The word imperialism has once again become descriptively relevant. The exercise of power over territories, which originally defined the term, now shifts toward the mediations that make such power conceivable. The international press senses it: it speaks of the return of spheres of influence, the struggle between the United States and China, control over strategic minerals, or the geopolitics of data. Yet, only rarely does it refer to the most insidious form that this power takes. Headlines show the visible surface of conflict; we must descend into its subterranean logic. What is at stake is not only the distribution of global power but the reconfiguration of the very conditions of our existence: the transformation of human life into a universal field of extraction and calculation.

The 19th century was the era of industrial imperialism; the 20th, of financial imperialism; ours, of algorithmic imperialism. On the surface, powers no longer compete for colonies but for markets and information flows. In reality, new empires—Google, Amazon, Apple, Meta— increasingly control states through the appropriation of their structural intelligence, reproducing the same domination matrix that once legitimized conquest and exploitation, only in a subtler form: technological dependence and attention capture. Whoever controls algorithms controls the possibilities and limits of the world: deciding what is seen, said, or ignored. Domination no longer operates by force but by design.

This reading extends, in a contemporary key, the debate Néstor Kohan (2022) collected in Theories of Imperialism and Dependency from the Global South. There, David Harvey (2003) and John Smith (2016) confront two ways of thinking about capital expansion: accumulation by dispossession, which expropriates commons and commodifies the vital, and superexploitation of labor, which transfers value from the Global South to the North by systematically degrading living conditions. In the digital world, both processes converge: platforms strip users of their data and Southern workers of their time and bodies. The cloud, celebrated as a metaphor of progress, rests on a subsoil of extraction, precariousness, and waste.

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