Quinn Slobodian in The Ideas Letter:
In recent years, it has become common—even unavoidable—to refer to the internet, AI, and digital capitalism in terms of empire and colonialism. A partial list of recent high-profile books that use the language includes Empire of AI (2025) by Karen Hao, Silicon Empires (2025) by Nick Srnicek, The New Empire of AI (2025) by Rachel Adams, Digital Empires (2023) by Anu Bradford, and Cloud Empires (2022) by Vili Lehdonvirta. These join influential work by Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias in their paired books, The Costs of Connection (2019) and Data Grab (2023), and their 2018 article, “Data Colonialism,” which has over 2,000 citations on Google Scholar (note for non-academics: this is a lot). Honorable mention goes to an article on “digital colonialism” by the South African scholar Michael Kwet, which tops 1,000 citations. Hardly a week goes by without a think piece with a title like “Big Tech is Building Empires,” as the economist Grace Blakeley wrote recently, or “AI is in its empire era,” as the STS scholar Kate Crawford posted last year.
The turn to empire is notable first for displacing a previously preferred language of mind control. After Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013 about Silicon Valley’s complicity in mass surveillance triggered the first phase of the so-called techlash, critics gravitated to language of behaviorism and anxieties about brainwashing from the mid-twentieth century. Our internet-connected phones and laptops had put us in Skinner boxes; we were the pigeons pecking at the pellets according to a pattern—at the mercy of “attention merchants” in “the shallows.” “The technology that connects us also controls us,” read the tagline for the influential Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma. Shoshana Zuboff—who had taken classes with B.F. Skinner himself as a youngster at Harvard—warned in her 2019 bestseller The Age of Surveillance Capitalism that Silicon Valley now had “the instruments and methods that can impose Skinner’s technology of behavior across the varied domains of everyday life right down to our depths.”
The shift from psychology to political geography is a good one.
More here.
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