Uneven datafication: Further thoughts

This article responds to five commentaries on ‘uneven datafication’, a framework drawing on the literatures of coloniality, uneven development and dependency theory to analyse the production of unevenness in digital colonial capitalism through three interrelated notions: (de-/re-)territorialisation, dispossession and unequal exchange. Against the charge that the framework is unduly pessimistic, I argue that naming structures of oppression neither forecloses agency nor speaks from a position of privilege, and I caution against mistaking survival under coercion for resistance. Extending the analysis through ‘data voids’, I agree that over- and under-datafication unfold simultaneously, while adding that populations can be datafied irrespective of their access to digital technologies. On complicity and historicisation, I embrace the invitation to attend to the tension between overarching colonial processes and local specificities. Finally, I defend the vocabulary of colonialism as a matter of epistemic justice, insisting that theorising from the Majority World on its own terms – rather than as a set of ‘case studies’ – is central to building scholarly solidarity and collective epistemic subversion.