In an article excerpted from her book Sounding the Nation: Radio and the Politics of Auditory Culture in Interwar France, Rebecca P. Scales addresses the topic of an imperative for, and origins of, French colonial surveillance – as exercised on the listening habits of the “native” populations in Algeria:

In November of 1934, Algerian Governor-General Jules Carde asked the Algiers Police Prefecture to investigate a rumor circulating through the French bureaucracy that “natives” in the Arab cafés (café maures) of the city were tuning in to biweekly Arabic broadcasts transmitted by an unspecified Italian radio station that featured “commentaries unfavorable to France” and “openly attacked France’s Muslim policy.”¹

As the governor of three overseas French départements, Carde had already received notification that the airwaves over North Africa were becoming dangerous. A few months earlier, Jean Berthoin, director of the Sûreté Nationale (National Security) in the French ministry of interior, warned regional prefects that “[i]n a number of cities a large portion of the radio-electric industry – sales and the construction of devices – is in the hands of foreigners.”² Berthoin feared that the dominance of large multinational firms over France’s radio-electric market would allow enemy agents to mask radio transmitters under the cover of radio sales and to report clandestinely on troop maneuvers and defense preparations. He therefore instructed prefects to begin “discreet investigations” into the civil status, political affiliation, and nationality of radio merchants and their personnel.³ While ostensibly directed at metropolitan prefects, these Sûreté directives resonated in Algeria – a strategic periphery of “Greater France” and home both to a sizeable European population of German and Italian descent and to multiple garrisons of France’s indigenous-based African army (l’armée d’Afrique). By 1935, rumors of radio espionage and subversive auditory propaganda that circulated through the Algerian colonial bureaucracy compelled Governor Carde to construct a colony-wide surveillance web in order to monitor radio sales, investigate Algerian listening habits, and assess the effects of radio propaganda on the “native mentality.”⁴

In light of Scales’ historical analysis, what are we to make of the possible surveillance of contemporary listeners of decolonizing podcasts? If the decolonizing content of our surveyed podcasters has any value regarding the ability to either critique and interrogate or create counter-narratives, we should expect counter-programming and surveillance from dominant institutions and their stakeholders. In other words, if the analogy between revolutionary radio in the post-World War II era of decolonization and contemporary decolonizing podcasts is sound, certainly the analogy between European colonial forces and contemporary institutions of power is also relevant.

This concluding chapter seeks to provide a summary of our findings, with an emphasis on the vulnerabilities of podcasters who use their programming as a space for decolonization. The chapter begins with an analysis of the aspects of decolonization found in the scholarly literature but not made apparent in our survey of the podcasting space. We then shift gears, to discuss systematic threats to the decolonizing potential of podcasting. We argue that surveillance capitalism is not just a new form of capitalism, as Shoshanna Zuboff contends: given the face of institutional power in the digital age, it represents a new era of colonization, where any use of media furthers the instrumentarian power of the colonists. This digital colonization is dependent upon, and threatens, all media users and producers, including podcasters. We give here a summary of our study’s main findings regarding the contradictory role of podcasting as a force of decolonization and digital colonialism. Lastly, we end by making policy recommendations designed to protect podcasters and private citizens from the perils of surveillance capitalism.

Gaps in Decolonization

Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, who co-edited Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education in 2019, remind us in that book that “decolonization studies are informed by indigenous theory, history, epistemology, and futurity.”⁵ Indeed, decolonization research is grounded in indigenous peoples’ demand for self-determination and uses the decolonization process to achieve indigenous utopianism.⁶ Indigenous utopianism is an aspirational concept; it refers to an ancient past that activists seek to bring about in the present in the form of freedom and self-determination.⁷ Tuck and Yang tell us, further, that decolonization depends upon deconstructing empire as an extension of the settler mentality, where “small numbers of colonizers go to a ‘new’ place and dominate a local labor force in order to send resources back to the metropole.”⁸ Given the centrality of empire and indigeneity to decolonization, we were flummoxed by the near absence of both in the podcasting space, by comparison to the representation of other areas such as race, gender, ethnicity, and class.

However, the gaps in decolonial podcasting reflect broader trends in scholarship. Since the establishment of decolonization as an academic discipline, less and less attention has been paid to indigeneity, and we find a comparable situation in the landscape of decolonizing podcasts. In fact Tuck and Yang write:

At a conference on educational research, it is not uncommon to hear speakers refer, almost casually, to the need to “decolonize our schools,” or use “decolonizing methods,” or “decolonize student thinking.” Yet we have observed a startling number of these discussions make no mention of Indigenous peoples, our/their struggles for the recognition of our/their sovereignty, or the contributions of Indigenous intellectuals and activists to theories and frameworks of decolonization. Further, there is often little recognition given to the immediate context of settler colonialism on the North American lands where many of these conferences take place.⁹

The waning of the subject of indigeneity that Tuck and Yang noticed on the agenda of decolonial conferences reflected a phenomenon parallel to what our survey found in podcasting.

We were flabbergasted to discover the scarcity of decolonial podcasts that critique and interrogate the perpetuation of colonization on indigenous peoples. We found notable exceptions, to be sure – including Nick Estes’ Red Nation, which is a clear leader in this field,¹⁰ or Thunder Bay, which investigates certain murders as a perpetuation of Canada’s colonial legacy on indigenous people.¹¹ However, given that we were looking at podcasts from the United States, whose history begins with the colonization of indigenous people, we expected to see a plethora of podcasters, all trying to challenge settler mentalities toward indigeneity. This is clearly a large gap, which raises questions about the podcasters’ commitment to decolonization and about their sophistication.

On a closely related theme, discourses about imperialism, which are a defining feature of colonization, were limited as well. We found the occasional reference to imperialism and empire in programs such as Long Distance Radio. For example, the hosts presented an episode on Myrla Baldonado, whom they described as

just a college student when protests and violent clashes between students and police break out during the First Quarter Storm of 1970 in the Philippines. When she learns about the dark truths of her country and its ties to U.S. imperialism, she risks everything to join the fight against the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos.¹²

Among the podcasts we surveyed, the only ones dedicated to interrogating and critiquing empire are Empire Files, hosted by Abby Martin and Mike Prysner, and Pushback, hosted by Aaron Maté.¹³ In both, the hosts are journalists, which means that, apart from analyzing the United States from the lens of empire, they provide firsthand accounts of the impact of empire on people. Martin frequently travels to nations that have fallen victim to empires in order to offer such accounts to audiences there. Maté is an expert voice around the globe; he even testified before the United Nations as an expert witness on the use of chemical weapons in Syria.¹⁴ These journalists’ programs look with a critical eye at empires all around the globe – particularly the United States, but China, Russia, and others as well. Although these two programs are expansive in their reach and scope, they cannot compensate for the absence of fellow programs; the topic they are attempting to cover is massive. The fact that no other programs deal with empire points to some of the limitations of podcasting as a space of decolonization.

We can only speculate as to why decolonial podcasts pay such little attention to two of defining features of colonization: empire and indigeneity. One area that needs further exploration is the profile we performed in Chapter 1. We think that it is highly likely that the privilege many podcast hosts enjoy in terms of education and employment could be a decisive factor in their seemingly waning interest in indigeneity and empire.

Whatever the cause may be, the fact remains that empire and indigeneity are rich areas of decolonial analysis that are largely disregarded in the legacy media spaces. And now we discovered vulnerabilities also in the decolonial podcasting space – just as we found gaps between the areas of analysis present in scholarship and those present in podcasting.

The Podcasters’ Dilemma: Digital Threats to Decolonization

In the process of chronicling decolonization, our research unveiled a dilemma: podcasters resist dominant ideologies, but these are the very ideologies that control and shape many of the tools and platforms that podcasters rely upon for producing and disseminating the media they use. A dilemma is a situation that requires an equally difficult or impossible choice between two (or more) undesirable options. Each new piece of technology historically presents consumers with what media scholar Neil Postman described as a Faustian bargain: opportunities for exploitation and liberation.¹⁵ To understand how this threatens decolonial podcasters, it is crucial to understand the dominant economic ideology of tech companies: surveillance capitalism.

Conclusion and Policy Recommendations

Our survey revealed great optimism about the work of decolonial podcasters, but it also raised concerns about the future of this space; and we referred to the latter as “the podcaster’s dilemma.” Rather than suggesting that podcasters endeavor to devise strategies that could lessen the impact of digital surveillance on their listeners, we have a series of recommendations for policies that would create structural change in the American digital landscape.

Broadly speaking, our recommendations are patterned on the privacy by design principles that underlie both Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), passed in 2000, and the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), passed in 2018. Writing for the company’s website for Varonis, a data security firm, Andy Green says:

PIPEDA is a consumer-friendly law that’s based on Canadian-born Privacy by Design (PbD) principles. The law has privacy rules requiring consumer consent when collecting personal information and giving consumers the right to access and change their data when incorrect. Companies are obligated to put in place security safeguards and practices, such as data minimization, to limit risks and protect their data. Not surprisingly, PIPEDA is also similar to another PbD-inspired law, the EU GDPR. Like the GDPR, PIPEDA’s definition of personal information is quite broad: it includes any data about an individual. Along with the name and other obvious identifiers, PIPEDA counts as personal information employee files, credit records, medical records, blood type, social status, and more.⁴⁹

As for GDPR, it requires the consent of individuals for data processing, anonymizes data to protect privacy, provides data breach notifications, and demands that companies appoint a data protection officer to oversee compliance.⁵⁰ Both PIPEDA and GDPR give consumers greater control over their data, securing their consent to the use, transfer, or sale of data beyond the purposes for which the data were originally collected. Individuals can transfer their data under a “right of portability” and have a “right of erasure” of their personal data.⁵¹

In addition to the prerogatives of PIPEDA and GDPR, we are open to the principles outlined by Jaron Lanier and E. Glen Weyl in 2018. Lanier and Weyl argue that individuals should be allowed to sell their data for profit in the broader digital marketplace. They write:

As we wait helplessly for more elections to be compromised, for more nasty social divisions to be enflamed, for more invasive data surveillance, and for more workers to become insecure, the widespread assumption that no other models are possible leads to a state of despair. But there is an alternative: an emerging class of business models in which internet users are also the customers and the sellers. Data creators trade directly on the value of their data in an information-centric future economy. Direct buying and selling of information-based value between primary parties could replace the selling of surveillance and persuasion to third parties. Platforms would not shrivel in this economy; rather, they would thrive and grow dramatically, although their profit margins would likely fall as more value was returned to data creators. Most important, a market for data would restore dignity to data creators, who would become central to a dignified information economy.⁵²

Although Lanier and Weyl are proposing market-based solutions to data privacy, their emphasis on “data as labor” and “data dignity” is compelling. They argue:

Glen has called this idea of a true market economy for information “data as labor” and “liberal radicalism,” while Jaron has called it “humanistic digital economics” and “entrepreneurial democracy.” Here we’ll use the less politically charged term “data dignity.” This translates the concept of human dignity that was central to defeating the totalitarianism of the twentieth century to our contemporary context in which our data needs to be protected from new concentrations of power. We understand the term “data” to include most digital activity. It intentionally creates entertainment data, like a YouTube video or a social media meme, as well as less deliberately produced data gathered through surveillance or biological sensors, such as location or metabolic logs. Other examples are language provided to a translation engine to train the software and real-time data flows, such as a music lesson delivered over Skype. All of this has value to the producer, and when the producer gains control over that value, incentives will be transformed; a market participant will try to persuade the buyer to spend money with them instead of paying monopolistic platforms to manipulate a targeted person.⁵³

We agree with Lanier and Weyl, who warn that the current tech oligopoly presents a significant challenge to free speech and counter-hegemonic community formation. We concur with Lanier and Weyl, who argues:

The result is an internet – and, indeed, a society – built on injected manipulation instead of consensual discourse. A system optimized for influencing unwitting people has flooded the digital world with perverse incentives that lead to violations of privacy, manipulated elections, personal anxiety, and social strife. It has also made many of the largest tech companies immensely powerful. A classic example of online behemoth power, what we call a “siren server,” is YouTube, owned by Google. The network effects that always accompany digital entities allow YouTube to control both the production and the consumption of digital video. They are at once a monopoly and a monopsony (a sole purchaser of data), deciding which content producers will be paid in the manner of a communist central planner and determining what content billions of users will consume. Tech giants have become so influential that they function like transnational governments charting the future to a greater degree than any national government. Facebook and Google, for example, have effectively become central mediators unilaterally determining the balance between free speech and election manipulation for all major developed democracies.⁵⁴

In summary, we believe that, in order for decolonizing podcasts to be liberated from the imminent possibility of digital colonization, a comprehensive national policy in the fashion of PIPEDA and GDPR must be adopted that should allow for the following measures:

1. a substantive digital trust-busting effort that would result in the break-up of digital and telecommunications giants like Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.;
2. the establishment of US federal and state departments of privacy and data protection designed to ensure compliance with anti-trust measures and with PIPEDA or GDPR-inspired national legislation;
3. full consumer control and consent regarding the use of consumer data, including the right of portability and the right of erasure;
4. mandatory oversight conducted by an office of data protection within private companies; and
5. the right of individuals to share or conceal their data as they see fit.

We do not believe that it is the duty of decolonizing podcasters to seek such measures. However, the processes of critique and interrogation, counter-narrative production, and the call to action that they employ are uniquely useful in pursuing and agitating for such policies. We hope that this book serves to raise awareness and will inspire progressive steps of this nature in the inspiring and liberatory podcasting communities that we have surveyed.