Digitizing Other Economies: A Critical Review

Contemporary hunter-gatherers, horticulturalists, pastoralists, agriculturalists and, on a much smaller scale, feudalists are threatened continuously by dominant (post-)industrial, often capitalist, economies. The latter perpetually seek to dominate the former through colonialism and development, violent resource extraction, and the more insidious effects of environmental change. Multidisciplinary research on digital economic transformations postulates that the global spread of digital technologies—designed largely by and for industrial capitalists’ needs and values—accelerates these domination processes. This research on data colonialism or digital capitalism has generated extensive, valuable insights into how technological designs constrain users’ choices. However, there is one major blind spot: Empirically, this research has engaged, primarily, with ‘inter-capitalist struggles’ focusing on contexts dominated by industrial-capitalist and, occasionally, industrial-command and mixed-market economic systems and values. Contemporary other economies and inter economic struggles are largely missing, even though, especially ethnographic, research has demonstrated the resilience of other economic systems and values in response to various industrial and industrial-capitalist colonization and domination attempts.