Digital colonialism and the social critique of technology: a review of the book Colonialismo digital: por uma crítica hacker-fanoniana, by Deivison Faustino and Walter Lippold

uma resenha do livro “Colonialismo digital: por uma crítica hacker-fanoniana", de Deivison Faustino e Walter Lippold

Abstract

This review examines the book *Digital Colonialism: Towards a Hacker-Fanonian Critique*, by Deivison Faustino and Walter Lippold, situating it within the contemporary debate in the Social Sciences on technology, capitalism, colonialism, and racism. Its main objective is to critically analyze the book's contribution to understanding the digital not as an autonomous or radically new sphere, but as a historical reconfiguration of mediations already structuring capitalist modernity. The adopted procedure is that of an analytical-interpretative review, combining a critical reading of the book's argumentation with specific bibliographical dialogue with authors and works that help to qualify its theoretical scope, especially regarding the critique of data extraction, the place of racialization, and the historicization of technology. The analysis highlights, as the work's main strength, its insistence on placing racism at the center of the critique of technology, shifting the discussion from the technical plane to the historical-structural plane of domination. The review also highlights the productivity of Fanonian mediation and the rejection of technological determinism, as well as the emphasis on the materiality of the digital, in its extraction chains, infrastructure, and labor. In conclusion, the review argues that the book raises the bar for critical discussion on platforms and data, although it presents limitations in the more concrete elaboration of its programmatic horizon of technological decolonization and, at times, excessively compresses some of its conceptual axes.