Security Interfaces as Perpetuations of Coloniality
In recent years, there has been a spread of digital security interfaces. These interfaces combine data, territory and spatial profiling to make visible threats and risks present to the global community today. There are many examples of these interfaces, including the New York Times’ map on coronavirus, the Global Terrorism Database, and various crime maps around the world. These platforms enact, imagine, and calculate security and risk. In doing this, the global circulation of these interfaces, perhaps unintentionally, stigmatizes peripheral places as territories of risk and insecurity, underpinning colonial dynamics and presenting a new form of colonialism - data colonialism. Data colonialism combines the predatory extractive practices of historical colonialism with the abstract quantification methods of computing. We can understand how digital security interfaces contribute to data colonialism by examining the three key features of these interfaces: data, time, and space.
The creation of data captures and quantifies distinct phenomena in the world. In the process of formulating, calculating, and shaping this data we frame what questions can be asked and what answers exist. The translation of phenomena into data happens at the expense of complexities that do not belong in numerical format. Imaginary risks become real threats through the authority of statistics and probability. This creation of real threats from imaginary risks relates to the second key feature: time. Based on past occurrences of conflict these digital security interfaces “predict” future possibilities of risk. This danger is currently imaginary; the threat has not yet occurred and may not even occur at all. The interfaces only work with possibilities, therefore they can not be wrong. They can however predict something correctly which legitimizes them. In this sense, maps work showing us a world that becomes “knowable”; visualizing data makes it look more reliable and real. Spatially, these digital security interfaces provide a map that presents information that reifies certain geopolitical constructions.
Putting these elements together, digital security interfaces give life to new cartographies and topographies of violence and interfere with our way of understanding the world by targeting certain territories as high risk through the rigidity of data. Territories in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East are framed by these interfaces as unstable and prone to crisis. These high-risk areas are all located in the global south on the social and historical peripheries of the world. This stigmatizes the global south as a place of risk, insecurity, and instability for global politics, rather than a place of complexities that are not revealed through the data. By framing particular territories as risky or as places of uncertainty, the interface ends up reducing these territories to nothing more than a part of the “dangerous south”, rendering these areas as intervenable, similar to how colonies were portrayed as places to be tamed. This time however their depiction is embedded in a global circuit of technological practices and bound to interfaces and technology which continue colonial imagination and practices through data combined with geolocation. That is why this technology perpetuates coloniality. Consequently, this technology exasperates social and spatial segregation as it justifies Western intervention and transfers blame for crisis and danger to already disadvantaged areas.
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