By Elias Watanabe
In the 19th century, colonial powers carved the world into territories, extracting resources and imposing borders that served distant capitals. Today, the lines are invisible, the resource is data, and the new cartographers are the tech giants whose maps are built not on geography but on flows of information.
The New Territory
Consider how a handful of companies handle more user data than most governments ever could. Your browsing habits, health metrics, purchasing patterns, social connections—all mapped, stored, and monetized. These datasets form digital “territories” that transcend national borders but exert real power over physical lives.
The analogy to colonialism is not just rhetorical. Like historical empires, data empires impose rules, extract value, and reshape local economies. The difference is speed: where colonial borders took years to draw, digital frontiers shift in real time, optimized by algorithms.
Case Study: Health Data as the New Spice Route
When a major wearable device company secures exclusive access to biometric data from millions of users, it controls a trade route—only instead of cinnamon or silk, the commodity is your resting heart rate. This data can be sold to insurers, used to build proprietary health platforms, or feed AI models for predictive care.
As with the spice trade, the profits accrue not to the people generating the value, but to the intermediaries who control access. Users receive “free” services; the companies receive enduring leverage.
Jurisdiction Without Geography
In the colonial era, sovereignty was contested through flags and fortresses. Now, it is contested through terms of service. A company headquartered in California can effectively decide how citizens in Nairobi or São Paulo experience privacy—regardless of local laws—by embedding its platforms in daily life.
This creates a paradox: states may claim territorial sovereignty, but their citizens’ digital lives are governed by foreign corporate policies that can be updated with a click.
The Risk of Irreversible Dependency
Colonial economies were structured to make colonies dependent on imperial powers for manufactured goods and markets. Today, dependency takes the form of essential digital infrastructure—cloud storage, payment systems, search engines—that entire societies rely on but do not control. Removing them would be economically and politically destabilizing, giving their corporate owners leverage traditionally reserved for nation-states.
What Resistance Looks Like
Some countries are trying to redraw the map. The EU’s GDPR, India’s data localization laws, and Africa’s push for regional data protection frameworks are early attempts to reclaim sovereignty. But these efforts face the same challenge anti-colonial movements did: the incumbent powers have resources, networks, and global reach far exceeding that of their challengers.
We are living through a re-colonization—not of land, but of life itself. The question is whether we will recognize the borders being drawn in code and contracts before they harden into the default map of the 21st century.
History shows that those who control the map control the future. The cartographers have changed. The stakes have not.
