One of the most brutal companies of the colonial heydays was the British East India Company. This company wasn’t a normal business; it was a chartered monopoly that fused commercial extraction with actual sovereign violence: its own army, which eventually outnumbered the British Army; the power to collect taxes, administer justice, and wage war and annex territory in Bengal and beyond. It was a private company that, over time, became a government.

Recently, Argentina’s president Javier Milei actually invoked the East India Company by name as the model for new legislation creating unregulated “non-human corporations” run by AI agents, explicitly framing it as an invitation for tech billionaires to relocate, and that legislation traces directly to the “Network State” concept promoted by Peter Thiel’s protégé Balaji Srinivasan; the idea that tech-run polities should operate alongside or instead of nation-states. I first thought that this was just another conspiracy theory, but there’s actually a real lineage here. The monopoly entities acquiring quasi-sovereign functions, such as surveillance, defence, and eventually governance, with diminished public accountability, are already among us. We don’t need to look far to find multiple examples such as Starlink, Palantir, Anduril, Amazon AWS, Clearview AI, and Academi (Former Blackwater).

Before we get into the dangers of what I call ‘flagless colonialism,’ let’s trace how this power actually gets built: through the data we hand over, the markets that reward hoarding it, and the states that end up dependent on both.

Data sovereignty

We read about data sovereignty everywhere, but what does it actually mean, and why is it so important? First, let’s just spend a few moments deciphering what it actually means. Data sovereignty is the principle that data is subject to the laws and governance of the jurisdiction in which it’s collected, processed, or stored. Meaning a government has legal authority over data generated within or pertaining to its territory, regardless of which company holds it or where that company is headquartered. The term has gained traction in recent years, following the development of artificial intelligence and the steadily increasing number of powerful models entering the market.

When the Trump administration recently forced Anthropic to pull its latest model from the market under the guise of national security, it began to dawn on people that AI is now weaponised and that having sovereign ownership of one’s own data is a deeply political matter. One of the main ingredients of the big tech business model is free data. It’s what’s feeding the development of the new digital capitalism. Data needs to be free for these businesses in order to keep growing. And that data is the data you share when Snapchat wants access to your contacts, when Instagram wants access to your photos, or when Strava want to track your position. Apart from our personal data, it is the literary and artistic works of writers and artists that are being subjected to one of the largest and most consequential thefts in human history. To quote Naomi Klein:

“We are witnessing the wealthiest companies in the world (Microsoft, Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon [and, by 2026, the most powerful/dominant AI companies OpenAI and Anthropic]…) unilaterally seizing the sum total of human knowledge that exists in digital, scrapable form and walling it off inside proprietary products, many of which will take direct aim at the humans whose lifetime of labour trained the machines without giving permission or consent. Then they are selling it back to us at a markup and have the audacity to call it ‘training data’.”

*> — Klein, Naomi (2023) “AI machines aren’t hallucinating. But their makers are.” The Guardian, 8 May.

As an acknowledgement of this fact, Europe taxes digital services: a mere 2% in the UK and Denmark, 3% in France, Italy, and Spain, and a bit higher again in Austria and Czechia, and Brussels is now weighing whether to harmonise these into a single EU-wide levy. The tech moguls, of course, sense this as a threat and are leveraging their close ties with the Oval Office; at the time of writing this article, Trump is threatening to slap a 100% tariff on goods from the EU in return. This is, of course, to protect the very business model on which tech companies rely. Our data is, as of now, an asset alongside natural resources.

Data-colonialism

In the times of colonial trade two hundred and fifty-odd years ago, alcohol-as-leverage was a deliberate weapon, specifically because of its physiological hold; traders used it to incapacitate negotiators before treaty signings, knowing addiction removes choice rather than informs it. Even today, colonialism assumes new forms. It no longer dominates only bodies, but appropriates data, transforming personal lives into exploitable information.

And tech companies are using a similar type of leverage on their users through addictive algorithms and their incomprehensible terms of conditions, in their act of data appropriation. This new wave of colonialism feeds upon the notion that our personal data is terra nullius or ‘no man’s land’, a framing already established in critical data studies. Pope Leo XIV writes about this topic in his first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas”.

He names health data, genetic maps and demographic profiles the new “rare earths” of power: data that, once aggregated, hands whoever controls it structural leverage over the future, deciding before anyone else who gets medicines, investment and protection. Without restoring people’s control over their own data, he warns, “the digital age will not be post-colonial, but colonial in another form.” Our data has, up until now, been perceived as merely the exhaust exuded by people’s lives. Recently, some governments, not all, and only partially, have realised the actual value of their people’s data, and are now trying to find ways to safeguard it as they would any other resource. We’ve come to realise that data can no longer be perceived as ‘no man’s land’, but we are still a long way from protecting it against wrongful and illegal appropriation.

Neo-colonialism

Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president, is widely credited with bringing the term “neo-colonialism” into African politics. It surfaces in the preamble of the 1963 Organisation of African Unity Charter, though the term itself predates him, used earlier by Jean-Paul Sartre in his critique of French rule in Algeria. It was Nkrumah, however, who gave it a systematic, continental definition two years later, in his 1965 book Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism.

By that definition, neo-colonialism describes the condition in which states appear to have international sovereignty from an outside perspective, despite their economic and political activity being directly controlled by external forces. If we borrow that definition, then neo-colonialism is currently resurfacing across Europe and in other sovereign states.

We are already witnessing this unfold in Ireland, where three-quarters of the country’s corporate tax revenue is now paid by large US tech and pharma companies, creating a lock-in that no government can opt out of. Even though Ireland is a rich Western nation, such a lock-in renders it structurally fragile. Ireland and other nations, rich or poor, with a well-nurtured fear of falling behind in the digital economy, will be forced to develop strong dependencies with the US or China, and will consequently have no other choice but to give in and, in all practicality, become vassals as the technology duopoly sets the agenda.

Politicians need to understand that technology-politics is tax-politics, foreign-politics, labour-politics, immigration-politics, and defence-politics. But it seems that our politicians and leaders are unable to put two and two together and accept that all these threads are intertwined. Of course, Nkrumah’s dependency was inherited, imposed by a prior coloniser. Ireland’s is self-chosen; it deliberately built the low-tax architecture decades ago to attract this investment. The dependency is now real and hard to escape, but it didn’t start as an imposition; it started as a strategy that calcified into a political trap.

Nkrumah states that neo-colonialism assumes a prior colonial history, but the digital form breaks with this assumption. There is no metropole, no inherited colonial relationship; Ireland’s dependency required none. This is the real danger that structurally fragile nations are facing. Leaders of nations around the world will need to understand that technology-politics preconditions policy design across the board. Unfortunately, the political discourse I’m currently witnessing is about fear of missed possibilities and opportunities, but not informed by the associated risks and dependencies.

As the large AI companies are scaremongering nations into investing in the infrastructure needed to power the data centres of the new digital economy, their products are at the same time spearheading the slow dismemberment of the very social structures that make up liberal democracies. We are being told that the coming digital transformation is here and that we have no choice but to accept it, as the choice has been made for us by the very same entities vested in making it a reality. We need politicians to think in systems and acknowledge that the fight for sovereignty has only just begun.

Europe and others, such as Canada, Australia and South Korea, will need to break free from their dependence on the current bipolar geopolitical landscape and invest in their own infrastructure to stay sovereign.

Let’s wrap it up

What people and our elected officials are failing to see is that it isn’t the physical bodies of people or geographic territories but our data and our values that are at risk. The systematic dismemberment of liberal democracy in favour of technocracy and tech moguls’ support for right-wing political movements around the world is the foundation on which this new world order will be built.

The fact that private enterprises have, for decades, surpassed governments in technology spending and innovation investment is now evident in governments’ dependence on technologies they no longer control. The best example being Elon Musk’s decision to switch off Starlink for Ukraine during their Kherson offensive, putting thousands of soldiers’ lives at risk.

The decision effectively reshaped the front line of the fighting, enabling Musk to take the outcome of a war into his own hands. I’m not convinced there’s one puppet-master holding these threads. But the wealth concentrated in a few private hands, combined with their megalomania, puts them in a position to intervene directly in nation-state conflicts. Their desired future is so bleak it makes George Orwell’s book 1984 look like the safer bet.