rich countries, they own the intellectual property, the means of computation, the cloud server farms,

and that system that they have in place, it benefits them. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Michael Quett.

Michael is a visiting fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, and he did his

PhD in Sociology at Rhodes University in South Africa.

He's written for a number of different publications, including The Intercept, Al Jazeera,

Motherboard, Wired, and others. In this episode, we discuss digital colonialism, the role that

the tech industry plays in entrenching the power of, you know, the United

States and the global north across the world. I would argue that this is an aspect of technology

that we don't see discussed so often. You know, technology and the internet in particular has had

these really positive narratives formed about it for several decades now. You know, in a

recent conversation with Dan Green, we talked about how these kind of narratives of access and

opportunity came out of the Clinton period and were associated with the internet at the very

time that Clinton and the U.S. government were cutting welfare and increasing the carceral state.

And just last week, I was talking to Olivier Jutel about blockchain imperialism and how there are

powerful groups associated with this technology who are using it in very exploitative and

extractive ways in the Pacific and the global South more broadly. So I think this colonial or

imperial dimension of technology needs more discussion. And that is why I wanted to have Michael

on the show to discuss what he's been writing about digital colonialism, in particular a piece

in Roar magazine that I will include a link to in the show notes. But we discuss how the

major U.S. tech companies entrench the power of the United States around the world because

everyone becomes dependent on these technologies and on these networks that are ultimately kind of

...