Colonial Legacies and the Settler Colonial Present in Google: An Anticolonial and queer Response
A thesis in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
University of New South Wales
School of Arts and Media
Faculty of Arts Design and Architecture
Bronwyn Miller
Thesis summary.
Google’s monopolistic expansion and authority over disparate fields of knowledge invigorates imperial and colonial practices, such as the hierarchical ordering of humanity, resource extraction, and surveillance, and in ways that make its underlying logics operative in social, cultural, political, and scientific domains. By engaging with the observations and interests of 19 Indigenous and/or LGBTQIA++ peoples living on Gadigal and Dharug land (Sydney, Australia) between 2021 and 2024, this thesis examines Google’s representation of information, algorithmic technologies, values or standards of practice, and the possibilities of resistance to Google’s ‘colonisation’ of information systems in ‘so-called Australia’ (Carlson and Day 2021; 2023).
Research Questions:
RQ1, ‘How do Indigenous and/or queer peoples respond to Google’s representation of their identity terms, histories, and geographies?’ (Chapter 4).
RQ2, ‘How do Google’s technologies contribute to, complicate, or contest colonial and settler colonial logics?’ (Chapter 5).
RQ3, ‘How do Google's values contribute to colonial and settler colonial logics in so-called Australia?’ (Chapter 6).
RQ4, ‘How do we [Indigenous and/or queer peoples] resist? (Chapter 7)
These are the findings:
Google deepens, perpetuates, and expands settler colonialism.
Google’s algorithmic structures are stabilising settler colonial data relations in information environments. Google does not connect the term ‘Aboriginal’ to any data that speaks to Indigenous excellence, and comparing Indigenous to ‘settler’ searches demonstrated the propagation of colonial/modern knowledge and deficit data.
Google Maps naturalises the dispossession of Indigenous lands.
Google’s representation of place that upholds and naturalises the dispossession of lands while also providing the technical infrastructure for racist engagement with place-names. Maps also provides digital access to sacred sites.
Google’s perpetuates gender and sexual binaries.
Google’s autocomplete suggestions contribute to settler colonial attempts to stabilise identity categories by continually reiterating associations across multiple years. This contradicts gender and sexualities’ “own performative fluidity” that also “serves a social policy of gender regulation and control” (Butler 1988, 528).
Google commodifies AI ethics.
Google’s ethics are positioned as the global standard for AI. However, their imprecise and adaptive corporate rhetoric that emphasise specific narratives around its technologies and possible solutions, for example, ‘access,’ ‘inclusion,’ and ‘diversity’ can cause more harm than ethical practice—such as ‘inclusion’ referring to surveillant and extractive data practices.
Google’s removal of discriminatory results is insufficient.
The longevity of discrimination in Google’s systems shows that removing visible ‘problematic’ recommendations only addresses the surface of data linkage and sorting systems, and alternative methods are required to create a safer online environment.
Resistance is possible.
There are various ‘refusal’ practices that challenge Google’s position of the inevitability of ubiquitous AI. Abolition, digital disengagement and self-defence, reparation, and technological sovereignty support Indigenous and queer refusal/liberatory futures.