Platform Imperialism

Discussion

Olivier Jutel:

"This article argues that blockchain represents a form of ‘platform imperialism’ (Jin, 2015) that extends both the cultural and economic power of Silicon Valley and American geopolitical interests. Blockchain has emerged as one of the central technologies of the ICT4D paradigm drawing together foreign governments, NGOs, platform developers and corporations in shaping developing world economic policy and governance practices. The US State Department has played a crucial role in coalescing these networks through initiatives such as Civil Society 2.0 which cast Silicon Valley platforms and a culture of techno-solutionism (Morozov, 2014) as universal. What is distinct about blockchain platform imperialism are its claims to algorithmic governance and powers of cartography. As part of ‘Data’s Empire’ (Isin and Ruppert, 2019), blockchain undermines the developing world state’s ability to control its own resources, while mapping new ‘territory as an object of power’ (208). Blockchain complements techno-colonial processes of data extraction and computational capitalism (Beller, 2018) by using code to lock in proprietary relations.

Opening new terrains of data and expanding network technologies does not depend upon imperial coercion but an assemblage of development agencies, foreign governments and platforms all ‘celebrat[ing] the transformative nature of ICTs’ (Ndemo, 2019: 27). Within these contours, there are rival cyber-powers and platforms as well as indeterminacies of connectivity which diffuse the exercise of imperial power. However the ‘spiritual hegemony of American-based entrepreneurship’ (Jin, 2015: 16) pervades these networks. The US has relied on the soaring rhetoric of freedom, democracy and empowerment through connectivity in shaping global communication systems. American hegemony in ICT4D can be explained in political-economic terms as the support of domestic capital and platforms, the leadership of governing bodies such as ICANN and the US State Department’s long-standing interest in tech-centric soft power initiatives. This continuity of soft power and cultural imperialism spans the ‘free flow of information doctrine’ (Schiller, 1975) during the Cold War to the ‘freedom to connect agenda’ (Powers and Jablonski, 2015: 74) in the era of network computing. As articulated by former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, connectivity is the ‘great leveller’ creating ‘a common body of knowledge that benefits and unites us all’ (US Department of State, 2010).

This cultural imperialist portrayal of the internet as a human-centred development tool is epitomized by the State Department’s launch of the ‘Civil Society 2.0’ initiative (US Department of State, 2019). This policy has been enacted through an on-going series of State Department workshops, hackathons and fora that operate under the banner of ‘Tech Camp’ with the aim to ‘[empower] civil society to solve the world’s most pressing challenges through technology’ (Tech Camp, 2019). As a champion of ICT, the State Department has promoted ‘the wider trend toward digital innovation and data practices in the humanitarian field’ (Madianou, 2019a: 582). Similarly, the emergence of the hackathon as a solutionist practice in the development sector represents the performative entrepreneurial style of Silicon Valley. It legitimizes existing platforms and offers participants an opportunity to ‘rehears[e] for future employment, partnerships, or investments’ (Irani, 2019: 225). The role of State Department programmes such as Tech Camp is to facilitate the private/public collaborations between platform developers, the NGO sector and the developing world state.

‘Platform Imperialism’ (Jin, 2015) is the material, economic and cultural power that is advanced by disavowing network geopolitics through humanitarianism. Platform Imperialism has allowed FAANG platforms to function as ‘beachheads’ (McChesney, 2013: 131) for American capital. It ensures the flow of data by monopolizing online advertising revenue, intellectual property rights and fees to Tier 1 ISPs. Leveraging a desire for development platforms are able to plan ‘infrastructure in the global south engineered for their own needs…while imposing privatized forms of governance’ (Kwet, 2019: 7).

Blockchain complements and extends existing techno-colonial practices of shaping social life for the extraction of data (Couldry and Mejias, 2019; Thatcher et al., 2016). This cultural and economic power enables digital platforms to ‘produce a new type of “social” for capital’ (Couldry and Mejias, 2019: 341). What is distinct about blockchain however are its pretensions to universality: a singular platform which mediates all data and the social world. Thus blockchain does not simply try to enter the fields of advertising, retail and cloud services but seeks to shape developing world governance systems for data production and platform dependence. It is in this way that blockchain creates a technological frontier with developing world resources as its prized objects.

Blockchain’s role within platform imperialism is in charting a ‘historical and planetary totality’ (Beller, 2018: 5) for computational capitalism. The mediation of all data via blockchain embodies the neoliberal premise of Friedreich Von Hayek that price signals, or in this case encrypted data, advance the prime social good of markets. This surpasses the e-commerce and advertising-based platforms of web 2.0 in incorporating private and public forms of governance. For blockchain developers, the governance systems of the developing world are a frontier ‘empty of other entrepreneurial ideas, histories and claims, but full of potential for new and improved use’ (Howson, 2020: 2). Thus biometric identification, land titles, resource management and cash-aid can all be integrated into this universal governance solution.

The vantage of American platforms and the state over this emerging cartography of control owes to the long-standing imperial vision of computation as the ‘underlying matter of everything in the social world [which can] be brought under state-capitalist military control’ (Golumbia, 2009: 60). While there are more than simply American platforms and agencies active in this space, Palantir is an example of a state-capital platform nexus which bring development agencies like the World Food Program into this orbit (Kintsler, 2019) through data and blockchain governance. Thus as blockchain claims a ‘technical agency separate from the messiness of society and the economy’ (Zook and Blankenship, 2018: 253), it reproduces these North-South asymmetries of power in mapping developing world societies for future exploitation."

(https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2053951720985249)