Tierra Común

A new colonial era is under way. This time the target isn’t land or natural resources, but human life itself: human action and experience that can be converted into profit through the medium of data extraction. This is data colonialism.

This represents a deepening of colonialism as significant as the original colonial landgrab of five centuries ago. Historic colonialism preceded capitalism and laid its foundations, based on brutal violence whose implications continue today. The new data colonialism is based, by contrast, on social relations established under capitalism: its violence takes a symbolic form, an opaque and automated violence, that threatens human freedom.

Data colonialism is unfolding on a global scale: its leaders are in China as much as in the USA. Its victims are in countries that suffered from historic colonialism, and among the oppressed and also minorities of the new centers of empire. We are talking here of universal process, but its victims are specific, and growing as global inequality intensifies.

Who are we?

Tierra Común brings together activists, citizens and scholars who want data to be decolonized. Our specific focus is Latin America, but our horizon is the Global South, and everyone anywhere who rejects data colonialism as the latest manifestation in modernity of the Global North’s desire for domination.

Imagination is our greatest tool. Let’s imagine a future where the terrain of human life does not involve extraction of data that discriminates between us and separates us from our own lives. 

Let’s imagine Tierra Común.