Ingo Dachwitz: Digital Colonialism – How Tech Companies and Major Powers Divide the World Among Themselves.

Description

Innovative, powerful, ruthless – few stories are told as often as that of the unstoppable rise of tech companies to the top of the globally networked world. Only one chapter is omitted: the price the Global South pays. In their book, tech journalist Ingo Dachwitz and globalization expert Sven Hilbig shed light on this blind spot, revealing the worldwide consequences of digital colonialism and existing approaches to a fairer digitalization.
One thing is certain: AI will not fix it.
The promise of the Digital Revolution is the salvation narrative of our time. This book tells a different story: that of digital colonialism. Instead of conquering physical land, today's colonial rulers are conquering digital space. Instead of gold and diamonds, they have people digging for raw materials under inhumane conditions – the raw materials we need for our smartphones. Instead of slaves, they employ armies of clickworkers who work for low wages in digital sweatshops to clean up social networks or supposedly keep artificial intelligence running.
Today's colonialism may present itself as clean and smart, but one thing remains the same: it exploits people and nature and disregards the local social consequences. In the competition between the new colonial powers, digital policy has long since become an instrument of geopolitical conflict – and the Global South is caught in the crossfire.

Ingo Dachwitz is a communications scholar and works as a political tech journalist for the award-winning investigative news outlet netzpolitik.org. His expertise on the ethics of digitalization has been sought by, among others, the German Federal Chancellery and the Evangelical Church in Germany in recent years. For his research on the global data industry, he received the Alternative Media Prize and the Grimme Online Award in 2024. Sven Hilbig is a legal scholar and an expert on digitalization and trade policy at the non-profit organization Bread for the World. Together with partners from the Global South, he is committed to combating new forms of colonialism. For years, he has been one of the few people in Germany involved in the World Trade Organization's process for a new agreement on digital trade. He publishes regularly in journals on German and international politics.

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