Digital Bandung

Digital Bandung

Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mehmed IV of the Ottoman Empire, a painting by Ilya Repin, 1891. © Pierce Archive/Getty

Quinn Slobodian

May 14, 2026 | The Ideas Letter 64

In recent years, it has become common—even unavoidable—to refer to the internet, AI, and digital capitalism in terms of empire and colonialism. A partial list of recent high-profile books that use the language includes Empire of AI (2025) by Karen Hao, Silicon Empires (2025) by Nick Srnicek, The New Empire of AI (2025) by Rachel Adams, Digital Empires (2023) by Anu Bradford, and Cloud Empires (2022) by Vili Lehdonvirta. These join influential work by Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias in their paired books, The Costs of Connection (2019) and Data Grab (2023), and their 2018 article, “Data Colonialism,” which has over 2,000 citations on Google Scholar (note for non-academics: this is a lot). Honorable mention goes to an article on “digital colonialism" by the South African scholar Michael Kwet, which tops 1,000 citations. Hardly a week goes by without a think piece with a title like “Big Tech is Building Empires,” as the economist Grace Blakeley wrote recently, or “AI is in its empire era,” as the STS scholar Kate Crawford posted last year.

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The turn to empire is notable first for displacing a previously preferred language of mind control. After Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013 about Silicon Valley’s complicity in mass surveillance triggered the first phase of the so-called techlash, critics gravitated to language of behaviorism and anxieties about brainwashing from the mid-twentieth century. Our internet-connected phones and laptops had put us in Skinner boxes; we were the pigeons pecking at the pellets according to a pattern—at the mercy of “attention merchants” in “the shallows.” “The technology that connects us also controls us,” read the tagline for the influential Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma. Shoshana Zuboff—who had taken classes with B.F. Skinner himself as a youngster at Harvard—warned in her 2019 bestseller The Age of Surveillance Capitalism that Silicon Valley now had “the instruments and methods that can impose Skinner’s technology of behavior across the varied domains of everyday life right down to our depths.”

The shift from psychology to political geography is a good one. It centers questions of power and authority alongside issues of land and energy. The reliance of citizens, states, and pension funds on the financial fates of a small number of US tech companies is a startling development of the recent past. It is sensible to search for a term proportionate to our astonishment—empire talk is a rhetoric of shock.

Yet invocations of empire and colonialism also risk being trapped in the register of polemic rather than analysis. As with the category of “techno-feudalism” effectively critiqued by Evgeny Morozov, it is not always clarifying to explain something new with reference to something old—especially if doing so relies on a two-dimensional view of the past. Actual scholarship teaches us that using the word “empire” as a straightforward synonym for a systematic, centralized, and overwhelming form of rule can be precisely wrong. Turning to the literature on empires for more applicable insights can help sharpen our understanding, our language, and thus, our critique. In what follows, I first suggest some of the shortcomings of the current usage of the category of empire and propose three other terms that have been ignored or underplayed in the scholarship on data colonialism: the comprador, the creole, and counter-colonization.

The Empire of the Megacorp

In the classic definition, an empire is a large expansionist polity comprising diverse populations ruled through a politics of difference, hierarchy, and nested sovereignty. Most historians consider it an extinct form. Its death knell came at the end of World War II, as a new norm of national self-determination was championed by the world’s two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, and institutionalized in the United Nations. One by one, and sometimes in bunches—sometimes by peaceful negotiation and at other times through bloody conflict—those parts of the world governed by European imperial powers found their own colors and their own names, their own flags and their own seats in the UN General Assembly. (The seventeen islands and archipelagoes that remain “non-self-governing territories” are the exception that proves the rule.)

To many, however, the apparent end of empire hid a paradox. The very nation that posed as an advocate for a world of nations turned into an empire of its own. This sparked an ongoing debate about whether the US remained an empire even after the “greater United States” that stretched from the Philippines to Cuba was whittled down to Puerto Rico and scattered Pacific atolls. Does empire have to...