Friends!
There was a time when one could reasonably hope that the words one posted online would function as a sort of digital epistle, traveling between sender and receiver(s). Granted, the internet includes a lot more "receivers" than private snail mail, and an even lower barrier to access than the print publications of yore. But the basic expectation remained that the public forum of the web consisted more or less of the people who wrote text and the people who read it.
No longer. An opaque, powerfully equipped force has descended on this garrulous town square. No sooner than the words on this webpage go live will they be scraped up, in the dead of digital night, by wide-mouthed cruising trawlers, secreted into a black-box processing system, "read," analyzed, chewed up, and marched forth in the form of predictive analytics for a growing pantheon of AI-driven large language models like ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and so on.
This is not my intention; the present introduction is for you, our beloved readers. Yet quite without my consent, these words of mine have already been nabbed for corporate profit. This particular case of conscription is innocuous enough, in the grand scheme of things. But it's just one example of the ways, both recognizable and utterly strange, that the internet has come to serve as the scaffold for a new age of the grab-motive, where the objects of ruthless partition and expropriation are not only land and resources, but also data: text itself! What's more, the dynamics emerging from this rapacious race recall (and reproduce) historical forms of geopolitical dominance. Call it "Digital Colonialism."
In this week's Empty Cup, we're reading about Digital Colonialism. In Stuff for Study, Vitória shares an MIT Technology Review series on the rise of “AI colonialism” and a dispatch on Nigerian startups creating self-reliant data structures across the African continent. In Visions of Attention, Eleanor meditates on the politics and spectacle of Thích Quảng Đức's immolation in 1963 Vietnam. And in From the Trove, David surfaces Herbert Schiller's Mass Communications and American Empire, a necessary text in understanding the role of media technologies in the project of American domination.
This may sound plenty bleak. But here at the School of Radical Attention, our work is to discern, through proper attention, the creative, world-building opportunities of the grimmest present. And there is SO much opportunity! So read on, and join us — and if you want to get out from behind that screen and join us in person, well… you know where to find us!
Warmly yours,
Peter Schmidt
Editor-in-Chief
Stuff for Study: Digital Colonialism and Sovereignty
Readings and other resources for continued learning on attention and politics
Is AI creating new forms of colonial dispossession? — MIT Technology Review series
Can digital public infrastructure build power for the Global South? — Sreekanth Mukku for Bot Populi
The Nigerian startups offering data independence from AWS and Google Cloud — Damilare Dosunmu for Rest of World
Digital hegemony and the americanization of the internet —
for twenty-first century demoniacThe “splinternet”: an answer to the rise of cyberlibertarianism —
for Disconnect
- Vitòria Oliveira
Visions of Attention
An archive of images and mini-essays on the myriad modes of attention
[CONTENT WARNING: the following section contains images/written descriptions of self-immolation]
Dissent By Fire
On June 11, 1963, over 300 Vietnamese monks and nuns marched through the streets of Saigon to protest President Ngô Đình Diệm’s brutal repression of Buddhists. At the center of this demonstration sat a motionless Thích Quảng Đức, in lotus position, as two monks doused him in gasoline. Moments later, he set himself ablaze. He remained completely still throughout his self-immolation, offering to history one of its most harrowing and profound spectacles of protest.
The image, captured by Malcolm Browne for the Associated Press, shattered America’s false narrative of a just and morally necessary Vietnam War and disrupted the culture of complacency that this narrative demanded. Đức's protest called attention to the contradictions of the USA's foreign policy by posing an apparent contradiction of its own: it seemed unthinkable that someone whose life was dedicated to nonviolence could commit such a brutal act.
Who decides which sacrifices are heroic and which are deranged? When U.S. Army veteran Aaron Bushnell self-immolated outside an Israeli Embassy in 2024 to protest the country’s ongoing genocidal campaign in Gaza, his act — and his clearly articulated intentions — were livestreamed and broadcast for all to see. Despite this exposure, his motives were largely rewritten as the expression of an unstable psyche. Yet this very erasure highlights its own enabling conditions: after all, who controls narratives of sanity and protest? How do societal frameworks shift depending on who is protesting – and against whom?
Acts such as Đức's and Bushnell’s rupture the status quo by calling us to confront what we’d rather not see. Thích Quảng Đức’s radical protest reminds us that bearing witness is not a passive act, and that a single image can outlive the fictions written by empire — even as those fictions migrate from our papers to our screens.
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From the Trove
Long-form recommendations from the Friends of Attention’s collaborative Attention Trove archive
An Empire of Communication
Digital colonialism adds new dimensions to a long legacy of cultural, electronic, and media imperialism. Herbert Schiller’s Mass Communications and American Empire (1969) is the foundational text to the systematic study of communication systems’ role in extending USA’s world power. By Schiller's telling, “each new electronic development widens the perimeter of American influence” by delivering ideological content, exporting American hardware and protocols, and establishing asymmetrical power relations. In a discussion with Tanner Mirrlees, author of Hearts and Mines: The US Empire’s Cultural Industry, Mirrlees explains Schiller’s thinking on media imperialism and provides context for the emergence of digital colonialism in the present day.
- David Landes
IRL
Sat, August 23rd: In WALKING & THINKING: SoRA On The Move, we’re going to WALK – from the SoRA headquarters in Dumbo, Brooklyn, to Fort Tryon Park at the northern tip of Manhattan – and THINK together, on a range of texts.
Sat, August 23rd: ATTENTION LAB: COALITION. Attention Labs are SoRA's in-person, experiential, participatory workshops dedicated to the joint exploration of radical human attention, with a special focus on COALITION.
Mon, September 2nd: ATTENTION LAB: STUDY. Attention Labs are SoRA's in-person, experiential, participatory workshops dedicated to the joint exploration of radical human attention, with a special focus on STUDY.
Find more workshops, events, and gatherings here!