How do civil society actors, pushed to live in the margins of capitalism, appropriate and use digital technologies to advance their own strategic goals? This essay intends to advance an answer to this question by exploring some of the material and geographic – therefore socioecological – dimensions of information and communication practices and technologies enacted by marginalised actors in the Global South, as ICTs and development have become realms in which anti-colonial struggles project themselves into.
Communication practices and technologies are immersed in global(ising) financial, logistic, cultural, and communicative trends underpinned by quick technological change. Globalisation has done away with some planetary barriers while creating others, by making foot and gaining traction in progressively unregulated merchandized/monetized processes of exchange – which used to be social exchanges mediated by trust-building instead – as they are scaled up and relocated by private corporations. Global market logics have converged in private companies as the central actor of globalisation, with states becoming their outer-protective shell against social agents. In essence, the hegemonic discourse of globalisation has pushed a mental model in which singularity under Euro-American modernity is not only sought after but framed as inevitable (for recent examples on how this framing operates, see: Posada-Burbano 2022b). This is achieved by discounting the place-boundness of financial, technological, cultural, and communicative processes by locating their epicentres in the Global North.
Globalisation, then, overlaps with the modernisation/development project heralded by the Global North, which continues to be resisted by social movements from the Global South in the continuum of anti-colonial struggles that started more than 500 years ago (Fúnez-Flores 2022). As part of this struggles, rural and indigenous communities have, paradoxically, become rather successful in using to their own advantage (although with limitations) the same processes that have facilitated the most recent iteration of imperial expansion coming from the Global North, that of “digital colonialism” (Kwet 2021). This is an issue that has been amply discussed in academia, but that has not received due attention from practitioners, especially in the development industrial apparatus that keeps trying to co-opt the decolonial project to legitimise their hegemonic position as intermediaries of funding, knowledge and aid (Peace Direct 2021).
I argue that the use and integration of ICTs in development work follows the deeply entrenched epistemological patterns of the aid industry, namely colonialism and neoliberalism (Posada-Burbano 2022b). The use of ICTs in development work reproduces centre/periphery relations to consolidate the technological hegemony of the Global North. Despite the skewedness of the system in favour of those who control technology, organized efforts to bring digital technologies to marginalized localities are being led and enacted by precarised communities, such as peasants, indigenous peoples, and the urban poor, outside of the mechanisms and processes of the global aid industry.
This essay is divided in two sections. In the first one, I engage with Kwet’s (2021) concept of “digital colonialism” to problematise the twin notions of development and humanitarianism. I seek to articulate how the changes brought by digital technologies reinforce the power structures that support neoliberalism, under which the development industrial apparatus thrives in detriment of the marginalised populations it claims to be ‘saving’. In the second part, I explore responses from marginalised communities in Latin America to digital colonialism, through what has been called “community networks”. I discuss how these networks are used in engaging marginalised communities with global processes by promoting alternative conceptions and practices of development. Finally, I contend that, for these communities, being online in their own terms and from their own territories is a powerful act of contestation against the development industry and extractive capitalism.
Digital humanitarianism /digital colonialism
Broadly defined, humanitarianism “includes all activities which are undertaken to improve the human condition” (Kennedy and Maietta 2021:1). As Shringarpure (2020:178) proposes, humanitarianism “can be framed as an ideology and a practice.” In a way, as Hopgood (2013:26) states it, the professional practice of humanitarianism – along with those of human rights and international justice – has as its mission the protection of the “innocent,” where “innocence was [and still is] a quality, of existential goodness, purity, and blamelessness, that existed within individuals. It was [is] kind of a secularized soul” (author’s emphases). Hopgood continues to argue: “protecting innocence is a symbolic palliative (and distraction) from modernity’s dark side and a powerful alibi when the destruction, violence, and cruelty seem unending” (p. 29).
As its professionalisation consolidated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, humanitarianism had an active role in supporting the civilising mission of European powers in Africa and other latitudes, and then in mobilising public opinion for the abolition of the slave trade in the continent (see Gosse 2010, Olakanmi and Perry 2006, and Oldfield 1998; as cited by Shringapure 2020:178). Building upon these notions, I define humanitarianism as the overarching set of beliefs, values and attitudes that frame the moral and scientific impetus of the modern civilising mission, now repackaged as global development (Posada-Burbano 2022b), as the means and the existential goal for the whole of humanity, as understood from a Eurocentric perspective.
Continuing with the theoretical dialogue with Shringapure (2020), she argues that “new media, deployed through digital technologies (…) has brought about yet another paradigmatic and epistemic shift in the communication of solidarity” (p. 179). The author makes a crucial point in articulating this shift by evidencing how digital technology has opened the space for “new practices, discourses and debates in the field of humanitarianism.” By her account, digital technologies accentuate the divide between field workers and distant individual contributors, by making the conditions, events, and context safe for the distant ‘savior’, while also “[furthering] the distance between the savior and the saved by demanding that individuals click, like, tweet, share and donate” (p. 179).
The umbrella term used by Shringapure to describe this set of discourses and practices, as well as the “enormous network of professionals, for-profit an not-for-profit institutions, individual moral actors, and digital and technological initiatives” (Shringapure 2020:181) is “digital humanitarianism.” Interestingly, this notion overlaps and affords tangibility to Kwet’s (2021) concept of “digital colonialism.” Both digital humanitarianism and digital colonialism imply the existence of governance structures that are geographically ordered in processes of extraction, in which Global South denizens – often qualified as beneficiaries, victims, users and clients – are denied ownership over “the means of computation” (Kwet 2021), namely software, hardware and network connectivity, which remain controlled by Global North entities, such as private companies and governments.
In the case of the humanitarian industry, digital practices are deeply and comfortably embedded in the Western-dominated means of computation: “digital humanitarianism is practiced and popularized through large social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram or Facebook (…). These platforms are increasingly being modelled to support humanitarian projects” (Shringapure 2020:181).
Enacting autonomous community networks in Latin America
Kwet (2021) also argues that “digital colonialism has become highly integrated with conventional tools of capitalism and authoritarian governance”: by dominating the physical infrastructure, the platforms, and service provider companies, capitalistic and authoritarian practices are deployed to ensure the flows of data, knowledge and monetizable resources to Euro-American private entities. An additional layer of complexity should be addressed here: although access to digital technologies in the Global South has been granted to urban and peri-urban localities for data/knowledge extraction purposes, the exclusion of rural and forest communities from digital connectivity further cements their marginalization from global processes.
For instance, Prieto-Egido et al. (2022:417) suggest that “high complexity and costs of classical telecommunications infrastructures and urban-oriented business models” contribute to this connectivity gap. As Graham (2019:7) points out, “the thesis that remote and inaccessible economic positionalities hinder the economic development of a region has been an ongoing narrative”. This pervasive narrative seems to remain politically unaddressed, not only by governments and markets, but also by development/humanitarian actors, who keep looking at ICTs as a technical silver bullet for solving poverty and inequality globally, voided of political significance.
Along these lines, Graham (2019:2) rightly states that “without sustained and critical enquiry into how digital economies are being envisioned and enacted, as well as into the effects of digital economies in [peripheral] countries, it is difficult to move beyond [the] hype and hope” of ICTs. In sum, connectivity and access to digital technologies is a fundamental condition to address material, symbolic, and power asymmetries and inequalities. Denying, preventing, or avoiding the issue of access to digital technologies does provide the backdrop for inequalities to increase in the wake of today’s “knowledge and information society.”
A way to address this challenge, amplified both by government and market failures, has been the development of rural telecommunications infrastructures, or community networks. (González 2018; Prieto-Egido et al. 2022:418-419). An example at hand is the Zapotec village of Talea in Oaxaca, Mexico. After reiterative refusals from private communications providers to make available mobile phone and data services to the village, the community of Talea decided to set up their own network (González 2018:5). As with other demands in the past, such as the construction of a road and electrification, access to digital telecommunications technologies is just the last of Talea’s conquests in their efforts to be connected to the outside world.
As Campos-Navarrete and Zohar (2021:3) highlight, the interaction between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples “has frequently taken the form of a deep-seated ethic of cultural marginalization and domination of Indigenous perspectives that is not limited to, but includes, those that address issues of sustainable community development.” However, Talea’s community network challenges this notion while asserting communal and Indigenous autonomy. Gonzalez (2018:8) argues that “villagers have borrowed and appropriated new knowledge and technology largely on their own terms, harnessing it to maintain social and kinship networks across national borders.”
Furthermore, the challenge of setting up and sustaining an autonomous community network allowed for the development of new governance structures and organisative projects to deal with the growing complexity and costs associated with the development, operation, and maintenance of a community telecommunications network, given the challenges for a single actor “to take the whole responsibility of designing, deploying, and operating greenfield rural telecommunications infrastructures” (Prieto-Egido et al. 2022:418).
In 2011, and from Talea’s own initiative, contacts and partnerships were fostered with other Oaxacan towns, as well as with development practitioners and researchers. From this interactions, Rhizomatica, “an NGO dedicated to expanding mobile phone services in indigenous areas around the world” was founded (Gonzalez 2018:6), as well as the federative Indigenous Community Telecommunications Cooperative (TIC by its acronym in Spanish). The close collaboration between TIC as operator and Rhizomatica as technical/technology provider allowed for the community network to be fully functioning by 2013. By 2015, at least 19 different networks (one per community) were working in Oaxaca.
Importantly, the joint venture has opened space for a more horizontal engagement between Western and Indigenous worldviews, mediated by digital technologies. The strategic engagement of Talea with digital telecommunications technology seems to position itself in opposition to digital colonialism, as control of the means of computation have been (at least partially) appropriated by the Zapotec villagers. Perhaps a key aspect of TIC/Rhizomatica’s approach is that by organizing and securing ownership over physical community infrastructure, they can correct power imbalances while negotiating spectrum licensing with the Mexican government, and data/mobile service provision with private companies, for example.
Conclusion
This essay approached the question of how civil society actors, pushed to live in the margins of capitalism, appropriate and use digital technologies to advance their own strategic goals. To achieve this, I made use of the concepts of “digital humanitarianism” and “digital colonialism” to articulate how digital technologies – and particularly ICTs – and their instrumentalization by the development-humanitarian industry apparatus reinforce colonial power structures and narratives of helplessness of Global South actors, particularly non-urban communities. I explored material and geographic dimensions, which are oftentimes neglected by ICT4D practitioners engaging, as key components for the reordering of the relationships between Northern and Southern actors.
Crucially, any use of digital technologies relies on connecting places/communities through physical infrastructure to global telecommunications networks. The case of the Zapotec community in Oaxaca, Mexico, and their innovative approach to autonomous community networks serves to illustrate how more horizontal relationships can be established between marginalized communities and development-humanitarian actors. As argued in a recent blogpost, “a focus on needs, in detriment of dignity and rights, helps in perpetuating the current power dynamics of dependence of people in crisis from aid organizations” (Posada-Burbano 2022a).
The engagement between the Zapotec-owned TIC Cooperative and the NGO Rhizomatica demonstrates how opening space for non-hegemonic notions of development allow for successful engagement of marginalized communities with global processes and discussions about what development should be about: “strategies for sustainable development must always include, and normalize, local understandings and the Indigenous Knowledges supporting them while at the same time contextualize and continually question and surface Western interpretations of development and sustainability” (Campos-Navarrete and Zohar 2021:4). In the case of the Zapotec town of Talea, I contend, being online in their own terms and from their own territories is a powerful act of contestation against the development industry.
References
Campos-Navarrete, M., and Zohar, A. (2021). Rethinking sustainable development by following Indigenous approaches to community wellbeing. Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society, 4:1
Fúnez-Flores, J. I. (2022). Toward decolonial globalisation studies. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 1-21.
Gonzalez, R. J. (2018). Zapotec innovation in a Mexican village: Building an autonomous mobile network. Anthropology Today, 34(4), 5-8.
Graham, M. (2019) Chapter 1. Changing Connectivity and Digital Economies at Global Margins. In: Graham, M. (ed.). Digital Economies at Global Margins. Ottawa, ON/Boston, MA: IDRC/MIT Press.
Kwet, M. 2021: Digital colonialism: the evolution of American empire. ROAR, 3 March.
Peace Direct (2021). Time to Decolonize Aid. Insights and Lessons from a global consultation. London: Peace Direct.
Posada-Burbano, J. (2022a, October 5). Projects, Life-Hackers and the Future of Aid. Perplexed Periphery. Projects, life-hackers and the future of aid – Perplexed Periphery (mau.se)
Posada-Burbano, J. (2022b, October 26). The Garden and the Jungle. Perplexed Periphery. The Garden and the Jungle – Perplexed Periphery (mau.se)
Prieto-Egido, I., Simó-Reigadas, J., Castro-Barbero, E., & Tacas, R. Q. (2022). Expanding Rural Community Networks Through Partnerships with Key Actors. In International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (pp. 417-435). Springer, Cham.
Shringarpure, B. 2020: Africa and the Digital Savior Complex. Journal of African Cultural Studies, 32:2, 178-194.
Final Reflection
There is certain inertia in development organizations. An excess of action-oriented approaches and the tacit rejection of reflexivity and pause from the side of practitioners, compound with the mistrust they have of academics, that results in the continuous “rediscovery of the wheel”: by this I mean that the lack of engagement between practitioners with academia is symptomatic of the lack of reflection in the professional fields of development and humanitarianism.
Equally, both development practitioners and researchers have been unable to engage, in a non-subordinate way, with individuals, organizations and movements from the Global South. Effectiveness has been mistaken for expediency, and technical approaches have relegated ethics to Codes of Conduct and Safeguarding Policies, thus dehumanizing the way practitioners and researchers engage with everyday people. Some blame technology for this dehumanization of interpersonal relations. Personally, I think this is not true.
This class exercise – writing a blog – has been an extremely hard and taxing experience. Not only because the hours invested in writing, but also because reflexion requires so much concentration. It also requires dealing with so many potential outcomes and their ramifications. I can just think how much emotions can be elicited by reading and writing. But then the reach of my writing is not nearly as impactful as my everyday actions as a humanitarian practitioner/bureaucrat. In this sense, I am thankful for the opportunity to pour my thinking in writing a few blog entries. Not only it provided an opportunity to organize my ideas about very contested issues, but also exposed me to the thoughts and emotions of a larger group of people, each of one bringing a unique perspective to the wicked issues of poverty, inequality and precarity that concern the globe.
