Parallels between the digital world and colonialism (as well as, company-states)

Regardless of the unavoidable specificity of regulation (and therefore its preordained expiry date), it is likely that the way in which information platforms have developed so far is explainable within the context of the advent of a new reality for humans, that of the digital world. Parallels could be drawn between the digital world, which is only a few decades old, and the prehistoric, imagined, period when humans first had to form (larger) communities—hence the focus of online platforms on user numbers. Similarly, belonging to an online platform is the only way for most humans to understand and make some use of the vast new and unexplored world in front of them, that is, the digital world. Once formed, these digital communities zealously guarded their members—and tried to sustain themselves in any way possible (one must not forget that the for-profit online platforms of today succeeded the large ‘forums’ of the first days of the Internet, which perished as soon as the money dried up). Unlike in the analogue world, however, newcomers did not have to fight to remove older inhabitants, or compete for access to limited resources in a first-to-arrive, life-or-death competition. On the contrary, because information in the digital world is infinite, any new platform is set up alongside existing ones, only competing with them for users (on the transformation of individuals (and citizens) into users, see §17.00.11). And users are happy to oblige by joining the new platform, because they are able to belong simultaneously to more than one—which also explains why individualisation and unique identification remain an issue today for humans in the digital world. Crucially, however, information platforms in the digital world are, today, private. In other words, it is not humans and their states that are trying to process information in a (pre-existing) reality (i.e. Nature), but part of them (the private sector) that is opening up new fields of human activity. It is for this reason that the stage of development of the digital world that we are currently in should not, therefore, be paralleled with the original, common to all, prehistoric period when humans and their groups started from zero. Rather it corresponds with a point in time when some engaged with the world better prepared than others, meaning not everyone was on the same level. This is why parallels should instead be drawn with colonialism and company-states in order to visualise, and to better understand, the reality of today’s online information platforms.

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