The Post-Humanist Construction of Colonial Identity: Artificial Intelligence and Digital Colonialism

Öz

Walter Benjamin’s understanding of history opposes progressive and linear historiography. According to him, history is a narrative that glorifies the victories of the dominant powers. “The history of the present” is the moment when the past suddenly erupts into the present; it is necessary to amplify the suppressed voices of the oppressed and reinterpret history. This study examines how colonial identity is reconstituted in the age of artificial intelligence and how digital colonialism operates within a post-humanist framework. Using the sociological descriptive content analysis method, practices of cultural domination on digital platforms, data mining, and algorithmic biases have been analyzed. The findings reveal that artificial intelligence systems are constructed in accordance with Western epistemologies, thereby perpetuating colonial power relations. Digital colonialism establishes a new regime of control in which identities are shaped through artificial intelligence. It has been determined that technology companies construct a new colonial order through data exploitation and algorithmic manipulation, further deepening cultural homogenization and digital dependency. This article emphasizes the necessity of developing a critical consciousness against digital colonialism. In the post-humanist era, the body is unchained, yet the mind is bound by data chains. While digital colonialism promises the free circulation of knowledge, it colonizes minds. Colonialism began with physical maps; now, it continues through digital ecosystems.

Anahtar Kelimeler

• The history of the present
• Digital colonialism
• Post-humanism
• Algorithmic dominatio
• Data colonialism
• Epistemological hegemony

Kolonyal Kimliğin Post-Hümanist İnşası: Yapay Zekâ ve Dijital Kolonyalizm

Öz

Walter Benjamin’in tarih anlayışı, ilerlemeci ve doğrusal tarih yazımına karşıdır. Ona göre tarih, egemenlerin zaferlerini yücelten bir anlatıdır. “Şimdiki zamanın tarihi”, geçmişin aniden bugün de patladığı andır; mazlumların bastırılmış seslerini duyurmak ve geçmişi yeniden okumak gerekir. Bu çalışma, yapay zekâ çağında kolonyal kimliğin nasıl yeniden üretildiğini ve dijital sömürgeciliğin post-hümanist bağlamda nasıl işlediğini incelemektedir. Sosyolojik betimsel içerik analizi yöntemiyle, veri madenciliği, algoritmik önyargılar ve dijital platformlarda kültürel tahakküm pratikleri analiz edilmiştir. Bulgular, yapay zekâ sistemlerinin Batılı epistemolojiler doğrultusunda inşa edilerek sömürgeci güç ilişkilerini sürdürdüğünü göstermektedir. Dijital sömürgecilik, kimliklerin yapay zekâ aracılığıyla şekillendirildiği yeni bir denetim rejimi ortaya koymaktadır. Teknoloji şirketlerinin veri sömürüsü ve algoritmik yönlendirme yoluyla alternatif bir kolonyal düzen inşa ettiği, bunun da kültürel homojenleşmeyi ve dijital bağımlılığı derinleştirdiği tespit edilmiştir. Bu makale, dijital sömürgeciliğe karşı eleştirel bir bilinç geliştirilmesi gerektiğini vurgulamaktadır. Post-hümanist çağda beden zincirsizdir ama zihin veri zincirlerine vurulmuştur. Dijital sömürgecilik, bilginin serbest dolaşımını vadederken zihinleri kolonize etmektedir. Kolonyalizm fiziksel haritalarla başladı, şimdi ise dijital ekosistemlerle sürmektedir.

Anahtar Kelimeler

• Anın tarihi
• Dijital sömürgecilik
• Post-hümanizm
• Algoritmik tahakküm
• Veri kolonyalizmi
• Epistemolojik hegemonya

Etik Beyan

Bu makale için etik beyan gerekmemektedir.

Kaynakça

1. Alamgir, Hashmi. The Commonwealth, Comparative Literature and the World: Two Lectures. Islamabad: Gulmohar, 1998.
2. Alatas, Syed Hussein. The Myth of the Lazy Native. London: Routledge, 2013.
3. Amato, Joseph A., and Joseph Anthony Amato. Dust: A History of the Small and the Invisible. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
4. Amin, Samir. L’eurocentrisme: Critique d’une idéologie. Paris: Anthropos Economica, 1988.
5. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso, 1983.
6. Arora, A., M. Barrett, E. Lee, E. Oborn, and K. Prince. “Risk and the Future of AI: Algorithmic Bias, Data Colonialism, and Marginalization.” Information and Organization 33, no. 3 (September 2023): 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infoandorg.2023.1.
7. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts. New York: Routledge, 2000.
8. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. New York: Taylor & Francis Group, 1989.

9. Badmington, Neil. Posthumanism. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2000.
10. Balogun, Shyngle K., and Ezekiel Aruoture. “Cultural Homogenization vs. Cultural Diversity: Social Media’s Double-Edged Sword in the Age of Globalization.”  African Journal of Social and Behavioural Sciences 14, no. 4 (2024): 1491–1512.
11. Barber, Benjamin R. “The Uncertainty of Digital Politics.” Harvard International Review 23, no. 1 (2001): 42–47.
12. Barder, Alexander D. “Global Cognitive Justice: Epistemological Pluralism and the Post-Colonial Critique in International Relations.” International Studies Review 16, no. 4 (2014): 653–654.
13. Barnett, Michael, and Thomas G. Weiss. “A Brief History of the Present.” In Humanitarianism in Question: Politics, Power, and Ethics, edited by Michael Barnett and Thomas G. Weiss, 1–48. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008.
14. Benjamin, Andrew. “The Decline of Art: Benjamin’s Aura.” Oxford Art Journal 9, no. 2 (1986): 30–35.
15. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” In Philosophers on Film: From Bergson to Badiou—A Critical Reader, edited by Christopher Kul-Want, 19–36. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019.
16. Benjamin, Walter. Pasajlar. Translated by Ahmet Cemal. İstanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2012.
17. Benjamin, Walter. Walter Benjamin’s Archive: Images, Texts, Signs. New York: Verso Books, 2015.
18. Bernstein, Mary. “Identity Politics.” Annual Review of Sociology 31, no. 1 (2005): 47–74.
19. Butts, Hugh F. “Frantz Fanon’s Contribution to Psychiatry: The Psychology of Racism and Colonialism.” Journal of the National Medical Association 71, no. 10 (1979): 1015–1018.
20. Canny, Nicholas, and Anthony Pagden. Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989.
21. Casilli, Antonio A. “Global Digital Culture; Digital Labor Studies Go Global: Toward a Digital Decolonial Turn.” International Journal of Communication 11 (2017): 3934–3954.
22. Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000.
23. Chambers, Iain, and Lidia Curti. The Post-Colonial Question. London: Routledge, 1996.
24. Cooper, Frederick. Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
25. Cover, Rob. Digital Identities: Creating and Communicating the Online Self. New York: Academic Press, 2015.
26. Fairchild, Halford H. “Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth in Contemporary Perspective.” Journal of Black Studies 25, no. 2 (1994): 191–199.
27. Fanon, Frantz. “Concerning Violence.” In On Violence: A Reader, edited by Bruce B. Lawrence and Aisha Karim, 79–100. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822390169-011.
28. Fanon, Frantz. Les Damnés de la Terre. Paris: François Maspero, 1961.
29. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press, 1963.
30. Fanon, Frantz. Peau noire, masques blancs. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1952.
31. Fernández Retamar, Roberto. Caliban: Notes About the Culture of Our America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
32. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Translated by Alan Sheridan. Paris: Gallimard, 1975.
33. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Routledge, 1995.
34. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Revised ed. New York: Continuum, 1996.
35. Gandhi, Leela. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1998.
36. Garland, David. “What Is a History of the Present? On Foucault’s Genealogies and Their Critical Preconditions.” Punishment & Society 16, no. 4 (2014): 365–384.
37. Greaves, Wilfrid. “Damaging Environments: Land, Settler Colonialism, and Security for Indigenous Peoples.” Environment and Society 9, no. 1 (2018): 107–124.
38. Guest, Krysti. “Exploitation Under Erasure: Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Engage Economic Globalisation.” Adelaide Law Review 19, no. 1 (1997): 73–93.
39. Handelman, Susan. “Walter Benjamin and the Angel of History.” CrossCurrents 41, no. 3 (1991): 344–352.
40. Homi, K. Bhabha. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.
41. Jonathan, Friedman. “The Past in the Future: History and the Politics of Identity.” American Anthropologist 94, no. 4 (1992): 837–859.
42. King, Anthony. “Thinking with Bourdieu Against Bourdieu: A ‘Practical’ Critique of the Habitus.” Sociological Theory 18, no. 3 (2000): 417–433.
43. Kipling, Rudyard. The Civilizing Mission and the Race for Empire, 1879–1902. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2018.
44. Kordzadeh, Nima, and Maryam Ghasemaghaei. “Algorithmic Bias: Review, Synthesis, and Future Research Directions.” European Journal of Information Systems 31, no. 3 (2022): 388–409.
45. Kracauer, Siegfried. “Time and History.” History and Theory 6 (1966): 65–78.
46. Kwet, Michael. “Digital Colonialism: US Empire and the New Imperialism in the Global South.” Race & Class 60, no. 4 (2019): 3–26.
47. Leander, Heldring and James A. Robinson. “Colonialism and Economic Development in Africa.” Working Paper No. w18566. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2012.
48. Leslie, Esther. “Benjamin gegen den Staat.” In Walter Benjamin: Politisches Denken, Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG, 2016.
49. Li, Jing-Jing, and Anne G. E. Collins. “An Algorithmic Account for How Humans Efficiently Learn, Transfer, and Compose Hierarchically Structured Decision Policies.” Cognition  254 (2025): 1–19.
50. Liu, Yigang. “Ecological Thinking About the Metaverse from a Posthumanist Perspective.” Critical Arts 38, no. 2–3 (2024): 86–103.
51. Lowy, Michael. Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History.” New York: Verso Books, 2016.
52. Mbembe, Achille. On the Postcolony. Vol. 12. California: University of California Press, 2001.
53. McClintock, Anne. “The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term ‘Postcolonialism.’” In Colonial Discourse/Postcolonial Theory, edited by M. Baker, P. Hulme, and M. Iverson, 253–266. London: Routledge, 1994.
54. McKenna, Tony. “Hegelian Dialectics.” Critique 39, no. 1 (2011): 155–72.
55. Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and the Colonized. Boston: Beacon Press, 1965.
56. MIT Technology Review. The Global AI Divide: How the West Is Dominating the Future of AI. Cambridge, MA: MIT Technology Review, 2021.
57. Mignolo, Walter. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012.
58. Mishra, Vijay, and Bob Hodge. “What Was Postcolonialism?” New Literary History 36, no. 3 (2005): 375–402. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20057902.
59. Muldoon, James, and Boxi A. Wu. “Artificial Intelligence in the Colonial Matrix of Power.” Philosophy & Technology 36, no. 4 (2023): 1–24.
60. Naheed, Misbah. “Colonialism and Its Impact on Modern Social Identity: A Cross-Cultural Study.” International Bulletin of History and Social Science 2, no. 1 (2025): 26–38.
61. Nandy, Ashis. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.
62. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1974.
63. Noda, Orion. “Epistemic Hegemony: The Western Straitjacket and Post-Colonial Scars in Academic Publishing.” Revista Brasileira de Política Internacional 63, no. 1 (2020): 1–14.
64. Nothias, Toussaint. “An Intellectual History of Digital Colonialism.” Journal of Communication, published online March 13, 2025: 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqaf003.
65. Østerlie, Thomas, and Eric Monteiro. “Digital Sand: The Becoming of Digital Representations.” Information and Organization 30, no. 1 (2020): 100275.
66. Peterson, Christopher. “The Posthumanism to Come.” Angelaki 16, no. 2 (2011): 127–41.
67. Pompa, Leon. “Philosophy of History.” In The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy, edited by Nicholas Bunnin and E. P. Tsui-James, 420–38. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.
68. Quijano, Aníbal. “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality.” In Globalizations and Modernities, Cultural Studies 21 (2007): 168–78. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380601164353.
69. Raghavan, Priya. Family, Politics and Popular Television: An Ethnographic Study of Viewing an Indian Serial Melodrama. PhD diss., Victoria University, 2008.
70. Roth, Michael S. “Foucault’s History of the Present.” History and Theory 20, no. 1 (1981): 32–46.
71. Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.
72. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.
73. Salmi, Hannu. What Is Digital History? New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2020.
74. Serafini, Luca. “The Old-New Epistemology of Digital Journalism: How Algorithms and Filter Bubbles are (re) Creating Modern Metanarratives.” Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 10, no. 1 (2023): 1–9.
75. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–313. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988.
76. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. London: Harvard University Press, 1999.
77. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. The Postcolonial Critic. East Sussex: Psychology Press, 1990.
78. Stalder, Felix. Manuel Castells: The Theory of the Network Society. Cambridge: Polity, 2006.
79. Steinmetz-Jenkins, Daniel. “Introduction: Whose Present? Which History?” Modern Intellectual History 20, no. 2 (2023): 559–570.
80. Stingl, Alexander I. The Digital Coloniality of Power: Epistemic Disobedience in the Social Sciences and the Legitimacy of the Digital Age. London: Lexington Books, 2015.
81. Strubell, Emma, Ananya Ganesh, and Andrew McCallum. “Energy and Policy Considerations for Deep Learning in NLP.” arXiv (2019): 1–12. https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.02243.
82. Swiffen, Amy. “Derrida Contra Agamben: Sovereignty, Biopower, History.” Societies 2, no. 4 (2012): 345–356.
83. Tülüce, Hicran. Jean-Jacques Rousseau—İnsan Özgür Doğmuştur Ama Her Yerde Zincire Vurulmuştur. İstanbul: Destek Publishing and Media Group, 2021.
84. UNCTAD. Digital Economy Report 2021: Cross-border Data Flows and Development. New York: United Nations, 2021.
85. UNESCO. Artificial Intelligence in Education: Challenges and Opportunities for Sustainable Development. Paris: UNESCO, 2022.
86. Veracini, Lorenzo. The Settler Colonial Present. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137372475.
87. Walker, Guy H., et al. “Critical Essay: Sociotechnical Construction.” Construction Management and Economics 42, no. 3 (2024): 251–265.
88. Whitrow, Gerald James. Time in History: Views of Time from Prehistory to the Present Day. London: Oxford University Press, 1989.
89. World Bank. The Future of Work in Africa: Harnessing the Potential of Digital Technologies for All. Washington, DC: World Bank, 2020.
90. World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Technology Trends 2021: Artificial Intelligence. Geneva: World Intellectual Property Organization, 2021.
91. Young, Robert J. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. London: Routledge, 1995.
92. Young, Robert J. Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016.
93. Young, Robert J. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. London: Routledge, 1990.
94. Zaagsma, Gerben. “On Digital History.” BMGN—Low Countries Historical Review 128, no. 4 (2013): 3–29.