CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 779Cultural Studies and PostmodernismPolitical Economy and MarxismEthics and Social Impacts of AI

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 29 of the 29 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Digital colonialism: US empire and the new imperialism in the Global South

Open access
Kwet, Michael·2019·Race & Class
DOI 10.1177/0306396818823172
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

This article proposes a conceptual framework of how the United States is reinventing colonialism in the Global South through the domination of digital technology. Using South Africa as a case study, it argues that US multinationals exercise imperial control at the architecture level of the digital ecosystem: software, hardware and network connectivity, which then gives rise to related forms of domination. The monopoly power of multinational corporations is used for resource extraction through rent and surveillance – economic domination. By controlling the digital ecosystem, Big Tech corporations control computer-mediated experiences, giving them direct power over political, economic and cultural domains of life – imperial control. The centrepiece of surveillance capitalism, Big Data, violates the sanctity of privacy and concentrates economic power in the hands of US corporations – a system of global surveillance capitalism. As a feature of surveillance capitalism, Global North intelligence agencies partner with their own corporations to conduct mass and targeted surveillance in the Global South – which intensifies imperial state surveillance. US elites have persuaded people that society must proceed according to its ruling class conceptions of the digital world, setting the foundation for tech hegemony. The author argues for a different ecosystem that decentralises technology by placing control directly into the hands of the people to counter the rapidly advancing frontier of digital empire.

Overview

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1177/0306396818823172

Cites

29 of 29 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Verification

Claims the paper makes

We couldn’t retrieve this paper’s full text, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

Citations

Cites

Show all 29 references

Research works printed but not linked: 8

  1. African National Congress , ‘54th National Conference: report and resolutions’, December 2017, p. 26, http://www.anc.org.za/sites/default/files/54th_National_Conference_Report.pdf.
  2. Horan Hubert, 2017, Transportation Law Journal, 44, 38
  3. Reidenberg Joel, 1998, Texas Law Review, 76
  4. Wu Tim, 2003, Journal of Telecommunications and High Technology Law, 2
  5. See Mazzucato Mariana, The Entrepreneurial State: debunking public vs. private sector myths (New York: Public Affairs, 2015), pp. 93–116.
  6. McCoy Alfred, Policing America’s Empire: the United States, the Philippines, and the rise of the surveillance state (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), p. 21.
  7. Kwet Michael, Counterpunch
  8. Breckenridge, Biometric State

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Items 701–777 of 777

Related

See all

Metadata

Authors
Kwet, M.
Corresponding author
Kwet, Michael
ORCID
Kwet, Michael
Venue
Race & Class
Publisher
SAGE Publications
Published
2019-01-14
Volume
60
Issue
4
Pages
3-26
ISSN
  • 0306-3968 (ISSN-L)
  • 1741-3125
DOI
10.1177/0306396818823172
OpenAlex
W2895649879
Cited by
779
References
29
Citations by year
2026: 187 · 2025: 175 · 2024: 142 · 2023: 98 · 2022: 86 · 2021: 53 · 2020: 29 · 2019: 9
FWCI
49.73
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
journals.sagepub.com/page/policies/text-and-data-mining-license (tdm)
Locations
  • Race & Class (publishedVersion)
  • SSRN Electronic Journal (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Communication › Cultural Studies and Postmodernism
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Political Economy and Marxism
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
Keywords
digital colonialism, American imperialism, Global South, multinational corporations, Big Tech, surveillance capitalism, data capitalism, privacy, government surveillance, intelligence services, digital ecosystems, South Africa, economic domination, resource extraction

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review