Colonised society is often pictured as being static, timeless, and spaceless. We will use these characteristics to make a determination about the contemporary age and its own centres of power. We will ask, is tech a colonial tool? Colonial relationships are hierarchical, extractive and exploitative. Extraction was initiated to increase the flow of capital within Europe and took the form of stealing directly from the Americas, Asia and Africa. 

The extractive nature of tech colonialism resides in the minerals that need to be mined to make the hardware for products, but also applies to the case of data extraction from the streams of information given by as residents of all countries go online. The uneven consequences of colonialism are felt across the entire system. Our theory of colonialism needs to be amended to account for the complicated territory brought into being in the current moment. The players and forms taken across imperial spaces have changed but we keep doing the same things for centuries across the globe. 

If colonialism is a relationship, rather than a historical period, we can practice decolonial thinking refusing to be included in particular narratives of help, of loss, of diversity, and of erasure. We might narrow the conceptual focus to a particular, solvable problem: our future. The past is here, the floor is paved, let’s learn from it. Via public space interventions we propose visual stimuli to act differently in the future, using elements from our past.