The talk will present a historical timeline to uncover the colonial roots of undersea cables and how big tech continue from this legacy through a narrative of expanding Internet infrastructure to bridge the digital divide, whilst also extracting resources to fuel the AI boom. Drawing from historical maps, art, and pre-colonial laws of the sea, we will look at the infrastructure that carries up to 95 percent of the internet across oceans. The goal will be to explore ingrained value systems in infrastructure that reinforce colonial logic in the expansion of big tech into African internet infrastructure.

Those who attend the talk will gain a new perspective of how internet infrastructure is a hidden system of power that extracts from people and land, as well as the colonial logic behind it. The talk will end with recommendations for reclaiming internet infrastructure using decolonial methods that do not replicate systems of oppression, especially when attempting to build green infrastructures.

Esther presents the outcomes of her art research on ‘Undersea Cables in Africa: New Frontiers of Digital Colonialism’, co-written with Dr. Abeba Birhane, focusing on the parallels of pre-colonial telegraph infrastructures and present day undersea cables owned by Meta and Google. This art research, which has received awards from the Green Screen Coalition Catalyst Fund and the Mozilla Creative Media award, interrogates the hidden systems of power transferred through colonial communication infrastructures.