““Anti-colonialism has been economically catastrophic for the Indian people for decades,” Andreessen wrote. “Why stop now?””
“The kerfuffle elicited a torrent of criticism for Andreessen, but the connection he made—between Facebook’s global expansion and colonialism—is nothing new.”
““I’m loath to toss around words like colonialism but it’s hard to ignore the family resemblances and recognizable DNA, to wit,” said Deepika Bahri, an English professor at Emory University who focuses on postcolonial studies.”
“In an email, Bahri summed up those similarities in list form:
-
ride in like the savior
-
bandy about words like equality, democracy, basic rights
-
mask the long-term profit motive (see 2 above)
-
justify the logic of partial dissemination as better than nothing
-
partner with local elites and vested interests
-
accuse the critics of ingratitude”
““I see the project as both colonialist and deceptive,” Ethan Zuckerman, the director of the MIT Center for Civil Media, told me. “It tries to solve a problem it doesn’t understand, but it doesn’t need to understand the problem because it already knows the solution. The solution conveniently helps lock in Facebook as the dominant platform for the future at a moment when growth in developed markets is slowing.””
“Facebook characterizes its intentions like this: Humans have a fundamental right to access the Internet. A platform that provides limited access is much better than nothing. Facebook isn’t motivated by business interests because the Free Basics version of the social network doesn’t even feature advertisements. And Facebook isn’t exerting undue control on people’s web experiences (or squelching other sites) because half the people who try Free Basics end up paying for full access to the web within a month anyway. As Zuckerberg put it in an op-ed for The Times of India in December: “Who could possibly be against this?””
“Free Basics makes Facebook a gatekeeper with too much leverage—so much that it conflicts with the foundational principles of the open web.”
“Well, here’s the other side of the argument: When mobile network operators allow some companies to offer access to their sites without charging people for data use, it gives those companies an unfair advantage.”
“All this raises a question about who Free Basics is actually for, which may further hint at Facebook’s motivations.”
“This entire narrative painting it as a choice between some connectivity and no connectivity is false and disingenuous.””
““There is absolutely no need to offer a condescending promise based on altruism to bring these folks online,” he added. “They will do so on their own time and at their own pace with or without any external help or artificial incentive.””
“Zuckerman, from M.I.T., is even more pointed: “When Zuckerberg or Andreessen face criticism, they argue that their critics are being elitist and inhumane—after all, who could be against helping India develop? The rhetoric is rich with the White Man’s Burden.””
“Some of the colonialist subtext in all this evokes what the writer Courtney Martin calls the “reductive seduction” of Americans wanting to save the world, and the hubris that underscores this kind of supposed problem solving. “There is real fallout when well-intentioned people attempt to solve problems without acknowledging the underlying complexity,” Martin wrote.”
“But web-based colonialism is not an abstraction. The online forces that shape a new kind of imperialism go beyond Facebook.”
“Consider, for example, digitization projects that focus primarily on English-language literature. If the web is meant to be humanity’s new Library of Alexandria, a living repository for all of humanity’s knowledge, this is a problem. So is the fact that the vast majority of Wikipedia pages are about a relatively tiny square of the planet.”
“For instance, 14 percent of the world’s population lives in Africa, but less than 3 percent of the world’s geotagged Wikipedia articles originate there, according to a 2014 Oxford Internet Institute report.”
““This uneven distribution of knowledge carries with it the danger of spatial solipsism for the people who live inside one of Wikipedia’s focal regions,” the researchers of that report wrote. “It also strongly underrepresents regions such as the Middle East and North Africa as well as Sub-Saharan Africa. In the global context of today’s digital knowledge economies, these digital absences are likely to have very material effects and consequences.””
“Consider, too, the dominant business models online. Companies commodify people as users, mining them for data and personally targeting them with advertising. “In digital capitalism—another stage of imperialism?—capital and corporation underwrite free-ness,” Bahri, the Emory professor, told me. “That’s why Facebook can claim to be always free.””
“Free Basics might be stoppable. But is Facebook?”
““Facebook became the de facto Internet for many people because it did the most profoundly useful thing the Internet can do: connect people.””