Imperialisme 2.0

Textbook on digital imperialism

Written by Lektoren

Impe­ri­al­isme 2.0
2 min­ut­ters læsning

Read­ing Sarah Wynn-Williams book “Care­less Peo­ple” and the recent ver­dict on Meta and Youtube was the final straw.

I would like to teach a course in his­to­ry on dig­i­tal impe­ri­al­ism for my K12 stu­dents, but as far as I know there are no text­books on the mar­ket right now for that pur­pose. If you know of any, please let me know. 

But maybe I should write one myself. 😊

I am a his­to­ry teacher, not a pro­gram­mer. So the pur­pose would be to stim­u­late and con­tribute to stu­dents’ crit­i­cal think­ing on big tech (broli­garchy), influ­encers and their busi­ness models. 

But I could use some help … I fol­low many peo­ple who have more tech­ni­cal insight than me. Maybe we can crowd­source ideas and pri­ma­ry sources that could be used in this pro­jekt. Or we could even co-write it? The pri­ma­ry sources should be suit­able for 16–18 year old stu­dents to read and understand.

For now, my idea is to write chap­ters con­sist­ing of an intro­duc­tion fol­lowed by pri­ma­ry sources for the stu­dents to eval­u­ate and work with. These pri­ma­ry sources could be any­thing from memes to UN reports, to inside doc­u­ments from whistle­blow­ing tech­work­ers, and also dig­i­tal mate­r­i­al, maybe this TED-talk from Car­ole Cadwalladr

My out­line for chap­ters in the book right now (very ear­ly stages) This might be too much and have to be trimmed !

  1. His­tor­i­cal empires vs dig­i­tal empires
  2. The smart­phone
  3. Face­book’s vision: Con­nect­ing people
  4. “Sen­a­tor, we run ads”: Data min­ing as a busi­ness model
  5. Influ­encers (oth­er than your beloved teachers)
  6. Elim­i­nat­ing com­petion – acqui­si­tion of Insta­gram og WhatsApp
  7. Internet.org: Face­book as the internet
  8. Schrems I 2015 (and 2 2020?) — Facebookistan
  9. The elec­tion of Trump in 2016
  10. Chi­na: Con­nect­ing — or sur­veilling? — people
  11. Myan­mar  — Face­book as a weapon — 
  12. Brex­it and Cam­bridge Analytica
  13. GDPR 2018 — lob­by­ism agains that?
  14. Google’s search monopoly
  15. “Sen­a­tor, we run ads” — the ftc hearing
  16. Ver­dict 2026: Meta delib­er­ate­ly harms young peo­ple 2026
  17. “Let’s juice up the algo­rithm” — avoid­ing restric­tive leg­is­la­tion — politi­cians addic­tion to social media
  18. The arms race with LLM’s : Sam Alt­mann vs. Musk vs. Anthropic

Per­haps the stu­dents could con­duct a sur­vey of how much time their net­work spend on social media and why they use it.

This is not a typ­i­cal his­to­ry sub­ject, I know. But his­to­ri­ans often focus on pow­er struc­tures and con­se­quences of new tech­nol­o­gy. We should offer our stu­dents a taste of the red pill 🔴.

If you know of any pri­ma­ry sources that could be used for this project, or if you have any oth­er thoughts, please let me know. 

Edit: Added Schrems — props to Randi

1 tanke om “Textbook on digital imperialism”

  1. @lektoren Not a text­book, but have you seen Face­book­istan? https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5456652/

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