The modern IT world has me, someone who loves computers and has a career in programming, really disappointed in my field. There's so much good that can be done with technology yet all we see is that almighty worship of profit. In my field, the only true goal I have is to ensure that worship and it drains my soul. I have to focus on free and open source software and ways to use software for the betterment of communities and speak out against this age of techno pillaging and dehumanization so I don't start to break down from the weight of it all.
🙂I'm hopeful for more software that exists outside of the big tech companies. Mastodon's done a pretty good job at supplanting Twitter ("X" 🤦♂), and I've got like, half a dozen bookmarks for projects that could replace Discord / Slack / whatever chat program. They all had slightly different features I think, and used the same federated back-end as Mastodon as I understood it. Gray jay and others can replace RU-vid. My social circle basically just uses Facebook as a glorified contact-list, with occasional pictures of vacations. I think a good marketing campaign could help these corporate-software replacements be used by the average person. 👍
I feel you so hard- when people find out what I do, it’s always “woah! That’s sounds so cool”…and I just stare at them…if only you knew how bad it was. I studied game development, and while I love it as an art form which I think has so much much room to express so many more meaningful ideas, it’s pretty rough knowing how most popular games are just ways to pacify and extract $$$ from audiences. I love tech so much, but it’s really rough right now.
That must be really tough, but I'm so glad to hear someone like you holding that awareness and responsibility and determination to do better for the world :)
I don't think it's half as radical as Andrew's, but. Have you seen Dan Olsen's video on the metaverse? Being basically boring slop? Andrew brings a much more, anti colonial, anarchist, political, interest frame work. Dan's is more like. A white, disappointed, IT Dad. Like. An engineer proud of his son getting into coding, only for the kid to hack Twitter so he can make Taylor Switf say "skippbidi deez 420 nutz into the brain rot toilet," from her official account. Lol. And just deep sighs from the dad. I think I'm somewhere inbetween, lol
One of the things that annoys me about "AI" is the way it includes so many different bits of tech - your LLMs and your cancer diagnosis systems are very different and you don't need to harvest people's personal data to make the diagnosis system.
To be fair, that comes all the way from how the field was born, historically. I have a book from the 70s in which a couple of mathematicians discuss "AI" and they present pretty much the sub-fields we still have - I don't think the lumping of all of these things under the same name was done out of malice, but it sure helps keep things opaque nowadays.
Ever since I saw the initialism "AI", my headcanon take never attributed that to intelligence as intelligence is based on the perspective of the policymaker. Instead, I denote any form of "AI" as *augmented* intelligence.
This is why one of our right wing politicians wants to eliminate Treaty rights us Mãori have here in NZ because one of the principles looked at a modern framework lead to allowing us to have data sovereignty. This was so powerful that even Microsoft had to allow us sovereignty over our own data, and our data couldn't leave New Zealand shores without our permission.
Kia ora, you're right that data colonialism can certainly be seen in NZ even though our media refuse to call it as such, which is ironic since they're suffering from that same right-wing politician's willingness to serve big tech, and I agree that the unending attack on the Treaty definitely plays into extinguishing Māori data sovereignty. Data is absolutely protected as a taonga under article 2 of Te Tiriti.
This is very interesting. Perhaps a strange question. The Maori have treaty rights the Dutch have not (more often we're, or have been, the colonisers). Yet what arguments helped the Maori get Data sovereignty? Could it be an example for all peoples and or nations across the world? That would certainly hinder US colonisation and domination.
Powers dat be got rid of assange, indigenous peoples, and they criminalized tobacco in Australia. Raised the property cost to keep people out of Australia and New Zealand because that’s where they are going to hide while they let the US & EU crumble. All part of the plan.
Also, don't forget that captchas you've been solving all this time are free labor for AI training. The recognition is not what makes the captcha distinguish you from a robot. Your mouse movement, clicks, pauses, time to type are tracked and that is what is actually analyzed by the captcha. The text or image recognition task you're completing is unpaid labor for big data companies used to make their AI tech work better.
Just my $0.02- (I’m only 2 min in so if you cover this, forgive me) The paywalls behind a lot of academic and scientific literature should be part of this conversation too. Something I often think about is the 2014 Ebola outbreak and how the disease had been mapped out since the 80’s, but that info hadn’t been disseminated to west African scientists and doctors during the epidemic because it was only posted among European and American academic communities, with paywalls as high as USD 40 per article
I think every leftist discussion about tech require a discussion about the Free Software movement. Even if other ideas by Stallman are controversial, Free Software Free Society should be top tier in reading priority.
One thing I don't get as a software dev is why devs do FOSS licenses. It is absolutely insane to me. If software engineers had defaulted the licenses to "I own this, feel free to use it but I will tell you to stop using it if I feel you are doing something I don't like with it", it would solve a ton of problems. Amazon and big companies wouldn't just steal and monetize all the open source and it'd be a much, much healthier community. That's the exact license I just put on a new programming language I'm working on. It's a ton of work, and if it becomes monetizable at some point, the contributors should share in that generated wealth. The FOSS licenses to me seem clearly like they are a mistake. They'd make sense if we lived in a utopian world, but you have to fight capitalism on it's own turf - by exercising property rights - or it will just be exploited for gain by people in positions to do so, with no "trickle down effect" to be seen. I believe there is a reason why GitHub has no non-FOSS licenses selectable. Microsoft and all the other giants gain from making all the software on it FOSS essentially by default.
12:17 This is the intersection between Tech colonialism and Car dependence. If you’re like me, you live somewhere you can’t meet anybody because you can’t physically reach meeting places without owning a dangerous and expensive piece of capital.
I'm ~95% sure my Philips/WiZ lightbulbs are extracting data on *exactly where I and my family members are within my own home at all times.* Supposedly, this is a feature that can be used to turn on/off or dim or change the colors of those lights automagically, but given that it's achieved by analyzing interference patterns in the wifi signal they need to function properly anyways, I doubt my intentional neglect of this feature is even noticed. Both the data and the means to extract it exist, so I'm pretty certain someone must be collecting it... as long as I want the convenience of RGB lighting that can be controlled from the notification center on my smartphone, there's going to be a large faceless company with unrestricted access to more information about what's going on in my house than anyone outside my household should ever have. Things need to change.
you could just go see them or text them. That's so weird. It's like buying a light bulb and those same light blubs being uninvited vouyers at your house. Like. Dude. If you're going to know every time I shit? $50 bucks. Per shit. Like. I want to see some of the value of my labour. Pay me, damn it. Lol.
WHY WOULD YOU WANT LIGHTS THAT RELY ON WIFI ?! IF YOUR WIFI GOES OUT OR YOU. WHO WANTS HACKABLE LIGHT BULBS?! I have a packable phone, TV, and watch. AND COMPUTER. ALREADY TO MUCH. NO MORE, PLEASE. THATS ENOUGH.
Yes - I know. Anecdotally; I’m “off” every ‘platform’ except YT (premium) and Nebula, have been for a couple years now. My LAN is fairly well filtered including local cashing DNS. Indeed, the algos that still read & exploit my behaviour are quite off by now, but it’s fairly impossible to escape all of it. Nerdy IT skills are useful in our time, luckily there are way cleverer ones out there than me, willingly sharing (always learning…). I wouldn’t _recommend_ others to just “decouple”, it’s a fairly alienating and radicalising process against the grain of society - unless you have a good community around you, and fair critical skills. Good work, Andrewism - people like you _are_ that community. Peace!
Someone mentioned free software and I think that is a key element too. Free and Open Source Software - and I mean freedom with that free; it’s okay to pay for good software. All these companies, all this ai crap, all built their monopolies off the backs of passionate nerds making open software on the internet. Don’t forget. Most people genuinely think Google is the only email service, or Microsoft Office is the only thing for documenting things. They have taken away our ability to even understand the computer by locking things arbitrary with “copyright” and the “law” as the mask, most forget this thing (the computer) is a beautiful culmination of human history, imagination, and a strong will to share knowledge. Most will never know that under all the abstraction and noise of modern tech, is just a terminal. You wouldn’t want full control of your machine now would you? You surely couldn’t handle something so scary… We have the power. Take it back. For all the people.
you also could've mentioned open source platforms that don't harvest your data; using those instead of the corporate ones could also offer a form of resistance
@thezipcreator it's tricky because usually that data is also used to make a more convenient product. Also many open source pieces of software rely on data collection too.
@@Nichrysalis open source projects typically collect less data (only really that which is necessary) and if they collect more then they usually let you opt out somehow. also with open source projects it's a lot more transparent; people can just check where the data is going by looking at the source
There are good videos about it. I recommend researching „dead internet theory“ - not the conspiracy videos about how the reptiloids use the internet to suppress you, but video essays about algorithms, bots, AI… there are very considerate, thoughtful essays.
I've heard it said before that the US government treats big tech companies like Google and Facebook like they were foreign countries. Their growth a happened under our noses too, just like the takeover of algorithms and social media in our lives, and like ai wants to do now.
@@funnyjuiceeffects chriswaves especially as he has a very positive view about it and even cites Andrewism (also I am not sure if it’s in this video). Pseudium had also made a good video summarizing the theories and what’s plausible about it.
This got me thinking. I was very frustration last week, when I learn that the parasitic drain my car had, was caused by the OnStar module in my car. So even though it doesn't support my old ass car, I still have to pay $700+ for this. I have to pay to be tracked, even though they claim it don't track you. Lol, okay. 🤦🏾♀️
I spent the whole video waiting for you to mention using Free (as in "Freedom") Software and FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) as resistance against data collection and, therefore, data colonialism. Maybe in a follow-up video?
@@DeepDeepSouthRecords And I have been using it for years lol, but it would have been important to mention for those who still don't know about it or use it
I don't really understand this stuff in depth but it feels like the idea that data extraction is performed without violence is wrong. The society of control has plenty of non-physical institutional violence that can be visited on us if we don't 'click the box'. The threat of homelessness, underpaid tax etc., loss of job, and their consequences is what conditions us to not think twice about digging ourselves deeper into the techno- and datasphere
Abuse can take many forms. That's a good observation. There are definitely parallels.. A (seeming) lack of alternatives to an exploitative and coercive status quo.
Not sure if you mentioned it, but the stage before data colonialism could be called work- or time colonialism. The biggest leap in this stage has been getting women into the work force. I've gathered that most labor today is done because of manufactured needs. They weaken and slightly poison the food and our living environment, ipso ergo we need more health care labor - physical and mental. They create a ban mainly on central plants, ipso ergo we need more policing and military labor. The West (especially USA, UK, and Israel) provoke and force conflicts, ipso ergo we need to destroy countries and peoples, ipso ergo we need more weapons and money to build up the country we destroyed. Those are just a few examples. This is built into the money system. We need money to grow, ipso ergo they write up more debt that they put money into circulation, ipso ergo we need more money into paying off that old debt. Anyways, we could work half as much and have a really great society, but the money controllers and -holders don't seem too keen on that. You can use the word Marx popularized - capitalism, but it has really been the dynamic of usury money that has driven colonialism, wars, slavery, etc. Usury is an age old banking scam that inevitably sucks up more and more money to the owning class, especially in the late stage. In antiquity they used to have debt-wiping jubilees to balance this out. In mideaval times the king used to throw out the money lenders at that stage.
Women have always been in the workforce. Teen girls were crawling through mine tunnels as late as the 1800s. Only well-off families could afford to have their women stay off the workforce. Industrialisation changed this because that meant needing more skilled people, less tired people, so the need for skilled workers meant two things : paying people enough for the whole family to live off one salary, and having someone at home to do the domestic work needed to free the mind of the worker, so he can put 100% of himself in his work. That's kinda fordism applied to the family : separation of tasks in order to be more efficient.
This macro-scale colonial analysis is an important base or structure in relation to big data, the dialectics of space, cybernertics, cloud capital, cloud rent, and managerial capitalism. This is the missing link that I have been searching for. Clive Burgess Thank you
This is just a little idea I had while I was watching the video So what if smaller communities had more readily available access to and education of how to operate radio towers , maybe these specific ones could be preset to out put useful information about the environment they’re in stuff like Warnings about the wild life , danger prone areas like flash flood zones or frequent storms, where to find clean water , what plants are safe to eat what plants have medicinal properties which are dangerous or have “medicinal properties” , how to get places , information about the local human communities and how to respectfully and responsibly interact with them and their land ,
Data ownership, agency and autonomy would go along way in curbing the exploitive practices that feed machine learning (AI) tools and people's job (livelihood) insecurities/destruction. It can be applied on the national level (e.g. NHS), community level (e.g. unions, religious group, school class) and individual level (e.g. the citizen, the worker).
One way of refusing the terms and conditions, so to speak, is to look for FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) alternatives to what you use and interact with. Its important to note that the 'free' in that abbreviation is not as in price but as in freedom, though FOSS is also frequently free as in price too. FOSS doesn't generally have quite as thorough support (part of living in a world dominated by capitalism is that people are forced to work on capitalist software more than they're able to work on FOSS projects), but quite a lot of the time they're at least good-enough. In my case at least, they're certainly almost always good-enough that I'll happily sacrifice my access to the more well supported features and quality of life to stay away from the invasions of privacy, security, and consent that almost universally accompany the software developed by and for capitalists. In the case of 'platforms' whether they're social media or things like operating systems, FOSS alternatives are frequently held back in some ways by a lack of total number of users that have adopted them, but that's also a problem that gets (eventually) solved by people adopting them. More users means more bug reports, feature requests, and users that happen to have skills that can allow them to also be contributors; in the case of social platforms, more users also means more activity on the platform and more future-friends to find. If anyone reading this is curious about potentially trying some alternatives, I recommend doing a bit of research on any alternative that you look at, as they often come with notable drawbacks due to the less-than-ideal support, so its important to make sure that it'll actually fit your needs. For some examples that I personally use, I swapped to Mastodon instead of twitter (frequently mastodon gets over-sold by its users, know that it DOES have its own problems, but I'm certainly not looking back at twitter and missing it other than a few specific accounts I used to follow), and I use Linux instead of Windows; many distributions of Linux come with a fair few FOSS alternatives to commonly used software (such as Libre Office to replace microsoft office). For researching Linux specifically, its important to look at differences between distributions. There's a number of popular ones and a lot of less commonly used ones, and they're all a bit different in the ideas driving their development. Some wind up better for a smooth transition from Windows, some wind up better for other purposes, and different ones have different degrees with which they stick to FOSS options for software they come with.
in regards to prev's insistance on distros: note that your package manager, and to a small extant, your main package repository are the only things you can't swap out at some point and most distributions are just others with some customisation (SteamOS, for example, is just Arch with Steam preinstalled) in the end, you'll have to choose between the big 4: - Enterprise Linux (has all the IBM and Oracle bloatware, otherwise not very useful) - Arch (moves fast, has the most packages, but sometimes breaks a little) - Debian Stable (years-outdated packages, but everything is extremely battle-tested and always just works) - Debian Unstable / Ubuntu (very much a tradeoff but probably the best for newbies, just don't use third party repos though or you'll have bad surprises on major updates) later on you might look at others like void, gentoo, NixOS or whatever finally, you don't even have to choose as there's a piece of software called BedRockLinux that lets you install multiple at the same time
One part of our lives that's even worse than our phones in terms of monitoring and scraping our data, and which most people seem to unaware of: our cars. Most modern cars have computers in them with microphones and SIM cards. One way the data that cars collect about you can be used is your driving telemetry & location history being sold to insurance companies to build a profile on you whether or not you're an existing customer with them yet. Connecting our phone to our car is also unwise as it can share even more data between the two.
Omggg, I’m so so so happy this was recommended to me, I’ve been desperately craving ANYTHING on this platform that is decolonial and not a random white guy talking. Loved this video and subscribed!!
plenty of random white guys support decolonisation, just like plenty of non whites sold out to their colonial masters, it's not about race, it's a state of mind
This macro-scale colonial analysis is an important base or structure in relation to big data, the dialectics of space, cybernertics, cloud capital, cloud rent, and managerial capitalism. DATA COLONIALISM: SOCIAL and ECOLOGICAL REALITY S.A.R.M • SUBJECTIVITY: DATA COLONISER • ACTIVITIES: Civilising Mission, explore, expand, exploit, exterminate, extract, disposess, appropriate. . .DATA EXTRACTION • Social RELATIONSHIPS: State ~ Private Partnerships, New Social Order, Producers, Class/Race, leading to Deep Inequalities. . . • MEANS: Physical Environment, Infrastructure, Natural Environment, Territory Clive Burgess please fill in the blanks... .
To Andrew: I think this video is good, but It doesn't come close the scope of Data collection and abuse in some areas of the United States, like the American South. Data collection from Banks, online shopping platforms, GPS mapping apps etc are used by employers to finely tune their exploitation of their employees specifically. They police what you are able to do online, on social media. They know how much money you have in your bank account, and can adjust your pay to be sure that you aren't saving enough to switch jobs, banks will cancel your cards if you try to escape and you can be fired for building social networks of solidarity in social media.
6:00 to your car, and if colonizers like Apple and NeuraLInk keep pushing into healthcare tech then your hearing aids, glasses, prosthetics, pacemakers, etc. Very few people would feel free to decline those terms and conditions given the medical benefits they would have to decline at the same time
For some reason I hadn't quite linked colonialism with the data practices the tech companies use to engage with us. I guess that's one new contradiction of my ideology. Thank you so much for opening my eyes to this perspective. Surely the road to truly decolonized tech is long but we'll get there. Subbed
Should also read about the free (as in freedom) software movement being appropriated by proprietary systems. Palantir is pretty much the cop version of an open source intelligence tool called maltego, Google maps coopted open street maps work. Very cool video thanks for talking about this
This video outlines the core motivation for my research (ik a lot of tensions in CS academia smh). While the open source movement has led to big paradigm shifts if it's still led by American and European programmers and with a Western mindset, that doesn't solve data colonialism. I.e. a lot of corporations have open source tools available and the red pajama llm dataset is open source but is still built on billions of text data points taken from internet content. There definitely are Black-led data science efforts (Deep Learning Indaba has a conference happening rn) and decolonial AI efforts that get to the root of the issue more and challenge data colonialism through efforts of technical subjectivity.
Thanks for the interesting video. How can we escape the craziness of data colonialism? How do I resist? What can I do to have more privacy? If I don't agree to the terms of an app I can't download it. What if I can't renounce it because I need it for school or work? Do you think AI is going to take over all our jobs or most of them? How will people surivive?
2:18 dude, you can't drop stuff like that without telling more I assume you have sources in desc, I wanna know all about this, I did not know any of this medicine history at all Please make a video on this topic only It'd be so valuable as capitalists always argue how everything good ever comes from it
This article is a good primer: www.who.int/news-room/feature-stories/detail/traditional-medicine-has-a-long-history-of-contributing-to-conventional-medicine-and-continues-to-hold-promise
It is a very good video and brings into the surface the important discussion of the complete commodification and control of our lives the Big tech is trying to achive through the extraction and usage of data, i haven't been persuaded that the data colonialism is a correct term. I find that the points you give either apply to capitalism in general and not exactly colonialism (extraction, creation of an elite, inequality, destruction of the envirnoment, collaboration of companies and state, perpetuation of particular beliefs. ) or it is Big Tech building itself for past and present colonialism, as it continues to exploit the Global South.
I suggest reading Data Grab! Mejias and Couldry go a bit deeper into their justification for using the term colonialism in particular than I explained here
I'm wondering if there's a way to create and code small, simple social networks completely separate from corporations or even the Internet at large - they only exist between the devices of participants. Would you have to create communication devices completely from scratch? It's a tall order, but I'm trying to think outside the box and reimagine our digital lives in a way that maintains radical autonomy.
Can you make a video on Waste Colonialism 🙏🙏 this is a big one where our everyday actions cause catastrophic shifts in the daily lives of those who live in the global majority, who’s homes we dump our trash on by the ton without batting an eye
Every video you watch, every comment you post, every content you share, every message/mail you send, every call you make, in short everything you do with your phone, tablet, computer is being monitored by intelligence agencies and recorded by tech companies. Your data is not only being sold to advertisers but you are being used as a trainer by the big tech ai (Google, Microsoft, Apple, Meta) and you are being abused as a subject by the big five states. (US, UK, CAN, AUS, NZ)
This is random, but in your last livestream, you mentioned an article with a pretty solid ending talking about the shortcomings of the Anarcho-syndicalist movement in Latin America. What was the title of it? One of my friends is interested in the history of anarchism in Latin America
Online and social media does ENfranchise those who are traditionally disenfranchised in typical offline social contract formats. These enfranchised groups include introverts, ambiverts, neuro spicy, disabled, mixed-culture, mixed-racial, and poor, among others. And of course these groups are also heavily targeted and disenfranchised by the colonizers.
1:04 I.e. biometrics and, the mind... "memes, the dna of the soul" 2:29 condemning people for using medication that we got from colonialism AGES AGO, is a perfect example of how "they" colonise our minds. 5:04 Ex's, damn! 5:41 Establishing indeed
5:00 In games, it's simplified. Under capitalism (if you look from the capitalist's point of view), your job is to win the competitive race. What does your sustainability depend on? On having sovereignty in key areas. Sovereignties: resources, industry, science/technology, military, culture, human resources (ability to produce people). Just like a chain that breaks at its weakest link, so too with sovereignty, it is lost through its weakest component. No resources - it will have to buy, it will have to enter the financial system, it will be open to unequal exchange of value. You will have to give more than you gain. Weak industry - you will have to buy goods and give something for it. No science, education and technology - you'll fall behind in production or culture. No strong military - you will be physically crushed. “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” Clausewitz. No cultural hegemony - your opponents will explain to the citizens of your country that your government is evil and must be fought. Orange revolutions. Society does not give birth to children - you will have to attract migrants from poor countries, who will bring their culture with them and reduce labor productivity. Colonialism relied on physical force. Neocolonialism relies on financial instruments and culture. Why invade another country when you can simply exchange non-equivalently with the people of that country? You give me gold, I'll give you beads. Just like the conquistadors. As an example: that's why the yellow vests (Mouvement des Gilets jaunes) are fighting the franc cfa, through it the france is plundering African countries. What you call “Data Colonialism” is no different than neocolonialism. It's just that neocolonialism has a new tool in its arsenal. Profit extraction is still done through financial instruments and culture, big data only helps with that and will not replace financial instruments. So calling it date colonialism is too loud. And if we're not talking about the scale of one country, and not the relationship between different national capitals, then it's just capitalism. It is simply the result of the key characteristic of capitalism - monopolization.
There's a distinction alluded to here that I think is interesting. The problem we have, as outlined in this video, is data colonization for the benefit of the profit motive. Though there does exist a possible benefit of consensual data collection in a post capitalist society for the benefit of all people. You make the joke about targeted ads for probiotics, but if the profit motive were eliminated, then we might be able to trust and even be thankful for the recommendation. Like with most things, the thing itself isn't the issue, it's the corruption by capitalist and colonialist forces.
Next logical question is how to decouple data collection for benefit and data collection for exploitative profit. Been thinking about it for quite some time, and personally didn't find a solution yet.
@@MonochromeChromosome the answer is simple, anarchist revolution. Much harder to have a profit motive if we eliminate money. The more complicated question is how we achieve that.
as a white canadian, i am of three minds, and they all conflict. 1. I hate the tech and want to burn it down and live in the woods, im done. And it sucks for me and the enviroment and everything else. 2. but. RU-vid. Video games. Having my phone calander. Messaging. Like. I hate having all my info tracked but having my steps tracked does fight the accusationthat Im lazy cause I anxiously pace a LOT. 3. Watching Megaman NT warrior growing up, and... even though I have a smart phone, a smart watch, and other things... I NEVER want a smart oven or Fridge. Cause. Some idiot hacks your oven, your house burns down. And you need a little cartoon character to save yourself. Lol.
if we could have the nice things, like data, without being shitty people and beings to get it, I think it would make life easier for folks of all strides.
