ABSTRACT
This chapter imagines how digital tools like search engines can reinforce current and historical inequalities by providing new modes of “ownership” over the digital representation of marginalized groups. To illustrate this point, I will use the Google Search results for the term “Ubuntu.” Ubuntu is a Zulu word referring to the South African spiritual philosophy of human connectedness and communal responsibility. However, the top search result for “Ubuntu” leads you to an open source software operating system. Because Google is primarily a multi-national ad broker, the company Ubuntu has an economic incentive to direct the digital representation of the term “Ubuntu” through search engine optimization. The chapter seeks to show how thinking critically about the search results for “Ubuntu” reveals how free market beliefs and values are encoded into search engines, and how users are, often unknowingly, accepting the value systems of neoliberalism, and corporate and colonial individualism. Through search engine optimization, digital tools like Google’s search engine incentivize a kind of “colonial gaze” where prevailing ideas about the democratic potential of the internet blind users from the ways these tools privilege the values, beliefs, ideologies, and ontologies of the Western world.
