The logics of digitisation: race, cyberspace, and digital settler colonialism

This paper will investigate how settler colonialism is extended online through the Internet, becoming “digital settler colonialism”, a term I have coined, that then encourages white supremacist violence offline. Digital settler colonialism, I argue, refers to the production, maintenance and use of the Internet to extend settler colonialism and reiterate the power of the white sovereign online. The white cursor of technology, the Internet, becomes a tool used to “eliminate the native”, Indigenous subjects, and in addition, to “exterminate the Other”, such as Black and racialised Muslim subjects, to extend the legacy of the white settler state. Where we understand that settler colonialism both marks the racialised body and colonises land, I argue that the Internet extends this through its digital operations while appearing racially neutral. This will be evidenced through the exploration of independently archived computer mediated material and drawing on disciplines of whiteness, settler colonial and critical race and Internet studies to purport that studies of race and racism online necessitate a media and race specific approach that is encompassing of the offline structures that maintain racial violence. I direct my attention to systems that can reiterate the settler state – such as the Internet – rather than Internet users, investigating to what extent settler colonialism is built into the Internet.