Info-topia: Postcolonial cyberspace and artificial intelligence inTRON: Legacyand Nalo Hopkinson’sMidnight Robber

Mainstream science fiction such as Disney’s TRON: Legacy (2010) lauds the utopian potential of the Internet/cyberspace and artificial intelligence (AI). This is sometimes tempered with concerns that AI in cyberspace will become too powerful and rebel against its creators – a concern based on fears that world powers will lose control of the globally networked systems of people and machines that they have dominated in the postcolonial era. By contrast, Nalo Hopkinson’s postcolonial cyberpunk novel Midnight Robber (2000) views AI and cyberspace through the lens of Afro-Caribbean epistemology. As a consequence, AI becomes less frightening in its potential, cyberspace becomes a space for accounting for the ways information technology is complicit in colonial projects, and technological appropriation provides hope for building a better world.