directed, in particular, at the increasingly pervasive appeal to the figure of the algorithm in such discursive formations. While recognizing the important contributions made by disciplines such as critical code studies, critical software studies and, more recently, critical algorithm studies vis-à-vis exploring the masked operation of asymmetric power in relation to algorithmic (1) mystification (positing of algorithmic agency, fetishization), (2) inscrutability (problems of access to and control over algorithmic technologies), and (3) normativity (accountability given the outcomes of algorithmic deployment)^[28], I argue that such studies tend to be framed against an assumed socio-material background of capitalism as world system that masks / occludes the constitutive colonial – and racialized – ontology of this system; further that such studies tend to focus on methods, while ignoring consideration of the body-politics and geo-politics of knowledge, thereby tacitly reproducing Eurocentric-universalism, and that there is a need to complement the critical discourse analysis of algorithms presented in such studies with a decolonial ‘meta-critique’ of such analyses (and their assumptions) so as to contest the universalizing tendency of such critical narratives.

Examples of the invocation of colonialism in information discourses include explicit recognition by Dourish and Mainwaring [14] of a ‘colonial impulse’ within ubiquitous computing and the IoT, analogically formulated with reference to 18-19^th century British colonialism, yet thereby occluding earlier colonial projects, specifically those initiated by the Spanish and Portuguese during the 15^th century which provided the historical setting for the emergence of the ‘race’ construct^[29].

With regard to Big Data and decolonial interrogation of entangled apocalypticism and the myths of history, it is interesting to note that boyd and Crawford [47] describe datafication as “a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon that rests on the interplay of technology, analysis, and mythology [that] triggers both utopian and dystopian rhetoric [emphases added].” (p.663)^[30] Against such rhetoric they suggest that “as with all socio-technical phenomena, the currents of hope and fear often obscure the more nuanced and subtle shifts that are underway.” (p.664)^[31] While broadly concurring with this assessment, I want to suggest that if the methodological framework of algorithmic racism described earlier is sound, it is necessary to reconsider the rise of Big Data / datafication, with respect to both its rhetoric^[32] (or mythology) and its reality (or ‘material’ power), in terms of how this “cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon” contributes to maintaining, expanding and refining (or adapting) the racial political economy of global white supremacy under what is purported to be an increasingly techno-scientific postmodern/postcolonial condition. In this connection, I would suggest there is a need to think about how datafication contributes to ‘iteratively’ re-inscribing the ‘Digital Divide’^[33].

In terms of reference to ‘colonialism’ within contemporary critical (‘left’) discourse about Big Data, Wyly [12] refers to “the increasingly aggressive colonization of the human attention span” (p.680) under the datafication paradigm, going on to assert that “this system is not yet totalized – there certainly are parts of social life that have not yet been colonized by automated epistemology, where individuals are more than digital individuals. But more and more urban life today is lived in the data ecosystem, where ‘digital reduction becomes a causal element’ … as people are subjected at every turn to data-driven systems of ranking, measurement, and classification to optimize ‘choice’ in an expanding panorama of ever more finely-tuned targeted advertising and behavioral modeling.” (p.682) It is important to note that colonialism is here deployed without reference to its ‘algorithmic’ entanglement with racialization.

However, perhaps the most explicit mobilization of colonialism in contemporary Big Data discourse is that of Thatcher, O’Sullivan and Mahmoudi [40] who argue for thinking about the capitalist drivers underlying the phenomenon of datafication in terms of colonization – specifically, what they refer to as ‘data colonialism’. While space precludes a comprehensive critique of their position, I would suggest that what is at work here is yet another race-less / de-raced – possibly even ‘post-racial’ – Eurocentric conception of colonialism that ‘brackets’ (marginalizes, erases) the ‘material’ links between colonialism and land, people and tangible resources, via recourse to an information-centric abstraction that allows ‘colonialism’ to be reductively, and economistically, framed in terms of labour. I further suggest that such a move both evinces and reproduces coloniality insofar as the discourse of ‘data colonialism’ co-opts the signifier ‘colonialism’ but disconnects it from its modern/colonial signified insofar as the experience of colonization by the colonized is ignored, thereby obscuring operation of the racialized logic of coloniality in this process^[34].

Finally, with regard to history and decolonial attempts at resisting hegemonic discourses of linear progression vis-à-vis ‘the future’ that arguably constitute a form of the colonization of time^[35], futurists Inayatullah and Milojević [49] argue that while advancing a critique of early ‘cyber’ discourses that were “overly utopian, seeing the emergent Internet as the solution to the world’s problems of development and alienation” (p.60), they concede that they had not predicted “the dramatic uptake of mobile technologies throughout [the world’s] poorer areas [and the] breath-taking development of applications – apps – that can assist the disabled and that can create seamless spaces for social and political protest movements to organize for social justice.” (p.61) Despite such developments, they are at pains to point out that “issues of power, however, remain pertinent” (p.61), and that “as network theory accurately predicts, node centers have dramatically increased their power”, such centers being able “to influence others in disproportionate ways, often through the politics of fear and exclusion.” (p.62) Crucially, their conclusion is that “by and large, centers of (former and current) power continue to receive much more attention than globally marginalized spaces.” (p.63) While arguing that “the Internet has certainly participated in the ‘decolonisation processes, giving power to communities and individuals’ [and that] the world has certainly become flatter; at the same time, large corporations and dominant worldviews still define the real [emphasis added]” (p.65); again, while conceding that the “power to influence has been dramatically enhanced, provided an individual or a group has the means to do so”, they draw attention to the fact that “the means are not only technological or in time and energy, but also somehow linked to existing cultural templates, thus deciding what gets to be heard and what is silenced [emphasis added].” (pp.65-66) I would suggest that in order to decolonize information narratives, thereby enabling us to understand who is speaking – and allowed to speak – and from where, it is necessary to consider the ‘entangled’ apocalyptic logics, algorithmic racism, and myths of history informing such discourses.

5. Conclusion

I should like to close with the following reflections of Inayatullah and Milojević [49]:

As we reflect on the future, what we certainly do not know is the nature of Web 4.0, if that occurs, i.e., will it be a merger of our minds with the Internet of things? … While it is certainly the disruption that the techno-utopians have imagined, the issue, for us, remains: how will power be circulated, and will the new Web be data/information-based or move toward communication/wisdom? Can power be dispersed, used more wisely, or will reality always be a realist zero-sum game? The futures of the Internet thus are multiple. What will emerge is far from clear.

References

1. Mignolo, W.D. and Escobar, A. (2010) Globalization and the Decolonial Option. Edited by W.D. Mignolo and A. Escobar. London: Routledge.
2. Inayatullah, S. (1998) Deconstructing the Information Era. Futures 30 (2/3): 235–247.
3. Pepper, S.C. (1942) World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
4. Ali, S.M. (1999) The Concept of Poiēsis and Its Application in a Heideggerian Critique of Computationally Emergent Artificiality. Unpublished doctoral thesis. Uxbridge: Brunel University.
5. St. Clair, R.N. (2002) The Major Metaphors of European Thought — Growth, Game, Language, Drama, Machine, Time and Space. New York: The Edwin Mellen Press.
6. Underhill, J.W. (2011) Creating Worldviews: Metaphor, Ideology and Language. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
7. Jenkins, K. (1991) Re-Thinking History. London: Routledge.
8. Jenkins, K. (1995) On ‘What is History?’: From Carr and Elton to Rorty and White. London: Routledge.
9. Ali, S.M. (2016) Algorithmic Racism: A Decolonial Critique. 10^th International Society for the Study of religion, Nature and Culture Conference, 14-17 January 2016, Gainesville, Florida.
10. Sardar, Z. (1996) alt.civilizations.faq: Cyberspace as the Darker Side of the West. In: Cyberfutures: Culture and Politics on the Information Superhighway. Edited by Ziauddin Sardar and Jerome R. Ravetz. London: Pluto Press, pp.14-41.
11. Kitchin, R. (2017) Thinking Critically About and Researching Algorithms. Information, Communication & Society 20(1): 14–29.
12. Chandler, D. (2015) A World without Causation: Big Data and the Coming of Age of Posthumanism. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 43(3): 833–851.
13. Wyly, E. (2014) Automated (post)positivism. Urban Geography 35(5): 669–690.
14. Dourish, P. and Mainwaring, S. (2012) Ubicomp’s Colonial Impulse. Proc. ACM Conf. Ubiquitous Computing Ubicomp 2012. Pittsburgh, PA, pp.133-142.
15. Borges, J.L. (1946) On Exactitude in Science. Los Anales de Buenos Aires, año 1, no. 3.
16. Evans, P. and Forth, P. (2015) Borges’ Map: Navigating a World of Digital Disruption. Boston, MA: Boston Consulting Group.
17. Ali, S.M. (2013) Race: The Difference That Makes a Difference. tripleC 11 (1): 93-106.
18. Ali, S.M. (2015) Orientalism and/as Information: The Indifference That Makes a Difference. DTMD 2015: 3rd International Conference. In: ISIS Summit Vienna 2015 – The Information Society at the Crossroads, 3 – 7 June 2015, Vienna, Austria. Available at: dx.doi.org/10.3390/isis-summit-vienna-2015-S1005. (Accessed 28 March 2017)
19. Ali, S.M. (2017) Islam between Inclusion and Exclusion: A (Decolonial) Frame Problem. In: The Future Information Society: Social and Technological Problems. Edited by Wolfgang Hofkirchner and Mark Burgin. Singapore, World Scientific, pp.287-305.
20. Noble, D.F. (1997) The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and The Spirit of Invention. New York: Penguin.
21. Davis, E. (1998) Techgnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information. New York: Harmony Books.
22. Gray, J. (2007) Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia. London: Penguin.
23. Daniel, N. (1960) Islam and the West: The Making of an Image. One World, UK.
24. Almond, I. (2010) Representations of Islam in Western Thought. Sarajevo: Centre for Advanced Studies.
25. Floridi, L. (2014) The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
26. Fuchs, C. (2009) Towards a Critical Theory of Information. tripleC 7(2): 243-292.
27. Hofkirchner, W. (2017) Information for a Global Sustainable Society. In: The Future Information Society: Social and Technological Problems. Edited by Wolfgang Hofkirchner and Mark Burgin. Singapore, World Scientific, pp.11-33.
28. Coleman, B. (2009) Race as Technology. Camera Obscura 70 24(1): 177-207.
29. Hall, S. (2002) Race, the Floating Signifier. http://www.mediaed.org/transcripts/Stuart-Hall-Race-the-Floating-Signifier-Transcript.pdf. (Accessed 30 March 2017)
30. Heng, Geraldine (2011) Holy War Redux: The Crusades, Futures of the Past, and Strategic Logic in the ‘Clash’ of Religions. PMLA 126(2): 422-431.
31. Asad, T. (2015) Thinking About Tradition, Religion, and Politics in Egypt Today. Critical Inquiry 42(1): 166-214.
32. Mills, C.W. (2005) Kant’s Üntermenschen. In Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy. Edited by Andrew Valls. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp.169-93.
33. Wynter, S. (2003) Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation – An Argument. CR: The New Centennial Review 3(3): 257-337.
34. Galtung, J. and Inayatullah, S. (1997) Macrohistory and Macrohistorians: Perspectives on Individual, Social and Civilizational Change. Edited by Johan Galtung and Sohail Inayatullah. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger.
35. Wallerstein, I. (2006) European Universalism: The Rhetoric of Power. New Work: The New Press.
36. Inayatullah, S. (1998) Deconstructing the Information Era. Futures 30 (2/3): 235–247.
37. Ziewitz, M. (2011) How to Think About an Algorithm: Notes From a Not Quite Random Walk. Symposium on “Knowledge Machines between Freedom and Control”, Kulturfabrik Hainburg, Austria, October 6-7, 2011. (Draft)
38. Kitchin, R. (2014) Big Data, new epistemologies and paradigm shifts. Big Data and Society, April–June: 1–12.
39. Dourish, P. (2015) Not The Internet, but This Internet: How Othernets Illuminate our Feudal Internet. Proc. Critical Alternatives (Fifth Decennial Aarhus Conference), Aarhus, Denmark.
40. Thatcher, J., O’Sullivan, D. and Mahmoudi, D. (2015) Data Colonialism through Accumulation by Dispossession. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34(6): 990-1006.
41. Ziewitz, M. (2016) Governing Algorithms: Myth, Mess, and Methods. Science, Technology, & Human Values 41(1): 3-16.
42. Dourish, P. (2016) Algorithms and their Others: Algorithmic Culture in Context. Big Data and Society, July–December 2016: 1–11.
43. Kitchin, R. (2017) Thinking Critically About and Researching Algorithms. Information, Communication & Society 20(1): 14–29.
44. Ali, S.M. (2014) Towards a Decolonial Computing. In: Ambiguous Technologies: Philosophical issues, Practical Solutions, Human Nature: Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Computer Ethics – Philosophical Enquiry (CEPE 2013). Edited by Elizabeth A. Buchanan, Paul B, de Laat, Herman T. Tavani and Jenny Klucarich. Portugal: International Society of Ethics and Information Technology, pp.28-35.
45. Mills, C.W. (2007). White Ignorance. In Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance. Edited by Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana. Albany: SUNY Press, pp.13-38.
46. Mills, C.W. (1997) The Racial Contract. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
47. boyd, d. and Crawford, K. (2012) Critical Questions for Big Data: Provocations for a cultural, Technological, and Scholarly Phenomenon. Information, Communication & Society 15(5): 662–679.
48. Venn, C. (2006) The Enlightenment. Theory Culture Society 23 (2006), pp.477-486.
49. Inayatullah, S. and Milojević, I. (2015) Power and the Futures of the Internet. In: The Future Internet: Alternative Visions. Public Administration and Information Technology 17. J. Winter and R. Ono (eds.). Berlin: Springer, pp.59-73.

© 2017 by the author; licensee MDPI and ISIS. This abstract is distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license.

^[1] By a ‘decolonial’ critique, I mean one that foregrounds considerations of the body-politics (who) and geo-politics (where) of knowing and being, and is preferentially disposed towards thinking through conceptual frameworks emerging from the margins / borders / periphery of the world system.

^[2] Briefly, coloniality refers to the structuring logics (epistemological, social, cultural etc.) associated with European colonialism that emerged during colonization and which persist in the post-colonial era following the decolonization struggles that led to formal independence of previously colonized nations. For useful and detailed discussions of the concept of coloniality, the related idea of the ‘colonial matrix of power’, and why there is a need to replace the idea of ‘the modern world’ with that of ‘the modern/colonial world’, see [1].

^[3] In constructing this decolonial ‘counter-narrative’, I recognize its ‘subaltern’ status within the terrain of information society discourses. As Inayatullah [2] perceptively remarks, “current global conversations are not communicative spaces of equal partners but conversations wherein one party has privileged epistemological, economic and military space ... Moreover, the language of such conversations uses the categories and assumptions of those that have designed the meta-conversation. We do not enter conversations unencumbered, as Foucault, Heidegger and many others have pointed out. Trails of discourses precede our words …Thus, before we enter global conversations we need to undo the basis of such conversations asking who gets to speak; what discourses are silenced; and, what institutional power points are privileged? ... Conversations come to us as neutral spaces for created shared agreement but they are Trojan horses carrying worldviews with them.” (pp.239-240)

^[4] Apocalypticism is the religious belief that there will be an apocalypse, a term which originally referred to a revelation of God’s will, but now usually refers to the belief that the world will come to an end very soon, even within one’s own lifetime. This belief is usually accompanied by the idea that civilization will soon come to a tumultuous end due to some sort of catastrophic global event.

^[5] Millenarianism is the expectation that the end of the world is near and that a new earthly paradise is at hand.

^[6] It is not merely that history is generated through the confluence of multiple causal chains – that is, that at least some, if not all, events are causally over-determined – but that the causal sequence, as hermeneutically (or interpretatively) framed contains ‘feedback’ or ‘cyclicity, viz. how the past is understood contributes to the determination of the present, one effect of such determination being a ‘backwards’ transformation in how the past is understood.

^[7] The notion of a ‘root metaphor’ was first introduced by Pepper [3], and an exploration of how metaphysical computationalism under an emergentist scheme might be understood in terms of two of the six root metaphors, viz. formism and mechanism, is presented in [4]. A more recent exploration of the ‘major metaphors’ informing European thinking appears in [5], while the relationship between metaphor, language and ideology in the creation of worldviews is explored in [6].

^[8] For examples of such post-structuralist and anti-foundationalist approaches to history, see [7][8].

^[9] Rather perceptively, Sardar states that “as an idea, the frontier is a tool of domination that arises from the certainty that one already has total control. As an instrument, the function of the frontier is to pass the routine practice of domination into the hands of the populace, to give them the illusion of freedom while they merely act out the actual effective control that is already predetermined, scrutinized and seen to be good by those with power. The frontier is the agency through which power elites get everyone to do their work while thinking they are acting on their own volition. Cyberspace frontier is no different. It has already been controlled; the populace are now being motivated to explore and settle in the new frontier. The ideologically constructed anarchy of cyberspace reflects the drive of the early settlers who colonised the territory like free agents, but only as the free agents of the evolving concept of a particular civilization.” Crucially, he maintains that “what the cyberspace ‘frontier’ is doing as a first step is rewriting history: an exercise in catharsis to release the guilt of wiping out numerous indigenous cultures from the face of the earth, the colonisation of two-thirds of the world and the continuous degradation of life in the Third World that the West has engendered. Why else have these colonial metaphors of discovery been adopted by champions of cyberspace...” (p.18)

^[10] Sardar maintains that “virtual colonisation is the new dimension of European colonialism.” (p.33)

^[11] Notwithstanding my critique of the shortcomings of Sardar’s techno-futurist projections, it is important to note his somewhat prescient argument that “our concerns [have become] largely limited to discrete data or information at best. Knowledge in its true sense, let alone wisdom, never really enters the equation. We are constantly moving towards the left of the axis: discrete data – information – knowledge – wisdom.” (p.28) In this connection, it should be noted that recent left-leaning disciplines such as critical code/software/algorithm studies target the ideological assumptions driving such ‘leftward’ shifts towards data-centrism which tend to be promoted by right-leaning corporations under late modern/colonial techno-capitalism. On this point, see [11][12][13] among other works.

^[12] Here, I refer, of course, to Borges’ single-paragraph short story from 1946 entitled “On Exactitude in Science” [15]. For an example of corporate think-tank mobilization of this Borgesian narrative in favour of datafication, see [16].

^[13] In terms of the background ‘horizon’ informing the argument presented herein and other works exploring the reflexively-‘entangled’ relationship between race and information [17], and between and Orientalism and information [18], it should be noted that Sardar presciently maintains that “cyberspace is social engineering of the worst kind. Those who have made cyberspace inevitable have shaped its datascape with their subconscious perceptions and prejudices, conscious fantasies and fears – all of them pulled out from the dark well of colonial projections ... The frontier was a merchant venture, just like the opening of the New World, and now cyberspace. But this venture cannot be envisioned without the context of an ideology and the mechanism of control. These, whether it be ‘discovery’ of the New World, the spice empires, settling the American West or cyberspace, are all the same: white supremacism, the West as the yardstick of civilization, the divine right stuff and military force ... Under colonialism [Eurocentric and Orientalist] fantasies framed and controlled non-Western cultures of the world. In the new colony of cyberspace, they bounce right back to surround Western man in the darkness of his own projections.” (pp.38-39) For a discussion of the background ‘horizon’ informing the present argument, see [19].

^[14] I refer to such events as ‘Big Bangs’ insofar as I consider them to be literally ‘world-changing’ in terms of their impact.

^[15] According to Noble, Joachim of Fiore’s theory was “the most influential prophetic system known to Europe until Marxism.” (p.24) This position is supported by Gray [22] who maintains that “the division of human history into three ages had a profound impact on secular thought. Hegel’s view of the evolution of human freedom in three dialectical stages, Marx’s theory of the movement from primitive communism through class society to global communism, [and] Auguste Comte’s Positivist vision of humankind’s evolution from religious to metaphysical and scientific stages of development all reproduce the three-part scheme.” (pp.12-13)

^[16] It is important to appreciate that eschatological, if not apocalyptic, narratives involving a prophesied Messiah who will engage in battle against the forces of evil during the end times exist in all three of the so-called ‘Abrahamic traditions’ (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), whether this involves the coming of the Masiach ben Yossef who will destroy the Edomites and enemies of Israel, the return of Christ who will battle all the nations of the earth, or the advent of the Mahdi (that is, ‘guided one’) who will accompany the return of Jesus and fight to usher in an era of peace. Yet Christian apocalypticism appears to be somewhat unique in relation to its ‘entanglement’ with, and contribution towards, the construction of a linear / sequential understanding of the historical process as the unfolding of eschatological events of an apocalyptic nature – especially in the post-Augustinian form it adopted under the influence of thinkers such as Joachim of Fiore.

^[17] It should be noted, however, that such crude / overt manifestations of white supremacism are not confined to the US context as events immediately following the outcome of the UK Brexit vote and the rise of ‘far right’ politics across Europe attest.

^[18] Consider Floridi’s [25] reference to the ‘three stages of history’ in the context of his argument for an ICT-based ‘Fourth Revolution’, Fuchs [26] deployment of Hegelian dialectics in formulating his critical theory of information, and Hofkirchner’s appeal to Brockman’s notion of ‘Third Culture’ – an updating of C.P. Snow’s ‘Two Cultures’ – in the context of articulating a ‘global sustainable information society’. In this connection, it is also worth pointing out in passing that futurist Alvin’s Toffler’s notion of the ‘Third Wave’ similarly realizes the Joachimite ‘logic of three-ness’ [21].

^[19] For a brief discussion of some recent algorithmic / computational / informational forms of ‘the racial’, see [17].

^[20] In this connection. Wyly [13] points to the ‘return’ of positivist ideas within the field of computational social science.

^[21] On my reading, the signifier ‘Western’ must be understood in genealogical relation to historically-prior, related signifiers such as ‘European’, itself emerging from an earlier experience associated with the formation of Christendom. For a brief discussion of this genealogy, see [19].

^[22] According to Gray [22], “the [Enlightenment] myth that humanity is moving towards adopting the same values and institutions remains embedded in Western consciousness” (p.104); crucially, on his view, this myth has an eschatological – more specifically, millenarian / millenialist utopian and apocalyptic – basis such that “history continues to be seen as a process with a built-in goal [emphasis added]” (p.105) Insofar as the ideas of process and goal (end-point, telos) are arguably essential to the definition of an algorithm, this means that history, seen in this way, might be construed as algorithmic – that is, consisting of a sequence of iterations / cycles involving occasional ‘branch’ points at which decisions have to be made / taken. (It should be noted that such branch points are generative of information in the Batesonian sense insofar as they involve decision-making and selection among alternatives, viz. a ‘difference that makes a difference’.) According to Gray, the goal of this eschatological (apocalyptic, utopian) historical algorithm relates to “the Enlightenment faith that humanity is moving towards a universal civilization” (p.104) – the universal here ironically being defined by a particular, viz. the Eurocentric, that masks / erases its particularity.

^[23] The idea of a ‘paradigm’ is used here in relation to phenomena coming into the foreground relative to those that have (been) moved to the background. Crucially, such ‘backgrounding’ should not be understood as indicating the absence or erasure of a phenomenon, but rather its displacement as the dominant motif associated with a particular historical juncture and geographical site, such displacement necessitating a reconfiguration of what was previously paradigmatic.

^[24] Importantly, Heng [30] maintains that “the Middle Ages were critically important and that medieval is not merely an arbitrary name devised to emplace a temporal interval in the West but more like the name of a repeating trans-historical pressure whose phenomenality renders later temporalities non-identical with themselves in ways that facilitate a multiplicity of (political and other) uses [emphasis added].” (p.424) Heng also refers to “postmedieval invocation of the Middle Ages in everything from popular culture to disciplinary history and formation to politics to built environments, inter alia.” and that “euromedievalisms imported and transmogrified around the world, in postcolonies as well as in colonial and neocolonial spaces.” (p.429) She also points to work by medievalists seeking to “erode a simple algorithm of temporal oppositionality by demonstrating the coevalness of present and past, in the sedimented pluralities of the present.” (p.424) Yet I would suggest that it is not necessarily an algorithmics of historicity / temporality per se that is being contested by Heng, but rather a ‘simple’ algorithmics of temporal oppositionality wherein sedimentation does not feature. In my conception of algorithmic racism, different iterations of race / racism / racialization are marked by ‘paradigmatic’ shifts in formation – religious, philosophical, scientific, cultural, technological – which should be considered distinct, but not oppositional, and at least partly inclusive rather than wholly exclusive; in this sense, my conception of algorithmic racism might be seen to bear some similarity to Asad’s [31] concept of ‘tradition’.

^[25] Following critical race theorist Charles W. Mills [32] and decolonial theorist Sylvia Wynter [33], I argue that the sub-human (which should not to be conflated with the broader category of the non-human) provides the ‘ontological ground’ against which the former is constituted through a process of hierarchical negative dialectical opposition, viz. the human (superior) as the negation of the sub-human (inferior).

^[26] In this connection, consider the how the information society is framed in the discourse of Fuchs [26], Hofkirchner [27] and others.

^[27] In an early critique of ‘information era’ discourse, Inayatullah [36] maintained that “its view of the future is overly linear, exponentially so” (p.235), further arguing that “slow time, lunar time, women’s time, spiritual timeless time, cyclical rise and fall time and circular seasonal time are among the victims, leading to temporal impoverishment, a loss of temporal diversity where ‘21C’ is for all instead of peculiar to Western civilisation.” (p.236) In this connection, it is interesting to consider exponentiation in relation to Moore’s Law which transhumanist Ray Kurzweil appeals to in connection with his ‘Law of Accelerating Returns’, as well as Floridi’s appeal to the same phenomenon of exponentiation in the context of his argument for a ‘Fourth Revolution’ [25].

^[28] Some important works in this regard include [12], [13], [14], [37], [38], [39], [40], [41], [42] and [43].

^[29] In the context of outlining a proposal for a ‘Decolonial Computing’ [44], I have argued that “an appeal to 18-19^th century British colonialism should foreground race matters a fortiori, yet Dourish and Mainwaring are completely silent about issues of ‘race’, as are other proponents of postcolonial computing who speak in terms of ‘colonial’, ‘cultural’ and ‘power’ formations. Is postcolonial theory here being used, perhaps unconsciously, to mask / obscure racial concerns? Is this a case of what Mills [45] refers to as ‘white ignorance’, that is, an ‘inverted epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance, a particular pattern of localized and global cognitive dysfunctions (which are psychologically and socially functional)’ which involve ‘white misunderstanding, misrepresentation, evasion, and self-deception on matters related to race’ [46: 18-19]?”

^[30] In terms of the utopian, boyd and Crawford argue that “Big Data is seen as a powerful tool to address various societal ills, offering the potential of new insights into areas as diverse as cancer research, terrorism, and climate change” (pp.663-664); and in terms of the dystopian, they maintain that “Big Data is seen as a troubling manifestation of Big Brother, enabling invasions of privacy, decreased civil freedoms, and increased state and corporate control.” (p.664)

^[31] boyd and Crawford maintain that “there are serious and wide-ranging implications for the operationalization of Big Data, and what it will mean for future research agendas ... We should consider how the tools [associated with Big Data] participate in shaping the world with us as we use them. The era of Big Data has only just begun, but it is already important that we start questioning the assumptions, values, and biases of this new wave of research.” (p.675) While broadly concurring with this critical orientation, as stated previously, I suggest the need to complement the critical (discourse) analysis of algorithms presented in such studies with a decolonial ‘meta-critique’ that draws attention to the body-political and geo-political orientation of critical commentators in terms of how their analyses tend to reproduce a tacit Eurocentric-universalism vis-à-vis logic of argument and rhetoric of articulation.

^[32] Contesting the claim by Wired magazine’s founding editor Chris Anderson that “with enough data, the numbers speak for themselves”, boyd and Crawford ask: “Do numbers speak for themselves? We believe the answer is ‘no’. Significantly, Anderson’s sweeping dismissal of all other theories and disciplines is telling: it reveals an arrogant undercurrent in many Big Data debates where other forms of analysis are too easily sidelined. Other methods for ascertaining why people do things, write things, or make things are lost in the sheer volume of numbers [emphasis added].” (p.666) From a decolonial perspective, I want to suggest that it is not mere hubris alone that is at work here, but also techno-scientific rhetoric that is being mobilized, albeit unconsciously – and here it is important to consider the operation of unconscious biases and dispositions in terms of ‘epistemic ignorance’ vis-à-vis social psychology as understood in relation to the historically sedimented racial contract underpinning colonial modernity [17] – in an attempt at blocking resistance to the hegemonic power of global white supremacy.

^[33] boyd and Crawford rightly ask “who gets access [to Big data]? For what purposes? In what contexts? And with what constraints? [emphasis added]” (p.673), and go on to state that “in addition to questions of access, there are questions of skills. Wrangling APIs, scraping, and analyzing big swathes of data is a skill set generally restricted to those with a computational background. When computational skills are positioned as the most valuable, questions emerge over who is advantaged and who is disadvantaged in such a context [emphasis added].” (p.674) In this connection, it is important to consider how the development of such skills depends on access to and use of powerful computing platforms capable of mining the vast quantities of data generated by various means within the technological infrastructure of datafication. However, while making explicit reference to issues of gender (p.674), boyd and Crawford are silent on issues of race, deferring to what are arguably race-less / de-raced economistic readings of the Digital Divide and digital inequality, viz. “whenever inequalities are explicitly written into the system, they produce class-based structures.” (p.675) Appeal to economism is also evident in recent work by Dourish who invokes historically-Eurocentric Marxist framings of feudalism in order to facilitate critical reflections on the Internet [39] and the ‘other’ of algorithms [42].

^[34] I should like to suggest that another major difference between historical colonialism and the ‘data colonialism’ associated with datafication is that in the latter, resistance can be effected, at least partially, through non-violent non-compliance, whereas historical colonialism could, in general, only be resisted through direct counter-violence.

^[35] In this connection, and in the context of a discussion of financial products, Venn [48] maintains that derivatives have “quickly become by far the most important element of finance capitalism [and] the biggest business in the world” that “the derivatives market concerns trading on the stock exchange centered on the predicted future values of assets; it is thus a trade in virtual assets, ultimately based on nothing but financial and information technologies that combine probabilistic knowledge and calculations with computer simulations of the future. The derivatives market generates value out of the future as resource [emphases added]. (p.483) Crucially, Venn goes on to state that his point is “not about this virtual world of finance that informational technology has produced. It is about the fact that it is time itself which is being traded, and the extent to which the drive to minimize the risks involved means the abolition of the future as emergence and as indeterminate becoming [that is, as something that is genuinely open to creative endeavor]. Basically, with the derivatives market, capital is obliged to organize the present in such a way as to ensure the future conforms to what has already been predicted by the probabilistic calculations. In order to ensure the future happens more or less as anticipated, capital must abolish contingency even as it plays with it, and it must bring everything within the order of the orderable and the calculable … The future thus becomes an extension of the present, and the present an intensification of the future. Capital controls the present by controlling the future. [I]t is time itself which is being colonised [emphases added]. (p.483)