DFI Speaker Series: Digital Decolonization: How Big Tech Exploits Us

Drawing from a work-in-progress, this talk will explore how social media and AI technologies represent a new form of colonialism—digital colonization—in which human attention, identity, and community are commodified for corporate profit. Building on the insights of anticolonial thinkers like Amílcar Cabral and Achille Mbembe, the talk situates Big Tech’s extraction of data and manipulation of behavior within the history of racial capitalism and colonial exploitation. Just as earlier colonizers targeted land and labor, today’s platforms seize the cultural and cognitive spaces through which we know, communicate, and form community. And just as earlier anticolonial movements did before, we must resist. By reframing our relationship to technology, we can imagine futures that protect human dignity and reclaim culture from corporate, capitalist, authoritarian, and anti-human control.

Janine de Novais is a writer and sociologist who explores liberation as a cultural project — a process of learning and unlearning. She is the author of Brave Community: Teaching for a Post-Racist Imagination (2023), a practical guide for fostering empathy and resilience in classrooms and communities confronting racism. Janine has held academic appointments at Harvard University and the University of Delaware and previously served as Associate Director of Columbia University’s Center for the Core Curriculum. Born and raised in Cabo Verde, she now lives in Philadelphia, where she works as an independent scholar and community cultural strategist, drawing on her expertise in engaged pedagogy, sociology, and adult learning to design transformative approaches to racial and social justice.

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