As I recounted this worry to a colleague, she introduced me to a phrase that had already been coined for the phenomenon: “data colonialism.” I discovered the work of scholars Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias, whose foundational text The Costs of Connection, published just that year, argued that Silicon Valley’s pervasive datafication of everything was leading to a return of disturbing historical patterns of conquest and extractivism.[*] The following year, a paper called “Decolonial AI” from Shakir Mohamed and William Isaac at DeepMind and Marie-Therese Png at the University of Oxford
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