Decoding the cybaltern: cybercolonialism and postcolonial intellectuals in the digital age

ABSTRACT In this article, I look at how the modes of knowledge production in the digital age construct new colonial relations. I argue that these cybercolonial hierarchies are defined by a new elite: an artificial intelligentsia. In this regard, I discuss how the epistemic shifts in cybercolonialism redefine the role of postcolonial intellectuals in the digital age. In order to trace these shifts, I analyse the 2018 data scandal concerning Cambridge Analytica, a now defunct British political consulting firm allegedly involved in electioneering in 68 countries, to show that the power held by this artificial intelligentsia is encoded within a largely inaccessible field of computing, producing information that looks rhetorically neutral but is artificial in nature. My analysis demonstrates that this kind of knowledge production deepens the geopolitical hierarchies between the Global North and South as it bears new mechanisms of silencing. For the silenced subjects in cybercolonialism I coin the term cybaltern. The cybaltern refers to a group of people whose voices are muted and rendered unheard, paradoxically despite and because of the digital tools available to them. With this in mind, postcolonial intellectuals are given the task of decoding the discursive gaps and traps that (re)produce a condition of cybalternity.