The Techno-colonial Era

I have a complicated relationship with America.

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My great-grandfather emigrated there in the 19th century, marrying in New York and settling in Morristown, Tennessee. Yet, when my great-grandmother got sick while pregnant, they returned to the house in Gloucestershire where I now live and never returned.

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I too lived in the US for a time, and while I was a visa-holder for a number of years, I haven’t been back myself in a long time.

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Maybe one day I’ll return and might hope to live in the US again. There is much I love about the country. There is much that saddens me also. There is much I haven’t seen with my own eyes, and much of American culture that intrigues me that I have not yet experienced.

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When I think of America, the concept of ‘American-ness’ is interwoven with lots of other concepts.

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Firstly, (and with apologies to the native peoples) it’s a nation whose success has been created by the hands of an immigrant population. The American dream of arriving with just the clothes on your back and still yet achieving your dreams is as real today as it was in my great-grandfather’s time. But America’s future success is unlikely to be built by its new arrivals, and instead by those who already live there.

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I also think of America as a land of freedom – the idea that whoever you are and whoever you want to be, you are free to live your life as you choose. I know all forms of freedom aren’t equal, and also not all people get to enjoy all freedoms equally; but at the very least freedom of speech is so intertwined with the American ideal that this is the one freedom everyone who lives there enjoys.

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I also believe that America has taken the concept of democracy and made it their own – to the point perhaps that even the idea of democracy has itself become infused with the American interpretation of what that means. Of course, the American democratic process isn’t perfect – perhaps no democratic process can ever be – but the idea of democracy being a right that is fought hard for is, I believe, something that many Americans holds dear and will defend.

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This visceral adoption of democracy as being a sacred ideal could be the cause of why many Americans have in the past been driven towards exporting democracy to other peoples of the world who have not been able to establish it for themselves. Indeed, it’s this topic which has been the subject of much criticism directed to America over the years.

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But for all the criticism of America in this regard until now, at least it was the democratically elected powers that were responsible for exporting democracy and not, as soon might be the case, a single man in pursuit of his own self-enrichment – Mark Zuckerberg.

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When I watched Zuck’s video last week where he described the rolling back of content moderation on Meta’s platforms of Instagram and Facebook, I initially thought it was a very clever deepfake. I was impressed by the reflection of his hands on the wooden table and how realistic his new curly haircut seemed in the footage. But then it dawned on me that this was no AI trickery, and indeed Zuck is beginning the task of dismantling the governance that his organisation has painstakingly built over the last decade or so.

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I’ll write more about the substance of the changes in a later article, but for now I want to simply highlight how perverse the state of affairs is where a single (and unelected) individual can ultimately project their own personal views on nearly 40% of the entire world’s population.

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To be sure, the changes announced by Zuck are going to only (for now) apply to the US. But it’s just a matter of time before the roll-back of governance applies globally. Zuck talked about how ‘it feels like we’re in a new era now’ – presumably referring to the recent US presidential election, and how restrictions on topics like immigration and gender are ‘just out of touch with mainstream discourse’.

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Yes, the US has (re)elected a new (old) president – but does this mean that we’re all living in a new era? Whether we like it or not, it seems like we are indeed so – because Mark Zuckerberg has popped his own content bubble.

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We all know that Twitter has become a basket case platform over the last couple of years, and I think many of us thought that this was an isolated ‘blip’. But now Meta is following suit by taking less responsibility for the content on its platform, not more; it’s clear that the norms of the early 21st Century (or perhaps the entire neo-liberal era) are coming to an end.

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Zuck also talked in his video about how he plans to work with President Trump to ‘push back on governments around the world’. It’s clear what this means, and it scares me. What we’re entering is not a new neocolonial era like in the 1950s and 1960s when the combination of Hollywood and television syndication projected American culture around the world, but a technocolonial era where the American government, together with large tech platforms like Twitter and Facebook, project ideological concepts like freedom of speech on the rest of the world quite in apathy as to other countries' democratic norms.

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What is the answer to this? Well, I don’t believe there are many workable solutions other than to hope that our own politicians and institutions of state have sufficient resolve and backbone to stand-up for our own norms. But this feels like fighting nationalism with nationalism, and my worry with this? Well, as Mark Twain once said “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes’.

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I abandoned Facebook and Twitter many years ago as they no longer served my needs, and consequently LinkedIn is currently the only platform where I still post online. But what will Microsoft do in response? I’m sure I’m not alone in having observed the ‘enshittification’ of this platform, but aside from the flagrant self-promotional posts from many of its users, this is the only global platform to connect and enter into dialogue with professionals on professional topics.

Let’s hope that LinkedIn remains a place where people can be free to post and scroll free from bias, discrimination, or hate speech. Let’s hope this remains a platform where politics can stay out of our feeds and we can just get business done. But most of all, let’s hope that this new era that we are living in is one that we will be proud of creating for our children. On this last point, I'm fearful but remain hopeful.

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