agenda



reading notes:
    
A Brief Introduction to Decolonial Computing* 
Syed Mustafa Ali 

Does computing need to be decolonised, and if so, how should such 
decolonisation be effected? 


--> possibility that computing is – or at least should be considered as – a colonial phenomenon

- computing as an entangled outgrowth of various developments within fields such as logic, mathematics, 
science and technology

- ‘excavate’ the history – or rather, genealogy – of modernity, and one way of 
proceeding in this regard is to consider the formation of the contemporary world system in 
terms of its socio-political ontology (that is, its nature or being).

- two key terms require unpacking – colonisation and colonialism.


difference: colonisation tends to refer to expansionist 
migration – for example, to settler colonies in America or Australia, the establishment of 
trading posts and plantations etc. – while colonialism covers this situation along with the 
ruling of the existing indigenous peoples of so-called ‘new territories’.

 modern form [=from 1492 on?]
 
 colonies covered 84.6 per cent of the land surface of the globe
 
  European colonialism 
brought forth a world system constituted by a European ‘core’ and non-European ‘periphery’

 there is no 
modernity without colonialism

the modernity 
which colonialism engendered persists, albeit transformed under the condition of 
postmodernity, which has meant the persistence of certain ‘sedimented’ colonial ways of 
knowing and being – that is, colonial epistemology and ontology – based on systems of 
categorisation, classification and taxonomisation and the ways that these are manifested in 
practices, artefacts and technologies. 

computing is necessarily colonial insofar as it is modern

 more general 
‘expansionist’ thrust of computing associated with the transformation of the modern world 
through incessant ‘computerization
 and the rise of a global ‘information society’ following the 
‘cybernetic turn’ of the 1950s

[Mr. big H: a relentless movement of inter-connected ‘stock-piled’ resources or ‘standing-reserve’ (Bestand) including the human.]

something essential, albeit 
historically-essential, about computing as technological-modernity when viewed from 
modernity’s occluded, obscured and ignored ‘underside’. 

It is not so much that computing 
has a colonial impulse, but rather, as decolonial thinkers might argue, that it is colonial 
through and through. 

adoption of a ‘postcolonial’ computing.?

postcolonial condition= persistence of the colonial legacy in 
various cultural forms, practices, histories and knowledge structures. Postcolonial theory 
refers to intellectual inquiry concerned with engaging this legacy from a ‘critical’ perspective, 
contesting colonial domination from the vantage point of formerly colonised peoples.

Loomba (!!!):
“postcolonial theory has been accused of ... shift[ing] the focus from locations and 
institutions to individuals and their subjectivities”
+
postcolonial theory grounds itself in the post-
structuralist ideas of Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida, it leaves itself open to the charge of co-
option into a project of critical transformation that remains internal to Europe; in short, 
postcolonial theory ultimately constitutes, at least epistemologically, a Eurocentric critique of 
Eurocentrism.

Grosfoguel:  
the problem with world-system theory is that it frames it primarily in terms of 
economic relations. As a result, world-system theorists find it difficult to conceptualize culture 
while postcolonial theorists have difficulties conceptualizing political-economic processes. 
For this reason, Grosfoguel and other decolonial theorists advocate embracing ‘decolonial’ 

Anibal Quijano:
colonialism has ended yet the 
postcolonial situation is still marked by a condition of coloniality that involves: 
 An ongoing legacy of colonialism in contemporary societies in the form of social 
discrimination that has outlived formal colonialism and become integrated in succeeding 
postcolonial social orders 
 Practices and legacies of European colonialism in social orders and forms of knowledge 

but frames that genealogy as a globally-systemic 
‘colonial matrix of power’ in which coloniality expresses itself through systems of hierarchies, 
knowledge and culture. 

 the constitutive ‘dark underside’ of Western 
modernity as a colonial order in which race as naturalised, hierarchical (or taxonomic) 
exclusion, rather than capital, functions as organizing principle. 

--> structures multiple entangled asymmetric power-relations including, but 
not limited to, the epistemic, spatial, sexual, economic, ecological, political, spiritual and 
aesthetic.

Mignolo & Tlostanova.
 ‘delinking’ and border-thinking. That is, consideration of 
the ‘body-politics’ and ‘geo-politics’ of knowledge – that is, who is thinking / knowing and 
from where – engaging thereby with the material dimensions of epistemology in contrast to 
the abstract / disembodied ‘theo-politics’ and, following secularization, ‘ego-politics’ of 
universalizing Eurocentric epistemology by thinking from the margins (borders, frontiers, 
periphery). Such ‘materiality’ is not that of the race-less / de-raced structures of political 
economy or culture, but that of the corporeal experiences of those who have been excluded 
from the production of knowledge by colonial modernity.

basis for subjecting the idea of a single linear time and 
associated notions of ‘progress’ and ‘development’ to critique in terms of the operation of 
power, and motivating the shift away from a universal perspective towards a ‘pluriversal’ perspective – that is, a worldview constituted from multiple sites of enunciation, pre-
eminently those situated at the margins of the world system.

Ali:
Decolonial computing= a response to computing’s ‘colonial impulse’ 

 decolonial computing, as a ‘critical’ project, is about interrogating who is doing 
computing, where they are doing it, and, thereby, what computing means both 
epistemologically (i.e. in relation to knowing) and ontologically (i.e. in relation to being).

crucial difference(s)postcolonial  between decolonial and 
postcolonial computing

1) completely silent on issues of 
‘race’, as are other proponents of postcolonial computing who instead speak in terms of 
‘colonial’, ‘cultural’ and ‘power’ formations
2) postcolonial is  silent on questions of 
reparations

 interrogate the body-politics and geo-politics of the pronouns ‘we’ and ‘us’ in such statements

Wendy Chun:
    "we need to examine ‘race and/as computing"


Mahendran:
     emergence of race and computation in 
modernity, and their convergence in the contemporary postmodern era, in terms of the mind-
body polarity as viewed through the ‘lens’ of existential phenomenology. 
->(the ‘embodied turn’ within computing and cognitive science)

abstract body presented as universal --->  the abstract or universal body of ubicomp (and related 
disciplines) is arguably Eurocentric / Western-centric. 

 the ‘embodied turn’ within computing constitutes a movement from an abstract 
disembodied computing to an abstract embodied computing

the push to establish a global ‘internet 
of things’ is historically-founded upon a prior ‘internet of things’, viz. the international network 
of land, resources, and enslaved humans as objects (inhabitants of Fanon’s ‘Zone of Non-
Being’) situated in a colonised periphery constituted by colonising human subjects situated in 
‘the core’. 

>>> Further Decolonising Computing
need to expand the decolonial computing endeavour by including more explicitly ‘religious’ considerations

coloniality is necessarily tied to race, racism and racialization, and computing is a 
modern/colonial phenomenon, it follows that computing must also be considered in terms of 
its relation to ‘religion’.

interaction between the cultural Other as a systematic epistemological design and the 
technological Other of the European mind 
(mechanized mind continued)

 Firstly, consider their geo-political and body-political 
orientation when designing, building, researching or theorizing about computing phenomena; 
and secondly, embrace the ‘decolonial option’ as an ethics, attempting to think through what 
it might mean to design and build computing systems with and for those situated at the 
peripheries of the world system, informed by the epistemologies located at such sites, with a 
view to undermining the asymmetry of local-global power relationships and effecting the 
‘decentering’ of Eurocentric / West-centric universals.

periphery of computing--->
informed by a commitment to decolonial praxis and what might be described as an ‘open-source’ techno-
political orientation, asymmetries of power notwithstanding




crossed refs:
[Maria Dada: https://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org/book/index.php?title=Rehearsal_as_the_%E2%80%98Other%E2%80%99_to_Hypercomputation ]
[pag 9: https://www.macba.cat/edu/quadern-educatiu-cat.pdf]
[testing texting south https://machineresearch.wordpress.com/2016/09/26/jara-rocha/]

alternative modernities https://brb.memoryoftheworld.org/Dilip%20Parameshwar%20Gaonkar/Alternative%20Modernities%20(9245)/Alternative%20Modernities%20-%20Dilip%20Parameshwar%20Gaonkar.pdf




***
computing as a colonial phenomenon
to ‘excavate’ the history –or rather, genealogy–of modernity,

world system theorist Immanuel Wallerstein: the history of the modern world-system has been in large part a history of the expansion of European states and peoples into the rest of the world, commencing with the so-called Columbian ‘voyages of discovery’in 1492 CE => capitalist world economy

colonisation and colonialism.
colonisation: ongoing process of control by which a central system of power dominates surrounding landsand their ‘resources’ (people, animals etc.) through a process of ‘settlement’, i.e. establishment of a colony; expansionist migration
colonialism: the establishment, exploitation, maintenance, acquisition, and expansion of a colony in one territory by a political power from another territory; the ruling of the existing indigenous peoples of so-called ‘new territories’

[Europe = Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch, British, Danish, German, Belgian]

settlements:
    expropriation of land, labour, materials and knowledges
    genocide of indigenous peoples and enslavement of others –specifically, Africans
    a world systemconstituted by a European ‘core’ and non-European ‘periphery’

"there is no [European?] modernity without colonialism."

colonial epistemology and ontology –based on systems of categorisation, classification and taxonomisation and the ways that these are manifestedin practices, artefacts and technologies

"computing is necessarily colonial insofar as it is modern"

Paul Dourish and Scott Mainwaring


Martin Heidegger
computing as technological-modernity

Loomba

Ramon Grosfoguel

Anibal Quijano
Walter Mignolo

Walter Mignolo and Madina Tlostanova

Syed Mustafa Ali

Dourish and Mainwaring

Mahendran

Frantz Fanon
‘open-source’ techno-political orientation

de

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CELL's CONVERSAITON:
    
    

borders, frontiers, periphery of computing
Ubicomp: Ubiquitous computing is a concept in software engineering, hardware engineering and computer science where computing is made to appear anytime and everywhere. In contrast to desktop computing, ubiquitous computing can occur using any device, in any location, and in any format

everyware-elseware
pervasive computing
ambient intelligence
pluriware <3

ubiquity: pervasive, everywhere

time as an axes is missing from the text

where does it shake "us"?
many parts, also personally. Feels like a shaky foundation of what we're also trying to do.

modernity/computing only from the west, but only explicitated later: "western computing"
multiple modernities?

Duke University Press published tis: https://www.dukeupress.edu/alternative-modernities
https://brb.memoryoftheworld.org/Dilip%20Parameshwar%20Gaonkar/Alternative%20Modernities%20(9245)/Alternative%20Modernities%20-%20Dilip%20Parameshwar%20Gaonkar.pdf

[ej: criollas?]

us/we

what is the missing time  axis?
what are multiple mo dernities?
multiple displacements of the west from its center
geography + power

defixing geographies without erasing the origins of damage
line of lim


measuring
ways of life/esistence
culture embedded there
embodiments

citational politics: the Ahmed-McKittrick case
worldvidews, who can afford to not quote, for the sake of liberation?


could the text be intervened by changing the word computing to another?

what is computing?-> absent from the text.

the text becomes canonical in its cuteness and simplicity
 I'm sorry i need a minute np<3
 
 

[crossing the texts that freethought recommended us to read]

Uncertain Archives
Actions:
generations of connectivity
owl
7g


case studies? controversies? research questions?
problem of dealing with an "object of study"
what if we start with a controversy
  questions? (probably not to give answers to) something experienced, observed?
  Something we can commit to

a trigger, a vehicle?

look back at something?

what is meant by discomfort?

also the feeling of discomfort, a sensation and not an object, not a materialization. Maybe a condition of materialization? or an aftermath of the materialization of technology?
--> the affective connections between the material and the infrastructural

still very strong, this idea of discomfort
we feel discomforted by the term fellow, but have to use zoom, bbb breaks down: why not accessible outside of EU!?
discomfort from academia
 discomfort from bbb / zoom contingrncies
 the discomforting owl
around us: the spatial
 the clutch of political mobilization
  the aesthetics of computation are  aligned with the values of technologies
   there is no space for  other ways