ALGORITHMIC ENCLOSURES: NEOCOLONIAL EXPLOITATION AND THE DIGITAL PLANTATION METAPHOR IN ANNALEE NEWITZ'S AUTONOMOUS

Abstract

The paper challenges the constitutive formations of power in the realm of data capitalism, claiming that the modern regimes of data harvesting and algorithmic workforce represent a new neocolonial exploitation. By applying a literary approach to the novel Autonomous (2017) by Annalee Newitz, this paper will argue that the posthuman fiction tentatively fixes a figurative concept of the digital plantation as a metaphor that can be used to interpret the continuity between the historical process of resource extraction and the modern-day digital extraction process. The conceptual framework of the analysis is based on the ideas of surveillance capitalism that were elaborated by Shoshana Zuboff, the notion of data colonialism developed by Nick Couldry, and Ulises Mejias that elucidate the mining of human experience as raw material and the algorithmic control of this raw material. A critical examination of the indentured AI, Paladin, and its bioeconomy based on the principle of patents in the novel shows the systematic commodification of bodies, behaviors, and intellectual properties, which is like the logic of the colonial plantation. The inquiry concludes that Autonomous does not only diagnose this exploitative system but also speculates on the means of hacking and sabotage as crucial acts of post-colonial resistance. What is novel about the study is its amalgamation of literary criticism and critical data studies that hypothesizes the algorithmic enclosure as a crucial point in which the psychological domination of the datafied subject and the possibility of decolonial agency are argued out narratively.