« The colony as a prison: L. N. Billington, ‘L.N. (2026). ‘Incarceration as Colonisation: Indigenous Imprisonment and Self-Determination in Australia and Kanaky’, in T. Anthony, M. Bhatia, K. Pillay, J. M. Williams (eds), The Palgrave Handbook of Racial Injustice and Resistance, Palgrave Macmillan, 2026, pp. 245-270
The settler’s arrested development: Shuya Su, ‘Indigenous Girlhood, Radical Resurgence, and the Question of Settler Growth in Jen Ferguson’s The Summer of Bitter and Sweet’, Children’s Literature in Education, 2026 »

Digital dispossession: Tyler McCreary, David Hugill, ‘Digital Colonialism, Fossil Capitalism, and Indigenous Dispossession’, Capitalism Nature Socialism, 2026

17Mar26

Abstract: This paper argues that North America’s emerging digital economies are materially and politically grounded in ongoing regimes of settler-colonial extraction. While scholarship on “digital colonialism” has illuminated new forms of data appropriation, corporate concentration, epistemic domination, and frontier discourse, it has often underemphasized the extent to which digital infrastructures remain tethered to fossil capitalism and Indigenous dispossession. We contend that digitization is not post-extractive. Rather, it amplifies extractive relations, relying on energy-intensive infrastructures powered by fossil fuels from Indigenous lands. Focusing on Calgary, a Prairie petropolis that has rebranded itself as a “smart city,” we examine how urban digital transformation is embedded in, and extends, settler-colonial fossil regimes. We develop four interrelated claims: (1) the appropriation of resources from Indigenous lands remains foundational to digital economies; (2) corporate power in both fossil and tech sectors is mutually reinforcing within the political order of the petro-state; (3) the digitization and automation of extraction reconfigure labor geographies, undermining Indigenous employment while distancing work from land-based lifeways; and (4) these dynamics intensify colonial violence, with profound consequences. By situating digital capitalism within the historical and ongoing logics of settler colonialism, the paper reframes debates on digital colonialism in grounded, place-based terms.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed