Debt that is not just exclusive to British and Spanish colonialism but also encapsulates extractive practices of other forms:
- Chinese, French, and American imperialism
- neocolonialist internet companies
See also: Technosolutionism, Data Capitalism
Paying off colonial debt
- Importance of bring in non-WEIRD perspectives especially when trying to solve problems outside of these demographics. How do we empower and enable local people to solve their own local problems?
- Local people know their own problems the best. However, funding complicates things as local people are forced to think and problem solve the way their funders think and problem solve
- Examples of where ‘good intentions’ were not enough to prevent negative externalities from impacting marginalized communities
- During middle of Syrian war, have folks from Syria that want to learn about secure communications practices. US people started explaining public-key encryption for a while, then the Syrian people said “oh we just wanted to learn about how to setup a telecommunications network”
- Conferences that say they are ‘international’ but make their speakers speak in English
- American women coming to Kenya to explain reproductive health to Kenyan women but providing a very western perspective with resources that the vast majority of the children there did not have the resources to access
- Design and design thinking is inherently colonial: “you have a problem and we can make the tools to solve it” (see: Design Justice)
- When advocating for more Black-led music programs: “oh, we already have a prison program!”
- The Open Library program at the Internet Archive, run fully with good intentions. This type of work is inherently skewed and biased toward people who have lots of spare time and energy and a result, it is still run predominantly by white dudes who live on the west coast. The Internet Archive is notorious to people who need a white education but does not serve any other populations.
- Things that embed implicit Western bias: multi-language calls and time zones
- How does the homogenization of the Internet impact the diversity of cultures and languages of the world?
Moving away from meritocracy
- Especially in technology, candidacy for opportunities heavily skews and favours those with free time, energy, labour
- We see this happen with HOAs, city town halls, and other ‘democratic’ processes. It turns out these are not really representative but in fact only those with free time attend (see: housing)