# The Internet Will Be Decolonized
Bibliography
Philip, K. (2021). The Internet Will Be Decolonized. In T. S. Mullaney, B. Peters, M. Hicks, & K. Philip (Eds.), Your Computer Is on Fire (pp. 91–116). The MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/10993.003.0008
Notes
Notes
Go to annotation“How does the internet have anything to do with colonialism, and why do global campaigners seek to “decolonize” it (see fig. 4.1)?” (Philip, 2021, p. 91)
Most people online are from the global south, and half of it are women. But most content was developed and produced by white men.
The internet was and is structured by colonialism. Attempts to do better for the poorest and least connected often come from this perspective.
Go to annotation“There are many definitions of the internet, and that descriptive diversity reflects the many ways in which people experience the internet.” (Philip, 2021, p. 93)
All the different views on the internet come from different professions and field and enlist different people and publics.
The first maps of the internet drew “on visual discourses of identity and negated identity that echo those of the European maps of colonized and colonizable space of nearly a century ago.” (Philip, 2021, p. 95)
They were not accurate in how there was difference in connectivity and infrastructures. They ignored complex histories. This although cartography was already highly critical of being focused on nations.
Go to annotation“Borrowing the term “metageography” from Lewis and Wigen, Harpold coined the term “internet metageographies.” He demonstrated how a variety of 1990s’ internet maps obscured transnational historical complexities, reified certain kinds of political hegemony, and reinscribed colonial tropes in popular network narratives.” (Philip, 2021, p. 96)
This maps of the internet reproduced colonial stereotypes.
Tubes
It’s important to remember the materiality of the internet. Even if you can make fun of the internet “as a series of tubes”, it’s still made of stuff and chained together. At the end of the 20iest century, the virtuality of it all was the preferred image. Although comm. infrastructure looked like tubes for more than 150 years.
The same was true for issues of race and gender, or the meatspace in other words. Another shift like this happened in measuring work as something in the fields, to something mental.
Go to annotation“The promise of cyberspace in its most transcendent forms animated a range of Euro-American projects, from cyberpunk fiction to media studies. Virtuality was, of course, tied to cultures with robust infrastructures and high bandwidth.” (Philip, 2021, p. 100)
Neal Stephenson wrote about the undersea cables in 1996. Going against the grain of focusing on virtuality.
Go to annotation“Known for the deep historical research he puts into his fiction writing, Stephenson ironically emulates the stylistics of early modern explorers, describing experiences among “exotic peoples” and “strange dialects.” All the cable workers we see are men, but they are depicted along a familiar nineteenth-century axis of masculinity.” (Philip, 2021, p. 101)
Go to annotation“The representation of non-Western workers as caged or lazy, the structure of the world map that recalls telegraph and cable maps, and the gendered metaphors of exploration and penetration are familiar to historians of empire.” (Philip, 2021, p. 102)
In the years to follow, infrastructure studies became popular in tech studies, anthropology and media studies.
Go to annotation“neither Neal Stephenson’s deep dive to the Atlantic Ocean floor nor the rise of “infrastructure studies” yielded clean stories about matter untouched by politics. It seemed to be politics all the way down.” (Philip, 2021, p. 103)
After the 2000es and the dot-com boom, nations such as India, and other BRICS states, leapfroged their  developments and soon owned large parts of the global communication infrastructures. Brazil was soon to follow, after the NSA leaks in 2013. This brought a lot of skilled internet labour (sweatshops) to these countries but also a lot of expertise. And expertise which the western media couldn’t take up yet.
Go to annotation“By the 2010s, the “material infrastructure” versus “virtual superstructure” split was morphing into debates over “rote/automatable tasks” versus “creative thinking.”” (Philip, 2021, p. 105)
This was for example displayed in a book by Daniel Pink, in which he calls for outsourcing of boring stuff to Asian, while keeping the interesting and creative work in the US.
Alt. Materialities
Go to annotation“In an ethnographic study of the internet that uncovers rather different human and technical figures from Neal Stephenson’s travelogue, engineer/informatics scholar Ashwin Jacob Mathew finds that the internet is kept alive by a variety of social and technical relationships, built on a foundation of trust and technique.” (Philip, 2021, p. 106)
Go to annotation“Infrastructures, Mathew reminds us, are relations, not things.” (Philip, 2021, p. 106)
The Opte Project tries similary, to produce different maps of the internet. Such that shows the complexity and messiness of the internet.
Go to annotation“The ability to display massive data sets to viewers fundamentally alters the historical and geographical picture brought by designers to the general public. Lyon’s visualizations retain maximalist forms of route data, incorporating data dumps from the Border Gateway Protocol, which he calls “the Internet’s true routing table.”” (Philip, 2021, p. 107)
Another project, Alpha60, maps “piracy” and could show, that piracy happens first and foremost in Go to annotation“concentrations of a “global tech elite.” (Philip, 2021, p. 109) and not in the global south, as popular assumptions would make us believe.
Go to annotation“The internet itself was not one thing in the 1990s. Its shift away from a defense and research backbone toward a public resource via the development of the World Wide Web is a military-corporate history that explains some of the confusion among media narratives. And technological freedom did not bring freedom from history and politics. The internet looks like a pipe in many places, but it moves along a radically branching structure and it is powered by human labor at all its exchange points. In the 1990s, internet narratives gave us a picture of a pipe constructed from colonial resources and bolstered by imperialist rhetoric, but, in more recent research, it appears to be uneven, radically branched, and maintained by a world of diverse people.” (Philip, 2021, p. 109)
We need to acknowledge the political dimension of the internet.