Cyberspace as settler space: Wendy Hui Kyong Chung, ‘Omophily, or the Swarming of the Segregated Neighbourhood’, in Wendy Hui Kyong Chung, Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition, MIT Press, 2021, pp. 81-120 | settler colonial studies blog

Cyberspace as settler space: Wendy Hui Kyong Chung, ‘Omophily, or the Swarming of the Segregated Neighbourhood’, in Wendy Hui Kyong Chung, Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition, MIT Press, 2021, pp. 81-120

03Dec21

Abstract: By the early twenty-first century, the imaginary of the Internet had moved decisively from the otherworldly expanse of cyberspace to the domesticated landscape of well-policed, gated “neighborhoods.” This was a progression rather than a transformation: U.S. settler colonialism and enclosure underlay the visions of both neighborhoods and cyberspace. Cyberspace, described as a “portal“—an elaborate façade that frames the entrance to a closed space—was always a horizon trapped within a U.S. military-academic network, a classic example of what information studies scholar Paul Edwards has called a “closed world.“ 1 Both visions also painted certain features as “inherent” to the Internet—they simply evaluated them differently. The “decentralized” nature of the World Wide Web and expanded user participation moved from being democracy’s guarantor to being its greatest threat: a breeding ground for insurrections and abuse. In a related development, the “alternative” aspects of Internet culture went from being pseudo-socialist to pseudo-fascist. As social media researcher Rebecca Lewis has pointed out, the alternative universes of YouTube have established systems of knowledge and authority that both counter and parallel the mainstream sources they have relentlessly critiqued.

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