Maybe colonialism, like racism, is something much more easy to spot when you are the side suffering from it.
They are not forced to use Wikipedia. They just happen to live in Africa, where most people live in 19th century by Western/Northern standards and they are hacking their way to 21st century. What would you do if you had to pay 80% of your salary for 1Gb of internet?
The hacker culture is about "creatively circumventing limitations of systems to achieve novel and clever outcomes". I can't find a better example of it.
Let the others call them pirates, but here I think we should celebrate what they did and call them by what they really are, true hackers.
I was never arguing the creativity part of the wikipedia hack, I adore that and welcome it. I can absolutely understand why they do it and how they do it.
I was just questioning the sense of entitlement that is apparently hidden in the "colonialism" criticism, but this seems to be so ideological that it's hard to get to a basic agreement. Different views on the world, I guess.
I can understand the sentiment of feeling offended by the term "colonialism" when giving away something for free. It implies a negative intent when really people/organizations intended to do something charitable.
That said, I can also understand the sentiment of feeling "colonialized" when people are only allowed to use something under conditions/mores imposed by a "foreign party".
Different world views then? I think it's more like two sides of the same coin...
It might be more comparable to missionary work. Wikipedia is providing valuable resources, but that charitable work can be interwoven with foreign ideals.
But it seems like Wikipedia are conscious of that, so they've taken a hands-off approach to this.
Hacking doesn't always cost the system operator anything, in fact I think the confusion between hacking as the activity of creating creative improvised solutions and the circumvention of security comes from settings like the hacking of the phone system where the cost to the phone network of phreakers making calls was negligible.
File sharing is a big resource hog. It's a totally different story.
Well define 'forced' in your view please. If I hold a gun to your head and say your money or your life am I reeeallly forcing you to give me you money or are you giving me your money out your own choice? Absent Mindflayers 'forced' is always going to be on a continuum.
So if I roll in and say "Here have this access to this thing everyone in the world claims is an economic and social miracle. Free!" and then later once you start using it I roll back around and say "oh yeah, by the way you have to follow the laws of the United States, the laws of a country you are entirely unrepresented by, if you want to use this thing that you're already using. This thing which every one swears is an absolute game changer, this thing that people claim will jump you into the 21st century* , this thing that everyone around the world swears you need."
Okay it's not a gun to their head but it certainly feels more than a hair coercive.
*people being varying levels of racist/ignorant in believing that "the 21st century" is not a date on a calendar but instead a particular sort of culture.
It may "feel" coercive but you didn't make any sort of case that it is. You may view words as having personal definitions that make your point valid but that is a linguistic trick, not an argument.
This is the objection to zero-rated services. Angolans get to use the internet, but they only get to use the zero-rated bits of it. And they have to use them in ways that westerners approve of.
It comes down to money, really. Do we put a "you must be this rich to use the internet" sign up on the planet's communications, or do we allow people to bring their culture and ideas to the party despite their poverty?
This whole thing reminds me of UseNet in the early days. It was supposed to be about news and conversations. It ended up being about sharing copyrighted content, because it was one of the only ways we could do it.
So we (Westerners) misused our internet services to share copyrighted content in the early days of our internet experience, why are we even surprised, let alone objecting, that others are doing the same?
I still don't understand the argument why people who are suddenly given a free thing, and not forced to use it, are now a victim of that and entitled to get everything for free.
If we give free drugs for certain diseases to a poor country, would that mean that we enforce our "Western view on health" on them, and that they are actually entitled to get all drugs for free, otherwise it is a form of colonialism?
That, generally, is not the argument. The side you don't see goes a bit like this[1]:
Folks in poor countries aren't stupid, and know Facebook isn't just being nice. Zero-rating strangles local startups who have to compete with the free walled garden; it is a spigot for western culture, which many object to[2]; and it smacks of a particularly Valley-flavored mix of paternalism, greed, and the sort of tote-bagger do-gooderism that led to some major travesties of charity. (You could go look up how Jello Biafra picked his stage name on Wikipedia, over a zero-rated link, if you like.)
Suffice to say, there are good reasons why many people in poor countries are extremely wary of westerners bearing gifts.
This bit isn't directed at the parent, and is something I wanted to say in a different thread about poverty, but here's a rule of thumb that may help: If you observe something that doesn't make sense to you, it is likely that you don't have the whole picture. This rule applies to the behavior of people with less money than you, as well.
[1] If you're really interested, reading some history of colonialism would be good. I don't know your background, but if it involved typical high school U.S. history, you likely learned that colonialism was a sort of adventure-phase where westerners explored and planted flags and whatnot, mostly ignoring the commercial interests driving it. And a lot of the horror.
[2] Not even going to get in to that one, aside from saying that if leading contenders in the Republican primary can hate on U.S. culture, so can folks who actually got the pointy end of the stick.
While your critique is valid when targeted to the "Free Basics" programs (or similar) when it comes to this particular instance of piracy you're reading too much into it. This is just a piracy hack. People everywhere have been doing this kind of thing for as long as there has been an internet and the reason is usually convenience, not some PolSci-level critique of neoliberalism.
I was responding to the parent comment, not the piracy.
On piracy, of course you're absolutely right - given the existence of a storage mechanism, someone will put stuff in it. See also: hacks that use dynamic DNS updates to store and share information.
I personally would welcome a free (as in no money) unrestricted but low bandwidth Internet connection for everyone. Paid would be faster.
I'm in the UK. Free mobile broadband at something like 256Kbits with cheap USB dongles would allow access for all children & low income adults who could find a suitable client device (recycled laptop/cheap smartish phone whatever). Sort of basic income argument applied to Internet connectivity.
Am I being colonialist? Remember I live in the country that more or less invented colonialism!
Kinda depends. Do the people in the UK who use this service have to abide by laws of other countries, laws that don't exist in the UK? That's the problem here, right?
My proposition is 'basic income Internet' provided at low cost in each country by $Government and $PreferredSupplier. Lowish bandwidth, possibly with fair use style bandwidth cap.
All currently existing legal frameworks remain in place in $Country.
The comment was in response to your last question "am I being colonialist?", and my response was intended to point out that the problem isn't really "here's some free stuff", but "here's some stuff that doesn't cost anything (and may well be donated by people who mean well), that comes with other strings attached"
It isn't really classic colonialism of course (we're not talking about enslaving a nation and stealing their goods). But if the basic income internet were not in fact provided by $Government, but instead by $corporation or $otherGovernment, and carried with it strings - "abide by $otherGovernment's laws while using the internet here in this country", then you could argue that's a colonialist approach. It's especially problematic when governments are subverted to transmit corporatist legal frameworks.
In your example in the most basic sense, it's not colonialist - it's just good sense, a government providing a basic level of access to the internet to all.
On the other hand to all of this, I feel like sometimes we're missing the mountain while staring at molehills. Yes, facebook's free basics seem like a naked grab for users and an attempt to stifle homegrown innovation in countries that don't have a lot of network infrastructure. On the other hand, we're still very much dealing with actual colonialism in our global economy. The fact that it's cheaper to ship cotton to Bangladesh to make t-shirts that in turn get shipped back to the US for me to wear (than, say, making the shirt in the US where the cotton is grown) says a lot about the influence of north/western economies on the rest of the world. We (meaning northern and western nations for the most part) still extract tremendous value from the countries we used to explicitly call "colonies". This is probably a much bigger problem (both ethically and in terms of long-term sustainability of our markets)
If this is important to you, and it's a noble goal, I suggest you go to Africa, build a startup and give those Angolans free internet access. Accusing others of not making their business free is not the way to go.
Encouraged, is perhaps more appropriate, as Wikipedia is the service being zero rated rather than something else that would be more suitable to the task at hand.
Forced, to the extent that they cannot afford to use other services that are not zero rated. The article mentions $2.5 for 50 Mb which is quite expensive by any measure.
