Page 67 - Monocle Quarterly Journal Vol 3 Issue 2 Spring

As with the early success of the Suez Canal Company in the late 1800s, Big Tech has in the last decade or so exploited the underdeveloped, fragmented and often wholly inadequate data and digital privacy legislations that have existed until recently. In fact, the Suez Canal Company benefitted tremendously from the loose,
work would create. The history of the canal’s contentious construction was further aggravated in 1956, when conflict erupted after Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal, in what was later seen to be a brash and irrational decision by the hot- blooded ruler. In response to the nationalisation and the subsequent blockade against their ships using the canal, Israeli forces invaded the Sinai Peninsula. This action triggered the Anglo-French troops to step in, believing a full-scale war between Egypt and Israel must be avoided at all costs. The resulting conflict and Nasser’s deliberate targeting and sinking of foreign ships in the Canal became known as the Suez Canal Crisis and caused its temporary closure in April of 1957. With the crisis promising to escalate even further and world trade already thoroughly disrupted, the decision was made to set up the first ever international peacekeeping force – UNEF – under the control of the United Nations, to ensure stability and safety for all using this globally strategic waterway.
The comparisons that can be drawn between today’s data domination by Big Tech and the turbulent history of the Suez Canal should serve as an important historical lesson, albeit one that played out over 150 years ago. The monopolistic control of unfathomable amounts of public and private data of everyday citizens is problematic in many ways, not least of which is the power that this information holds in a world that will soon be radically changed by the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence in every sphere of our lives. The fact is that these companies will not willingly release their mighty hold on this data, which means that at some
Taking advantage of the lax operating environment they
have found themselves in,
these companies can be seen as modern-day colonists of the
digital wilderness...
colonial-style agreements that allowed them to mono- polise the critical waterway for many years. Whilst the public and the State have recently awoken to the fact that Big Tech corporations are hoarding massive amounts of user data on their servers, there is no way to wind back the years of plunder that have already occurred. This act-now-and-ask-permission-later mantra of these giant firms has effectively put them in a position where any competitors attempting to enter the market will start with a handicap the size of a decade’s worth of data.
Whilst some may see these companies as brilliant pioneers in their industries, one could also make the argument that they are robber barons disguised in the jeans-and-t-shirt uniform synonymous with Silicon Valley. Taking advantage of the lax operating environ- ment they have found themselves in, these companies can be seen as modern-day colonists of the digital wilderness, planting a flag in every territory where they find valuable resources and drawing up imaginary borders to divide and conquer the somewhat bewildered populations that reside in the newly colonised lands. But as history suggests, no such monopolistic dominance of economically critical resources exists for long without a violent rebuttal.
In the case of the Suez Canal, it is estimated that at any given time during the 10-year construction period there were 30 000 labourers working on the Canal, with more than 1.5 million people from across the world working on the project in total. Most of these workers, however, were corvée – unfree, unpaid Egyptian labourers who would never see a penny of the wealth that their
The comparisons that
can be drawn between today’s
BIG TECH AND THE COLONISATION OF DATA
data domination by Big Tech and the turbulent history of
the Suez Canal should serve as an important historical lesson...
point their iron grip may have to be forcefully broken. Whether this will happen peacefully or violently is hard to tell, but if history is to be the prophet of the future – as it so often is – then Big Tech may soon experience its own form of Suez Canal crisis.
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