Uneven datafication

Abstract

This article develops the concept of uneven datafication, drawing on literature on coloniality, uneven development and dependency theory. Uneven datafication refers to uneven development in the contemporary political economy of data, showing how global cycles of differentiation and totalisation perpetuate inequality to sustain capitalist structures. Datafication is neither homogeneous nor universal, but marked by colonial continuities, spatial differentiation and temporal unevenness. Uneven datafication operates through three interrelated dynamics. First, territorialisation, deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation produce uneven geographies of digital colonial capitalism, from datafied bodies to platform infrastructures and space-based data centres. Second, dispossession enacts spatial, temporal and dehumanising violence, ranking populations as more or less valuable and enforcing biopower ‘within’ and necropower ‘beyond’. Third, unequal exchange sustains asymmetrical valuation and circulation of data and data labour, enabling Big Tech and core economies to extract surplus value from peripheral regions. Uneven datafication thus sustains colonial capitalist accumulation through differentiated dispossession and dependency across populations, spaces and classes.

Introduction

‘The algorithm Congo Inc. had been created at the moment that Africa was being chopped up in Berlin between November 1884 and February 1885. Under Leopold II's sharecropping, they had hastily developed it so they could supply the whole world with rubber from the equator, without which the industrial era wouldn’t have expanded as rapidly as it needed to at the time. […] The final point had come with the concept of putting the uranium of Shinkolobwe at the disposal of the United States of America, which destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki once and for all, launching the theory of nuclear deterrence at the same time, and for all time. […] During the so-called Cold War, the algorithm had remained red-hot. The fuel that guaranteed proper functioning could also be made up of men. […] Disposable humans could also participate in the dirty work and in coups d’état. […] Congo Inc. more recently had been appointed as the accredited supplier of internationalism, responsible for the delivery of strategic minerals for the conquest of space, the manufacturing of sophisticated armaments, the oil industry and the production of high-tech telecommunications material’. (Bofane, 2018: 174–5)

In Congo Inc.: Bismarck's Testament, Bofane satirically compares Congo to an algorithm invented by colonisers to power wars, increase industrial profit and extract materials and human lives and skills from the country. Colonialism is portrayed ironically as a technology of power; a formula to keep things uneven despite the changing political background. While the role of digital technologies in general, and datafication in particular, in reshaping capitalism has sparked considerable scholarly debate, few have integrated the enduring colonial algorithm into their frameworks. Accounts of capitalism's transformation through datafication diverge considerably: some have focused on the emergence of a novel class antagonism that pits those who control digital infrastructures and major technology firms against a burgeoning class of hackers and information workers (Wark, 2009) or digital serfs within rentier-based digital economies of technofeudalism (Dean, 2024; Durand, 2024; Varoufakis, 2023). In another strand of thought, scholars have focused on the monetisation of everyday activities, and the emerging forms of labour, such as ‘free labour’ (Terranova, 2004), ‘immaterial labour 2.0’ (Coté and Pybus, 2007) and ‘informational labour’ (Fuchs, 2011). Similarly, cognitive capitalism (Moulier-Boutang, 2011) describes a shift in value creation from physical labour to knowledge, information and intellectual property. Other scholars have highlighted ubiquitous computing and the global scope of digital capitalism (Bratton, 2016; Schiller, 1999) with platformisation, and its outcomes such as surveillance and dataveillance, transforming the function and scope of economic and political spheres (Lehdonvirta, 2022; Srnicek, 2016; van Dijck, 2014; Zuboff, 2019).

Others have focused on the subject of capitalist exploitation, such as the commodification of human life through data (Couldry and Mejias, 2019b), in all its aspects, even sleep (Crary, 2013). The logic of accumulation has also been conceptualised as opening the human desire and psyche to capitalism. Although he later denounced the book, in Libidinal Economy (1974), Jean-François Lyotard was one of the first to investigate the ways capitalist economic relations expand to human desires. This focus on the psyche, desire and emotions has continued in the work of subsequent scholars. For example, Illouz (2007) shows how emotional capitalism intensifies intimacies and emotions to profit from them and posits the emotional and the economic in a mutual relationship where they reciprocally shape each other. Feelings and affective orientations have become central to the formation of political affiliations and divisions, especially in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crash (Anderson and Secor, 2025). In Psychopolitics (2015), Byung-Chul Han transcends the Foucauldian biopower concept to introduce psychopower as a new technology of power. He argues that neoliberalism uses surveillance and monetisation of Big Data to turn human beings and their desires and feelings to commodity. In a similar fashion, limbic capitalism (Courtwright, 2019) focuses on how addiction to technology is fuelling consumption and tech firms profit from shaping our habits and behaviour. However, as Revi (2025) argues, manipulating desire and addiction is not new in colonial history, when one looks at the centuries of wars and oppression for sugar, coffee, opium and spices.

The literature on capitalist transformations is rich and extensive, and this article, in its limited scope, recognises elements of truth in all these accounts. However, the article critically demonstrates that, despite the validity of aspects of such diagnoses, most scholars theorise predominantly from a Western perspective, thereby constructing universal narratives that lack historicity and a differentiated treatment of the political economy of data. As a result, they neglect to integrate ongoing marginalising procedures and colonial continuities of the present in their analysis. To address this, I draw on three bodies of work on coloniality, uneven development and dependency theories to offer uneven datafication as a theory of political economy of digital colonial capitalism. I argue that uneven datafication should be understood as a manifestation of uneven development within the contemporary political economy of data, illustrating how global cycles of internal differentiation and totalisation perpetuate unevenness to sustain capitalist structures. This captures how datafication is not a homogeneous, universal condition but one marked by deep colonial continuities, spatial differentiation and temporal unevenness.

The article builds on multiple literatures to highlight the colonial continuities and the persistence of extractivist and epistemically violent relations rooted in imperial and colonial histories. It shows how these relations of coloniality have been transposed into digital infrastructures and knowledge production. Part 1 introduces and addresses some of the shortcomings of literature on digital colonialism. Part 2 conceptualises uneven datafication and the production of unevenness in digital colonial capitalism through three interrelated notions:

Territorialisation, de-territorialisation and re-territorialisation: the production of uneven geographies of data colonial capitalism, ranging from the occupation and instrumentalisation of corporeal space as both data source and infrastructure, to the extension of data centres into colonialised outer space.

Dispossession: the transformation of human life into raw material for data extraction, in ways that not only commodify but also redefine subjectivity, ranking certain lives as less human than others.

Unequal exchange: the asymmetrical valuation and circulation of data and data work, whereby monopolistic control over infrastructures, technologies and knowledge enables core economies and Big Tech to extract surplus value from peripheral populations.

In short, uneven datafication designates the way ubiquitous datafication reproduces and intensifies global unevenness, sustaining colonial capitalist accumulation through differentiated forms of dispossession and dependency across classes, populations and geographies. Part 3 concludes with some thoughts on international political economic competition and the possibilities and limits of ‘other’ technologies and forms of resistance.

Throughout this article, I will use the term ‘digital colonial capitalism’ to highlight three overlapping issues: the advent of technological transformation and an era of internet, datafication, AI and other digital technologies, the ongoing forms of capitalism and capitalist accumulation as well as the persisting coloniality of economic, social, cultural and political relations. The argument I develop makes clear how and why these three are interrelated and cannot be analytically separated when thinking about today's global political economy. In constructing a more nuanced and differentiated account of datafication, it is also essential to reflect on the position of Western intellectuals as ‘the custodian of the totality […] evad[ing] the question of their own class location and the extent to which it may be shared with others whose immediate labor processes are otherwise quite different’ (Wark, 2019: 254). There is a diverse range of data political economies, such as China's centralised digital governance, and data communism (Aho, 2024), India's successful public-private digital partnerships (Samdub, 2025), the techno-nationalism of Dubai and Turkey, as well as the experiences of numerous other countries that simultaneously engage with and challenge North American and European datafication models. Incorporating such diversity in one universalising narrative (Milan and Treré, 2019) would be inadequate in addressing the complexities of global computation. These limitations also apply to making sense of colonialism(s) and the diversity of colonial histories and experiences. The intersecting issues of coloniality, capitalism and datafication have been studied across diverse disciplines. Although this article adopts an interdisciplinary and intersectional lens, it does not claim universality or comprehensiveness. As Chan argues based on her analysis from the assumed margin of this datafied world through a case study of Peru, ‘digital universalism appears to have done what older universal projects have been unable to today – to convince ever broader audiences of its incontrovertible, self-evident, and universally shared necessity’ (2013: 19). Rather than treating technology as a ‘multifunctional, universally common solution for all users’ (Chan, 2013: 178), it is vital to emphasise historicity, plural temporalities, epistemic violence and coloniality in analyses of datafication.

A brave ‘new’ world?

The scope and profundity of digital transformation have become increasingly obvious through the datafication of sectors such as healthcare, education, finance and numerous others. Technology, digital communication and technology-driven consumer cyclical companies now rank as the most profitable enterprises, even surpassing the once-dominant oil and gas conglomerates. In Table 1, I have consolidated the top ten companies based on their market capitalisation in billions of dollars since 1989 to illustrate this sectoral shift. Rather than focusing on revenue, I have opted to employ market capitalisation – the value of a company's outstanding shares – as a metric, as it more effectively captures the perception of success and the prevailing hype surrounding a corporation. In addition to the visible technological exuberance, it is significant to note that the volume of market capitalisation has also experienced exponential growth: Apple's market capitalisation in 2025 is nearly 57 times greater than that of Exxon Mobil in 1989. However, the technological shifts under examination extend beyond mere financial gains: digital communication, social media, platform-based services, and, more broadly, the datafication of all facets of human existence are reshaping the very fabric of our societies, influencing individual lives and altering our visions of potential futures.

Table 1.

Market cap of top ten S&P 500 companies in billion USD between 1989-20252⁷.

Theorising this shift is far more complex than other historical turning points in the global economy: data fundamentally differs from traditional commodities subject to exchange. In an earlier article (Akbari, 2020), I identified several challenges in conceptualising data within conventional economic frameworks: its inherent difficulty in being standardised as a unit of measurement, its non-rivalrous nature permitting simultaneous usage by multiple actors and the complexities surrounding its ownership, which may be either shared or obscured. Moreover, data defies fungibility, as its constituent units are not interchangeable in the way other commodities are. I further contended that the commodity form of data, its meaning and its capacity to alter the networked relationalities within which it exists are fluid and contingent upon the context and specific network in which it is situated. In a similar vein, Sadowski argues that while data capital is aligned with the logic of capital accumulation, it exhibits characteristics akin to social or cultural capital, representing a ‘distinct form of capital’ which only in certain conditions is convertible to economic capital (Sadowski, 2019: 4). Wark (2019: 71) advances this discussion by positing that ‘information acts as a force of production’, which simultaneously generates particular relations of production while being shaped by those very relations. Collectively, these perspectives suggest a profound shift in the nature of value: the issue is not solely the commodification of data, but rather how data serves as both the means and the end of a new, emergent value production system.

However, some of the innovative and novel characteristics of the emergent value production system should not divert our attention from continuities within capitalism. The convergence of economic and cognitive power means that we are ‘entering the age not so much of a new capitalism as of a new interlocking of capitalism's and colonialism's twinned histories, […where] the interlocking force is data’ (Couldry and Mejias, 2019b: xiii). In common with many other accounts, data colonialism identifies several key features of the contemporary data-driven political economy: extractivism through datafication; the reconfiguration of socio-political structures; the expansion of digital infrastructures to sustain these extractivist practices; the emergence of new elites who control and profit from these dynamics; and the injustices exacerbated or perpetuated by these relations. Most strikingly, Couldry and Mejias’ (2023: 788) claim that Big Data practices represent a new stage in colonialism due to two primary factors: first, the neo-colonial legacies that expand data markets to developing countries; and second, ‘the extraction of value through data represents a new form of resource appropriation on a par with the landgrab’. Mejias and Couldry (2024) conceptualise data as a raw material that is effectively ‘up for grabs’, arguing that its appropriation follows logic analogous to the exploitation of nature in capitalist economies. In this account, platforms produce ‘a form of “social” that is ready for appropriation and exploitation for value as data’ (Couldry and Mejias, 2019a: 4). They further contend that the language of ‘terra nullius’, historically used to describe land deemed vacant or available for colonial appropriation, now applies to the extraction of data (Couldry and Mejias, 2019a: 5).

Although extractive logic was an important feature of colonialism, colonial political economies were far more complex than just extraction. Other scholars have further explored dimensions of data colonialism that remain underexplored within Couldry and Mejias’ more universalist framework. Madianou (2019), for example, explores techno-colonial power relations in the humanitarian aid sector and refugee management. While the epistemic violence embedded within data colonialism has been acknowledged in the conceptualisation of the phenomenon (Couldry and Mejias, 2023: 794), later works have built on and historicised this critique. Gray (2023: 7) interrogates ‘the interaction of orders of knowledge with orders of value’ in the ‘colonial present’, while Ricaurte (2019: 2) critiques the ‘data-driven rationality […] supported by infrastructures of knowledge production developed by states, corporations and research centres situated mainly in Western countries’ and their epistemic violence. Uneven datafication builds upon and expands these debates around data colonialism while conceptualising the more complex ways colonial capitalism translates into processes of datafication.

Conceptualising uneven datafication

In December 2025, the U.S. Department of State introduced ‘Pax Silica ¹ ’, a diplomatic initiative aimed at bringing together a coalition of nations to create a ‘new economic paradigm’. According to the State Department, Pax Silica is ‘American AI diplomacy at its best: building coalitions, shaping markets, and advancing our national interests’. Similar to Pax Americana and Pax Romana, ‘Pax Silica’ refers to a world order based on power projection but instead of the power of an imperial state, this new order is portrayed as founded on silicon, a core material in the computer chips that power artificial intelligence. Considering that China controls around 90% of the world's rare earth elements ² , which are vital for producing chips used in smartphones and AI systems, it is no wonder that the initiative seeks a ‘new economic order’. Pax Silica is the most recent step in a rapidly changing world order that many had speculated in the last decades: a computing revolution as a new era of technological and financial transformation (Perez, 2002), the rise of network society (Castells, 1996), the diminishing state in the face of virtual communities (Rheingold, 1993) and blossoming of democracy through liberation technologies – a pseudo name for social media (Diamond, 2010). This article does not ponder the veracity of these speculations, rather it reflects on the fact that such transformations do not occur in a vacuum and carry the legacies of past orders. Before we set out to explain the relationships between things, we should first ask where they are situated, who placed them there and how this particular order came into being.

Historicising and situating a problem is a project of decoloniality because, firstly, it engages with coloniality as that which survives colonialism (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2015) and still defines inequality, discrimination and unevenness; secondly, it highlights how the ‘coloniality of power’ (Quijano, 2024) sustains certain ways of producing knowledge and ordering the social; and thirdly, it is an a call to action for ‘epistemic subversion’ (Quijano, 2024: 387), a project of seeing, reading and analysing from the margin (Akbari, 2020; Casilli, 2017; Milan and Treré, 2019). Such an approach builds on previous waves of thinking about digital technology and computation as described by Amrute and Murillo (2020): the ‘developmental’ strand focuses on nationalist IT policymaking through state-supported innovation policies, whereas the post-colonial approach criticises the modernisation undertone of developmental projects and refutes a paradigm of catching up with the developed world. Post-colonial approaches question the undisputed attribution of technology to developed countries and underline the alternative technological advances in the Majority World. However, decolonial perspectives centre ‘Black and Indigenous technological histories’ in addressing the question of computing cultures (Amrute and Murillo, 2020: 7). The decolonial project, therefore, not only questions computation as a colonial phenomenon (Ali, 2016; Irani et al., 2010) and describes digital spaces as sites of digital-territorial coloniality (Mohamed et al., 2020: 665) but also reclaims control, as manifested in Feminist Data Manifest-No: ‘We commit to taking back control over the ways we behave, live, and engage with data and its technologies ³ ’. Other initiatives such as ‘A Primer on AI in/from the Majority World’ ⁴ showcase a collection of over 160 thematic works that ‘reframes current understandings of AI and data-centric technology from a majority world perspective’.

Furthermore, decolonialising efforts highlight the positionalities of people who do computing and the effects of such positionalities on produced knowledges (Ali, 2016: 20) as well as global infrastructures that make the power of coloniality sustainable (Aouragh and Chakravartty, 2016). They use the ‘south’ as a method bringing together all its facets as a ‘historic block, an epistemic formation, a political compass and, a poetics of relation’ (Amrute and Murillo, 2020: 2). By doing so, these efforts show the uneven distribution of knowledge and the bases of innovation and the way knowledge is supposed to move from ‘centers of power […] to places where it is lacking’ (Dourish and Mainwaring, 2012: 134). However, they also demonstrate how a belief in universality underlies such notions, where there seems to be ‘a commitment to reductive representation and hence to quantification and statistical accounts of the world as a tool for comparison, evaluation, understanding, and prediction’ (ibid.). Moreover, the ‘colonial impulses’ (ibid.) of ubiquitous computing position the developed world as the endpoint of civilisation, with everybody else destined to catch up and become part of it.

This article is also a decolonialisation effort built on the wealth of knowledge already produced through the aforementioned projects. It recognises the importance of historicisation and situatedness, epistemically and ontologically, to reflect on the political economy of digital colonial capitalism. I focus on three dimensions of digital colonial capitalism that explain the centrality of unevenness to this system: 1) procedures of territorialisation, re-territorialisation and de-territorialisation, 2) processes of appropriation, the dehumanisation of the colonised and dispossession as a tactic and strategy, and 3) unequal exchange as an essential part of the political economy of digital colonial capitalism. These aspects were defining features of past colonial relations and, I argue, remain central to contemporary digital colonial capitalism.

Territorialisation, re-territorialisation and de-territorialisation

In order to reflect on the geographical dimensions of digital colonial capitalism, that is, its geopolitics, political economy and dependency patterns, this article expands its conceptual horizons beyond extractivist logics of colonialism that has been the focus of theories of data colonialism, which I introduced in Part 1. This contrasts with interpretations that reduce the portability of mobile devices and internet access to a mere ‘dimension that overlays social space continuously’ (Couldry and Mejias, 2019b: 20). In this interpretation, outward geographical expansion is understood as characteristic of historical colonialism, while modern data colonialism is seen as a form of inward appropriation, focusing on the colonisation of human life itself (Couldry and Mejias, 2019b: 4; Thatcher et al., 2016: 9). Territorialisation, re-territorialisation and de-territorialisation were defining features of past colonial relations. Venn (2009: 216) defines territorialisation as the ‘formation of the post-Westphalian nation-state and the apparatus of “police”’, delineates de-territorialisation as the function of ‘global networks of markets and exchange through which circulation of goods, money, people, wealth was managed and then intensified prior to the emergence of liberal capitalism’ and conceptualises re-territorialisation of ‘lands, frontiers, populations, products, etc.’ as a feature of ‘colonial conquests and occupation’. These aspects, I argue, remain pertinent to contemporary data colonialism. For that reason, the article problematises the assumed expiration of outward expansion and the novelty of inward appropriation. Consequently, it engages with geographical scholarship to draw similarities between the relations of nature to capitalism and data to digital colonial capitalism.

Smith ⁵ (1984: 11) argued that nature is typically conceptualised through a dualism: it is either seen as external to human society, thus open to exploitation, or as universal, encompassing both human and non-human elements. This dualism is equally pertinent in understanding data as both a resource to be captured and a naturalised feature of contemporary capitalist economies. On the one hand, data exists ‘out there’, awaiting extraction; on the other hand, the processes of datafication are framed as ‘natural’, to the extent that resistance to them is depicted as ‘un-natural’. This narrative aligns with Silicon Valley's portrayal of datafication as a self-evident, inevitable evolution (see, Cheney-Lippold, 2025; van Dijck, 2014). However, alternative narratives challenge this worldview, drawing from frameworks such as Ubuntu-centred African relational moral theory (Ugar, 2024), Indigenous Data Sovereignty ⁶ (Taylor and Kukutai, 2016) or Volunteered Geographic Information in informal urban settlements (Hachmann et al., 2018). These counter-imaginaries resist the universalist conception of datafication and offer more situated and differentiated understandings of the political economy of data.

In addition to the production of nature, Smith's (1984) seminal work on spatial differentiation and uneven development illuminates the structural unevenness of capitalist development, which is not merely an incidental feature but a reflection of the inherent contradictions within ‘constitution and structure of capital’ (Smith, 1984: 4). Smith argues that the geographical expansion is not the sole function of the capitalist economy; rather, it is the ‘internal differentiation of world space’ that makes the spatial dimension so crucial (Smith, 1984: 121). He underlines the contradiction inherent in capitalist systems to concurrently differentiate and universalise (Smith, 1984: 122). In his view, the outcome of such a contradictory dynamic is uneven development (ibid.). Datafication technology has a similar function: it promises a transcendental cyberspace free of geographical boundaries, while simultaneously fixing individuals within their bodies and specific territorial contexts, for example, through surveillance technologies. This paradox is most apparent in the conditions of those subjected to the extreme forms of datafication, where they are dispossessed of their lives, bodies, homes, social connections and human status – such as refugees receiving humanitarian aid in an increasingly datafied aid environment (see, i.e., Martin, 2025).

Datafication combines the geographical, colonial and the capitalistic: The production of unevenness in digital colonial capitalism is based on colonial procedures of territorialisation, re-territorialisation and de-territorialisation. The rising trend of using digital technologies alongside brute force in the United States and the European Union to enforce strict migration and anti-refugee policies is an ongoing example of the territorialising function of digital colonial capitalism. ImmigrationOS, a system under development by Palantir, a technology company founded with early support from the CIA, applies artificial intelligence and data-analysis tools to detect, monitor and assist in the deportation of people suspected of being noncitizens ⁷ . Such systems are accompanied by a network of surveillance infrastructure policing the borders of belonging to the Western civilisation. Similarly, the recent rhetoric of the Trump administration, entailing proposals to purchase Greenland, annex Canada, turn Gaza to the Middle East's riviera and seize control of the Panama Canal (Hernandez, 2025), provides a clear indication that geographical expansion is ongoing and territorialisation practices do not belong to the past.

In Crack-up Capitalism, Slobodian (2023) elaborates on how the creation of free trade zones and the implementation of zoning practices in jurisdictions with weaker regulatory frameworks have been central to the agenda of neoliberal globalists. While ‘globalists’ (Slobodian, 2018) aim to de-territorialise global markets and flow of goods, data and capital, they re-territorialise pockets of land as special economic zones. Many of these zones, which often promote themselves as platform cities or startup cities, are aligned with the libertarian exit ideology or offer a deregulated oasis in authoritarian countries. Once dismissed as marginal or exceptional, these enclaves have become increasingly prominent, particularly in light of the speed and scope of deregulation under the Trump administration. The fervour of exit libertarians (see, Lynch and Muñoz-Viso, 2024), who advocate for accelerating global deregulation, is evident in these initiatives. It is no co-incidence that the PayPal Mafia ⁸ through its Praxis network state, is planning to establish its first city in Greenland as part of a broader agenda to ‘reclaim the West’ (Wood, 2025). Other re-territorialising projects such as Próspera ⁹ , a ‘startup city’ in Honduras and Neom ¹⁰ , a ‘cognitive city’ in Saudi Arabia, build their high-tech urban dream by evacuating indigenous communities and rebranding their land as new territory for futuristic progress.

The re-territorialising imperative does not remain limited to urban spaces or economic zones with clear infrastructural advantage. The spaces of human bodies have become a territorialisation project in digital colonial capitalism. I have demonstrated how code/body becomes a co-constructed space – one in which the physical body is simultaneously concretised and abstracted, thus transforming it into a key element of digital infrastructure (Akbari, 2025b). Building on the example of refugees who are compelled to utilise UNHCR's iris-scanning technology for access to essential aid, I show how certain bodies become a site of uneven datafication. Such a body could be transformed into a border, exemplified by the use of body warmth and heartbeat detection at surveilled borders ¹¹ , or function as a digital passport, as seen in Worldcoin, a cryptocurrency project involving iris scans led by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman ¹² . These examples starkly illustrate how re-territorialisation materialises unevenly, with the most marginalised groups often extremely datafied without consent.

The underlayer of the code/body is an ontopology of body, ‘an axiomatics linking indissociably the ontological value of present-being [on] to its situation, to the stable and presentable determination of a locality, the topos of territory, native soil, city, body’ (Derrida, 2006: 192) ¹³ . Rather than the body vanishing or being reduced merely to a coded representation, as some have suggested, the logic of unevenness remains inscribed upon it, shaped by normative matrices and situated practices of raciality, gender, sexuality, intimacy, able-bodiedness, economy and citizenship (see Abbey and Akbari, 2025). Such a logic ‘produces dispossessed subjectivities, rendering them subhuman or hauntingly all-too-human’ while entrapping them within calculable, identity-based categories that puts them ‘in their proper place – the only spatial condition of being that they can possibly occupy’ (Butler and Athanasiou, 2013: 19). In this sense, a core objective of uneven datafication is to maintain the subaltern in a subordinate, dispossessed state, effectively keeping them in colonised territories. The code/body functions as an uneven spatial trap, physically or virtually, by exposing some individuals to continuous surveillance, control and profiling, ultimately treating them as a moving part of the machinery of uneven datafication.

Invasive forms of territorialisation also find unprecedented new forms in digital colonial capitalism. The notion of terra nullius, once confined to the Earth, now extends beyond terrestrial boundaries. In December 2024, Musk's SpaceX rocket company was valued at $350 billion, having secured contracts worth more than $700 million from the US Space Force just two months earlier ¹⁴ . While Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has launched a less commercially successful space programme, his vision remains similarly ambitious, forecasting ‘a future where millions of people are living and working in space for the benefit of Earth’ ¹⁵ . Behind the shiny futuristic space colony narratives and at the heart of climate change denial lies a silent acceptance that the data centres need to be relocated to places where cooling down would not be a problem. Au (2024) shows how the expansion of data centres into outer space reflects a continuation of colonial logics that have long shaped Earth's geographies. Satellites already function as mini data centres, and companies such as OrbitsEdge, NTT and Amazon are now developing larger space-based data infrastructures for faster processing, improved security and cost-efficiency.

While these projects promise benefits such as free solar energy and minimal human interference, they also reveal power imbalances: space is increasingly claimed by dominant nations and private tech companies under the guise of neutrality or terra nullius, echoing settler-colonial ideologies. Utrata (2024) underscores the colonial continuities between contemporary space colonisation ventures and the corporate strategies of historical entities such as the British and Dutch East India Companies. Regulatory frameworks, like the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, aim to ensure equitable use of space, yet access to orbital and frequency ‘slots’ remains skewed towards early movers, often wealthy countries or corporations. The recent Artemis Accords, led by the United States and NASA, exploit such ambiguities in favour of US interests (Din, 2022). These projects also risk environmental harm, including light and sound pollution, space debris and oceanic dumping, perpetuating a ‘permission-to-pollute’ model rooted in colonial land relations (Au, 2024: 23). The uneven geographies of digital colonial capitalism are essential to the workings of global processes of datafication and terra nullius now extends across scales, from individual bodies to outer space.

Digital dispossession

Theories that explain aspects of digital colonial capitalism concentrate on appropriation of human life as the raw material of data colonialism (Couldry and Mejias, 2019b), digital dispossession within extractive and accumulative logics (Thatcher et al., 2016; Zuboff, 2019) or constant evaluation, categorisation, profiling and ranking of humans (Fourcade and Healy, 2024; Gandy, 1993) and even their dehumanisation (Akbari, 2025c; Weheliye, 2014). Although capitalism has been sufficiently criticised for its inadequate treatment of oppression beyond class (see, Young, 1990), addressing the forms of dispossession in digital colonial capitalism reaches beyond the technological imagination of Marx at the early days of industrial capitalism. Long before the rise of datafication, Frankfurt School theorist, Alfred Schmidt, had already sharply criticised Marx for considering technology warranting an ‘abolition of the division of labour’ (Schmidt, 1971: 242), a ‘total automation (Verwissenschaftlichung)’, where the worker ‘stands beside the process of production’ as a technical ‘overseer and regulator’ (from Marx's Grundrisse cited in Schmidt, 1971, p. 242–3). For Schmidt, technological advances not only have brought about no salvation but ‘lead to total destruction, a grim parody of the transformation intended by Marx, in which Subject and Object are not reconciled, but annihilated’ (Schmidt, 1971: 272). In the ubiquitous computing project of digital colonial capitalism, we move a step further, where the annihilation of subject and object happens through reconciliation, resulting in humans and their data no longer being distinguishable. In this turn of events, only one prognosis remains true: The Verwissenschaftlichung, the annihilation of expertise and the total automation results in a new gesellschaftliches Individuum (social individual) (see, Irrlitz, 2015, p. 44) or as Smith puts it, ‘as the ensemble of social relations change, so too does human nature’ (Smith, 1984: 62).

The interplay between the social relations of production and individual autonomy has been widely interpreted as stripping individuals of their autonomy and minimal integrity of the self (Couldry and Mejias, 2019b), self-determination (Zuboff, 2019) or as a data fix transforming life to ‘commodified representations of self’ (Thatcher et al., 2016: 9). Both latter accounts base their analysis on Harvey's (2004) concept of accumulation by dispossession. I set aside Zuboff's surveillance capitalism since it does not include a critique of capitalism per se and rather seeks ways to make capitalist systems fair (see Morozov, 2019 for a discussion). Thatcher et al. also use the concept of dispossession in their metaphoric analysis of colonialism and, therefore, do not engage with its deeper meanings. Couldry and Meijas (2019b: 4) criticise accumulation by dispossession for failing ‘to grasp how the axis of capitalism's expansion has transformed’ – although they also limit this transformation to positioning human life as the new ‘raw material’ subject to capitalist exploitation. I revisit the concept of dispossession to argue that digital colonial capitalism not only targets human life but also redefines humanity, ranking certain lives as less human than others.

To better understand the nature of this dispossession, it is necessary to trace the conceptual evolution of the term. Harvey (2004: 76) identifies three distinct waves of imperialism: the first, between 1884 and 1945, was characterised by individual nation-states engaging in their own imperialist ventures. The second wave, beginning in 1945, saw the United States at the helm, aiming to address overaccumulation through collective international cooperation — ‘an intensification of an integrated capitalism in the core regions’ (ibid.) — and through the systematic geographical expansion of capitalism. Harvey underscores the US role in promoting decolonisation and developmentalism as part of this spatial expansion. The third wave, beginning in the 1970s, marked a shift towards neoliberalism, with the US spearheading ‘new international financial arrangements’ and applying considerable pressure through institutions like the IMF (Harvey, 2004: 77). Accumulation by dispossession marks this era of new imperialism and extends Harvey's notion of the spatial fix (Harvey, 1982) ¹⁶ . The spatial fix explained how capitalism produces spatial configurations to postpone the crisis of overaccumulation. Through accumulation by dispossession, Harvey broadened the scope of the spatial fix, arguing that dispossession operates not only geographically but also through more diffuse global mechanisms of capitalist expansion. The relationship between the geographical aspects of capitalist expansion and dispossession as a way of accumulation also highlights the overlapping concepts of dispossession and (de-/re-)territorialisation in this article. Uneven datafication marks a fourth wave of accumulation by dispossession, unfolding through processes of territorialisation, deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation that span from human bodies to outer space in processes of digital dispossession. In this sense, digital dispossession is a multifaceted phenomenon that includes (de-/re-)territorialisation of every space, temporal unevenness and de-/sub-humanisation.

The previous section has discussed the processes of territorialisation, re-territorialisation and de-territorialisation in digital colonial capitalism at length. However, dispossession does not remain limited to land, territories and spaces of living. Engaging more deeply with post-colonial theory allows a more differentiated reading of how datafication works with respect to different populations (Gray, 2023). Without adequately addressing these differences and historicising colonial data relations, one risks presenting a ‘universal and secular vision of the human’ (Chakrabarty, 2007: 4) ¹⁷ , in which the colonised remain relegated to a ‘permanent waiting room’ (Chakrabarty, 2007: 8) within a singular historical totality. The persistence of such a view is evident in numerous reports by international institutions, where stereotypical images of non-white people from ‘underdeveloped’ countries hold mobile phones – supposedly symbolising the digital divide and the call for developing countries to ‘catch up’. This discourse of the digital divide implicitly creates a socio-temporal hierarchy where it is unimaginable to be ‘capable of living in several centuries at once’ (Chakrabarty, 2007: 49). The digital divide discourse simultaneously serves two purposes: first, it always promises the have-nots that only if they wait, educate themselves and acquire (read: ‘buy Western’) technologies, the divide will be closed, and second, since the have-nots do not possess the necessary knowledge to close the divide, the direction of knowledge transfer is always from the haves to have-nots. Followingly, the so-called ‘time space compression’ (Harvey, 1989) and the fundamental spatio-temporal changes brought about by different waves of globalisation expose a problem of (s)pace (Der Derian, 1990) to understanding datafication. Seeing through a historical lens can provide us with a more detailed account of the interrelations between the establishment of spatial sovereignty and temporal dominance in modern times. It is no coincidence that the British Empire materialised time zones within its own territory at Greenwich, London. This temporal hegemony continues to define the progressive time of development and label entire nations as ‘behind time’, especially in light of technological advancement. As Cheney-Lippold (2025) argues, the technodeterminist discourse of ‘silicon future’, not only imposes the inevitability of the Big Tech and venture capitalists’ vision of future but also is intrinsically based on a notion of temporal supremacy. In doing so, temporal unevenness becomes a form of discursive violence within digital colonial capitalism. Additionally, temporal unevenness creates ‘temporal arbitrage’, whereby the temporalities of certain groups are organised in relation to the temporal power of others (Kitchin, 2023: 12); for example, Indian call centre workers’ working times are aligned with the European or North American clock.

Similarly, taking the idea of dispossession to psycho-political realms, Butler and Athanasiou (2013: 2) assert that dispossession involves processes and ideologies by which individuals are ‘disowned and abjected’ by normative powers that govern cultural intelligibility and regulate vulnerability. These powers determine ‘the terms of subjectivity, survival, and livability’ which extend beyond the loss of land and community to encompass more intimate forms of ownership, such as the historical control over one's living body, as seen in slavery systems (ibid). Their interpretation of dispossession moves beyond the loss of material resources to consider the psycho-social ramifications of ‘becoming’ dispossessed; a condition derivatively created by the ‘deprivation of land, rights, livelihood, desire, or modes of belonging’ (Butler and Athanasiou, 2013: 5). This conceptualisation broadens the scope of data colonialism and digital dispossession, arguing that they extend beyond simple data extraction to fundamentally alter the very conditions of subjectivity itself. Consequently, although the much-discussed epistemic violence embedded in digital colonial capitalism is important, the violence does not remain limited to abstract realms. Datafication processes unevenly affect different marginalised groups through not only psychological but also corporeal violence. Armed anti-immigration squads in the United States or at the maritime borders of the EU combine the territorialising functions of digital colonial capitalism and dehumanisation of asylum seekers to sustain the uneven relationship between the core and peripheries.

The violence of datafication is dynamic and includes an active process of othering. Depending on time, place and situation, the boundaries of ‘others’ shift. This active process of inclusion/exclusion/dehumanisation contains an enforcement of biopower amongst those considered ‘within’ and necropower against those considered to be ‘outside’. In doing so, the violence of datafication also engages in practices of territorialisation. Biopower, which includes the management of life (biopolitics) and other disciplinary and surveillance mechanisms in a society (Foucault, 1977), ensures the efficient and risk-controlled imposition of digital colonial capitalist logic. Necropower, however, describes the management of ‘living death’ and the procedures that mark some bodies stripped of their rights and reduce them to their bare life (Mbembe, 2003) or the dehumanised. The differentiating mechanisms of biopower and necropower underline the inefficiency of ‘human life as raw data’ argument, since they make clear that not all human life is treated identically in datafication processes. This differentiation is not just a sorting mechanism (Beer, 2016; Fourcade and Healy, 2024). As Venn (2009: 208) argues, the biopolitics and the emergence of (neo-)liberalism cannot be understood without ‘devices and strategies, that are both discursive and material, put in place to secure accumulation and inequality in its many forms’. Followingly, he demonstrates how colonial dispossession is an integral part of the ‘economy of inequality and violence’ (ibid.). Digital colonial capitalism not only combines biopower and necropower in sorting and surveillance (Murakami-Wood, 2017), it sustains a zero-sum game, where ‘inequality is natural and inevitable’ (Venn, 2009: 214).

It is in this inevitably unequal system of liberal capitalism that ‘'social” and “cultural” values of cohesion’ can only be fostered ‘by promoting reinvented racism and nationalism, stiffened by militarist values, that is, by a return of the “discourse of race war” congruent with all forms of the exclusion and objectification of the other’ (Venn, 2009: 226). As discussed earlier, territorialisation practices heavily rely on nationalistic and racist notions of othering and overlap with uneven geographical expansions to secure accumulation. The interlinkages between dispossession, liberal capitalism and global datafication are also evident in the discussions of racial capitalism being dependent on ‘slavery, violence, imperialism, and genocide’ (Kelley, 2017). For proponents of racial capitalism, ‘capital can only be capital when it is accumulating, and it can only accumulate by producing and moving through relations of severe inequality among human groups’ (Melamed, 2015: 75). Dispossession based on race, therefore, continues within digital colonial capitalism (McMillan Cottom, 2020) both ‘through the exercise of coercive power and through the mobilisation of desire’ (Bhattacharyya, 2018: ix). The violence of dispossession can be biopolitical, not only through the general datafication of all spheres of life but also direct, exclusionary, dehumanising and corporeal through the necropolitical systems that sustain social, cultural, economic and geographical unevenness.

Uneven exchange and valuation of data

This article started with a provocation about the colony as an algorithm to illustrate that any discussion of digital capitalism cannot be complete without considering coloniality at its heart. At the height of decolonisation and independence movements in the 1980s, the ‘Gang of Four’ (Amin et al., 1982) theorised the intertwinement of capitalism and global production of dependency between the core and periphery countries. Immanuel Wallerstein's World-Systems Theory, Andre Gunder Frank's Dependency Theory, the work of Giovanni Arrighi, and Samir Amin's work on uneven development analysed in detail how patterns of dependency emerge, especially between former colonies and world's economic powers – their colonisers. Collectively, they critiqued the global order from the perspective of the periphery, especially the former colonies, highlighting the exploitative socio-political and economic entanglements that bind the core and periphery. In this article, I primarily focus on Samir Amin's work for his innovative ways of conceptualising class and unequal exchange, since the issues of labour and exchange are pivotal to understanding digital colonial capitalism.

The notion of data, particularly as a by-product of human existence, alongside its distinct characteristics, does not present an entirely novel theoretical dilemma. The exploitation of human life as a form of capital within late capitalism can be traced back to early discourses on the commodification of audiences, and more recently on the monetisation of leisure time. These dynamics have only been accentuated within the context of the data-driven political economy. While numerous efforts have been made to quantify new modalities of value production, especially their immaterial (Gorz, 2010) or affective aspects (Arvidsson and Colleoni, 2012), many scholars have sought to understand the commodification and monetisation of life as a variant of labour. Examples of such conceptualisations, as already mentioned earlier, include the notions of ‘free labour’ (Terranova, 2004), ‘immaterial labour 2.0’ (Coté and Pybus, 2007) or ‘informational labour’ (Fuchs, 2011), all of which can be seen as extensions of Lazzarato's (1996) integration of ‘cultural content’ into labour relations and the conceptualisation of how new forms of ‘immaterial labour’ transgress the social relations of production. Later, Hardt and Negri (2001) expanded this framework by incorporating affect and bodily labour, extending the notion of the immaterial. Andrejevic (2011) furthers these arguments by highlighting exploitation as a form of coerced, profit-making and alienating labour in different areas of online activity. The paramount focus on labour – what is sometimes termed workerism (Morozov, 2022) – presents three problems. First, as Couldry and Mejias (2019a: 3) argue, unpaid labour has always constituted a foundational pillar of capitalist systems. Second, exploitation is not limited to labour relations and, as discussed earlier, dispossession acts at various scales and within different groups. Third, the mere absence of workers does not negate the existence of capitalist production (Morozov, 2022: 107). In addition, I argue that unequal exchange marks labour relations within digital colonial capitalism: instead of finding ways to push the usage of social media platforms into classical definitions of labour, post-colonial theory can explain how data and data-work are being valorised in this system.

Amin (1974) proposed that capitalist accumulation operates on a world scale, driven by an unequal division of labour between the core and peripheral countries, which results in the skewed distribution of wealth. This model of ‘unequal exchange’ occurs when the labour in peripheral regions is undervalued, thereby generating surplus value for core capitalists. Amin described this dynamic as ‘imperialist rent’ (Amin, 2010), where surplus value is extracted from the periphery through both the undervaluation of labour and the appropriation of natural resources, such as mining rents. Consequently, Amin advances ‘the law of value to the law of globalized value’ (Amin, 2010: 11) by recognising the intertwined system of capitalism/imperialism. Instead of planetary-scale homogenised economic conditions, he differentiated between ‘the dominant (imperialist) centers’ and ‘the dominated peripheries’ (Amin, 2010: 84). Amin's conceptualisation of uneven development has the theoretical capacity to merge the labour-based theorisation of digital capitalism and the rentier economy framework of techno-feudalism, mentioned earlier in this article. Furthermore, Amin contends that uneven development functions by sustaining monopolies over technology, worldwide financial markets, access to the planet's natural resources, media and communication as well as weapons of mass destruction (Amin, 1997: 4–5). Although economists have shown the entire start-up economy and venture capitalist system functions based on a platform's ‘rent monopoly’ (Langley and Leyshon, 2017: 25), Amin's focus on monopolies draws attention to wider monopolistic structures within digital colonial capitalism, where technological dependency, monopolistic control over data and extractive data practices produce and reinforce unevenness.

Amin's theorisation also deepens and better theorises the current simple binary class antagonisms of ‘tech-lord/vectoralist, capitalist, landlord’ versus ‘digital serf/hacker, worker, peasant’. Amin (2010: 92) categorised six global classes within capitalist political economy, each with a distinct position within the system: the imperialist bourgeoisie, the proletariat of the central countries, the dependent bourgeoisies of the periphery, the proletariat of the periphery, the exploited peasantry of the periphery and the exploiting classes of the non-capitalist modes. Although some elements of Amin's class categorisation have been challenged, such as the anti-imperialist intentions of dependent bourgeoisies in the periphery, his framework remains valuable for understanding the diversity of exploitation and dispossession within the capitalist system that complicates the notion of class solidarity. While in the universalist theorisation of information worker/hacker (Wark, 2019), a coder in Silicon Valley, a software developer in India, a cyber intelligence officer of Israeli army and a female content moderator in Morocco are pushed in the same category, uneven datafication allows us to differentiate their role and positionalities. It also explains the role of subcontractor companies in peripheral countries that supply cheap labour and undertake hazardous tasks, such as data cleaning and harmful content moderation, for Big Tech companies. The coexistence of various classes underlines the complex interdependence of different groups in profit-making within digital colonial capitalism. This complexity of class relations reflects the mechanisms of global data exploitation, where the capacity for political mobilisation and solidarity is often hindered by the very tools that are supposed to connect people, such as social media platforms (see, i.e., Dencik et al., 2025; Lehdonvirta, 2022, for collective action).

Although unequal exchange and dependency theories can explain the production and sustainment of unevenness within digital colonial capitalism, data and the exchange of data have a distinct valorisation problem. In a data-driven and financialised world where ‘nobody knows what anything is worth’ (Wark, 2019: 126), we only can be certain that data produces profit. In addition to the market cap shown in Table 1, the global data broker market size was estimated at USD 277.97 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach USD 512.45 billion by 2033 ¹⁸ . Consumer data segment accounts for 58% of market revenue, valued at USD 142.5 billion. Despite such grandiose numbers, data is still missing from the economic equations in calculating GDP of countries. Multiple methods have been offered for the valuation of data ¹⁹ , including those argue that data rents alone account for more than two percent of GDP in the United States (Ciuriak, 2025). Data rent here is calculated not only through direct transactions but also by ‘optimizing business processes; capturing consumer surplus; allowing firms to exploit information asymmetry for market advantage; shifting innovation into machine-learning space, which in effect permits the industrialization of learning, accelerating the process of innovation and providing a speed advantage to firms that are able to harness this element; and creating machine knowledge capital as a new factor of production’ (Ciuriak, 2025: 2). In this manner, data rent has value because of the intrinsic unevenness of the environment it has been produced in, that is, through the free data harvest from users, and the asymmetry of information it can produce through revealing patterns, models, etc.

The information asymmetry also crystalises in ways that companies with access to data can develop profitable trading strategies. Katona et al. (2025) study satellite data for measuring parking lot traffic to predict quarterly retailer performance and show how financial analysts and mutual fund managers’ access to such data has capital market implications. Others have focused on the ‘global distribution of economic values of cross-border data flows’ (Li, 2023) and shown ‘ten leading countries control over two thirds of international data flows’ (Li, 2023: 4) while ‘the value of cross-region data flows distributes very unevenly across the globe [..] U.S./Canada-Latin America [having] the highest average value US $75.2 billion, in 2021, with an average annual growth rate of 12.9% during 2018–2021’ (Li, 2023: 5). According to Li (2023, p.2), ‘China's international data flow has the world's highest value with a double-digit growth during 2012 to 2017; however, the US's value has less than one half of China's and has been declining’. Considering that the companies with the most market cap (Table 1) are mostly located in China and the United States, the market dominance of these countries defines the flow of data profit. In this sense, today's information asymmetry is not dissimilar to patterns of colonial knowledge dominance, especially regarding the rules of trade and market know-how.

In their report on ‘unequal exchange and North-South relations’, Nievas and Piketty ‘construct a new database on global trade flows and the world balance of payments (including goods, services, income and transfers) covering the entire planet over the 1800–2025 period’ (2025: 2). Their striking, yet expected, findings show ‘unequal comparative development largely stems from unequal exchange, in the sense that a different set of trade rules and institutions could have led to a different pattern of comparative development, and could contribute to do so in the future’ (Nievas and Piketty, 2025: 5). The study demonstrates the decisive role of colonialism and ‘changes in bargaining power and terms of exchange’ (Nievas and Piketty, 2025: 7) in establishing skewed systems of trade that are designed to accumulate wealth unequally, such as United States’ exorbitant privilege in global trade based on US dollar. Despite the richness of their study, the authors highlight the difficulties in calculating invisible flows such as trade in services, foreign income, and foreign transfers during colonial times for companies such as East India Company (Nievas and Piketty, 2025: 27). This challenge is similar to valuation of data in current economic calculations. As Birch (2025) points out about mercantilist logics of Trump tariffs, if data is accounted for, the United States has a trade surplus with many countries and not a deficit.

The colonialist unevenness of knowledge is evident in the way such invisible flows of data are being exempted from official calculations of the countries that benefit from it the most. Economic reports are produced by obscuring the trade in data. Silicon Valley, therefore, embodies the new form of liberal cosmopolitanism of the City (Banaji, 2020: 70), pushing the US state for campaigning for international deregulation in data-intensive sectors, while increasingly tightening its hold on US government and its national agenda setting. Although the penetration of Big Tech into the White House and Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency brought about heated discussions on new forms of state-private sector relationships, the phenomenon is anything but new. Banaji discusses in detail how British mercantile capitalism called for imperial aggression when ‘this was required in the strict interests of bondholders, bankers, and the agency houses’ (Banaji, 2020: 70). In a Senate hearing in May 2025, Sam Altman appealed to the nationalistic sentiments of Trump's era and urged the United States not to slow down AI efforts by ‘ill-considered regulations’ ²⁰ , especially in light of the AI race with China. The current US Vice President J.D. Vance, a venture capitalist himself, used the Paris AI summit 2025 to remind Europeans that ‘excessive regulation of the AI sector could kill a transformative industry’ ²¹ . United States data economies function on the same exorbitant privilege they have successfully established on a global level. Farrell and Newman (2023) and Fishman (2025) explain in detail how the United States has weaponised world economy to put forward institutions and regulations that constantly tilt the playing field for American profit. Unevenness is integral to the workings of digital colonial capitalism: user data gets harvested for free, regulation is highly politicised, knowledge and innovation are monopolised, and differentiation in the treatment of data subjects complicates solidarity action.

More importantly, as Amin (2010) argues, ‘imperialist rent’ is inherently based on the unequal wage paid for the labour-time in the periphery countries, which makes extracting unprecedented surplus value possible – a kind of surplus that would have been unattainable within the labour conditions in the core. The examples of imperialist rent in data work are abundant, especially in the age of artificial intelligence, content moderation and mechanical Turks. Tubaro et al. (2025) show in their case studies across Europe, Africa and Latin America how data workers are disadvantaged in wage, working conditions, job security, psychological burden of their work and unionising efforts. Similar research has been done on Asian data workers (Verma, 2025) or through groups like Data Workers’ Inquiry ²² . These studies show that artificial intelligence, machine learning and data-driven systems depend on large amounts of hidden human labour such as data labelling, content moderation and microtasks (Casilli, 2025). As a result, the International Labour Organisation has recently drafted a Recommendation on decent work in the platform economy for their 2026 session (ILO, 2025). Such initiative is also only happening after intensive campaigning of data workers such as content moderators in Kenya and union of gig workers in India; Whether these campaigns can resist the legal and financial power of Big Tech remains an open question. The uneven wage and labour conditions are also accompanied by rapid automation and the deployment of AI systems to displace vulnerable local workforces. AI for Good initiatives of Big Tech companies such as Google, Microsoft and Meta are received with suspicion in Africa ²³ because experts worry that AI dependency is another data grab scheme and will deepen the reliance on foreign technology in countries with already fragile digital infrastructure and inept market regulation. Finally, Nievas and Piketty (2025) conduct a thought experiment at the end of their report on unequal exchange and consider a hypothesis, where terms of exchange and the price of primary commodities were not set by world powers: East Asia, Africa and Latin America would have been in a totally different and better economic situation. Although history is not a playground for what ifs, such hypotheses might help us understand why Trump administration and his Big Tech supporters insist on deregulation, inevitability of AI and coalitions for a new economic paradigm: efforts to keep uneven systems as they are.

Conclusion

Colonialism remains the most successful profit-making business model in the history of humanity: the Dutch East India Company still tops the list of most valuable companies of all time ²⁴ . With 2.6 billion people worldwide without internet access ²⁵ , digital colonial capitalism still has a lot of space to grow. This article has introduced the concept of uneven datafication to describe the persistent creation of unevenness in data production, extraction and control operating on a multi-scalar level. Instead of focusing on privacy, algorithmic discrimination, bias or similar concepts, uneven datafication as a theory, draws attention to the elephant in the room: digital colonial capitalism. In doing so, not only does this theory go beyond symptoms to understand the structure but it also shifts the analytical perspective to marginal positionalities to produce alternative ways of knowing and knowledges. To comprehend the complexities of such intricate interrelated systems, universalist Eurocentric descriptions of datafication do not suffice and can hardly help us resist an increasingly powerful narrative of efficiency, libertarianism and deregulation. As both Amin et al. (1989) and Wallerstein (2006) have demonstrated, frameworks that prioritise Western experiences relegate the Majority World to an underdeveloped, uncivilised realm, behind time, a world that carries the burden of building their ‘civilisation’. Uneven datafication not only exposes the aggressive extraction of data from ‘all’ individuals but also underscores how the production of unevenness leads to the social disposability of certain communities, even within the Global North.

In response to the colonial logic inherent in uneven datafication and the dominant US technological discourse, China has emerged as the leading proponent of digital sovereignty, ahead of other BRICS nations (Jiang and Belli, 2025). The appeal of sovereignty discourse is understandable for nations historically positioned as the exploited periphery. As a result, techno-nationalism has gained traction in countries such as Turkey, Nigeria and Iran (see, e.g., Akbari, 2026; Benhaïm, 2023). Elements of the nationalistic sovereignty discourse have become embedded as new normative frameworks within South-South collaborations. These Majority World countries, no longer resigned to technological defeatism, are increasingly pursuing alternative technological models, ranging from India's centralised public-private digital ID system to Dubai's marketing-based performative projects, and China's surveillance-centric governance. The rise of techno-nationalism represents a parallel development in the paradoxical tension between colonial fragmentation and a totalising agenda. Although calls for platform cooperativism (Scholz and Schneider, 2017), democratised companies, democratised money, the cloud and the land as commons and a cloud rebellion (Varoufakis, 2023), remain urgent, they fail to gain significant traction within the violently uneven world of datafication. Amin's (1990) notion of ‘delinking’ provides a useful lens for understanding this situation. Often misunderstood as an exit from the global economy, Amin's vision was more about fostering a combination of strong state governance, domestic legitimacy and South-South collaboration to create a polycentric world. In this sense, his interest in China ²⁶ , as well as China's current success in presenting an alternative to Silicon Valley's ideology, can be interpreted through the lens of ‘delinking’. However, China's own efforts to establish dependency, through initiatives such as the Digital Silk Road and the Belt and Road Initiative, reflect a similar dynamic of neo-colonial expansion. The rise of BRICS countries as global players does not necessarily translate to a transformation of uneven power geometries (Aouragh and Chakravartty, 2016) and can contribute further to authoritarian nationalistic forms of digital governance (Akbari, 2026). It is in this context that the pursuit of exit by libertarian tech entrepreneurs also should not be mistaken for a liberatory endeavour. Uneven and combined development theory problematises the globalised world as a homogenous world and highlights the role of states and local institutions in a highly networked world. In doing so, it embraces the complexity of a datafied world without sacrificing neither the agency of nation-states nor exaggerating their sovereign decision-making capacity.

In the current alignment of Californian Ideology, belief in technology as ‘the sole transformative force of history’ (Wark, 2019: 119), with the emergent US ‘facilitative state’ (Harvey, 2004: 73), outward geographical expansion and inward digital dispossession grow aggressively together. The digitally dispossessed are either reduced to their data profiles, subjected to algorithmic governance or are encouraged to close the ‘gap’ and become digitally savvy, literate or educated – without considering the political economy behind uneven datafication. However, loss of self is not unique to data colonialism; it is a continuation of centuries of colonial violence; it is ‘a battle between dehumanized self and the objectified enemy, the technologized bureaucrat and his reified victim, pseudo-rulers and their fear of some other selves projected on to their “subjects”’ (Nandy, 1983: xvi). Such violence cannot be remedied solely by privacy solutions, fairer algorithms or digital luddism. In addition to these mandates, resistance to the system's integrated unevenness requires a fundamentally political response. Digital colonial capitalism is not just extractive; it is also productive: it produces unevenness in every aspect of life in order to sustain itself. Accordingly, critical data scholars must resist atemporal, ahistorical and apolitical narratives of datafication and AI. The periphery is not merely important ‘as sites of replication of a future invented prior and elsewhere’ (Chan, 2013: x). Any project of solidarity cannot treat human degradation as the levelling effect of capital on ‘workers’ only (Smith, 1984: 154). Uneven datafication creates hierarchies of oppression, despite Marxists’ resistance to differentiated oppression. Therefore, it is vital to understand these hierarchies before entering into global initiatives of solidarity. One should not forget that the current structures of dominance in data colonialism are linked to historical monopolies and advantages of the core countries that sustain the uneven development of capitalism. Planetary Big Tech is dictating its relationship to states and increasingly lobbies for more global and regional deregulation (see, Akbari, 2025a). The inevitably authoritarian combination of deregulation and disregard for international law, and the increasing role of Big Tech and venture capitalists and their ideologies in state structures, are changing the meaning and the very structure of politics, society and economy. This article has been an effort to highlight how this change is only possible by sustaining and producing unevenness.