Settler Colonialism K Supplement - Michigan 2024 DGW

Settler Colonialism K Supplements---DGW
1NC Links
1NC Links – Big Tech/Internet of Things
Big tech and the IoT extract data from Indigenous African People, denying autonomy and allowing increased surveillance
Nhemachena et al 2020 [Artwell, holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cape Town in South Africa, "Relationality or hospitality in twenty-first century research? Big Data, Internet of Things, and the resilience of coloniality on Africa", Modern Africa: Politics, History and Society 8.1 (2020): 105-139., 2020-06-26, https://doi.org/10.26806/modafr.v8i1.278]ec
Relational Big Data transformations, reconfiguring research in the twenty-first century, efface African data sovereignty, national sovereignty, epistemological sovereignty and DNA/gene sovereignty in ways that are reminiscent of the colonial epoch. Put differently, Big Data and the Internet of Things are open and relational in the sense of conjoining or linking various human and nonhuman objects, and datasets – relational theorists presuppose that entities are not important in themselves, since for them what matters most are the relational data between the entities and not the entities themselves (Crellin 2016; Kitchin 2014; Marton et al. 2013). In other words, as much as colonialists denied African autonomy and sovereignty, while using the same binary logic to distinguish themselves from the purported African Other, contemporary theories on data relationality/relational ontologies similarly deny autonomy and sovereignty to Africans who are depicted as indistinct from nonhumans from whom data can be extracted without the necessity of consent and privacy. Theorised in terms of relationality rather than hospitality, African people are ambiguated, they are denied autonomy and sovereignty and then deemed to be indistinct and indiscernible from nonhuman animals. Effacing various forms of indigenous sovereignties, contemporary data relationality theories deny indigenous human essence, identity and autonomy – relational theories presume the absence of distinctions between the human and nonhuman, ethical and unethical, inside and outside, consent and dissent, the colonial and decolonial. Emphasising connections, relations and networks between otherwise distinct objects and subjects, data relationality defies distinctions/binaries/dichotomies (Ahn 2019; Latour 2005; Wildman 2006) in ways that generate ambiguities, uncertainties and hence ignorance. On the other hand, we argue, hospitality assumes the existence of distinctions between insiders and outsiders, assumes the existence of distinctions between humans and nonhumans (but does not necessarily assume an acrimonious relationship between them), and recognises the existence of African human essence, identity, autonomy and sovereignty. Thus, relational data assumptions of openness, borderlessness and unboundedness legitimise the contemporary implantations or insertions of smart electronic chips and intelligent nanobots (microscopic autonomous robots) into the bodies and brains of indigenous African people, who become subject to remote control and mind manipulation via the Internet of Things (an emergent tapestry of internet that connects various environmental objects and subjects imbued with sentience) and Big Data (huge volumes of data transmitted at high velocity from objects and subjects connected in the Internet of Things). The contemporary era is marked by the growth of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence, which are unevenly centred in North America and China. Marked by the logics of economic and data extraction, Big Data has parallels with colonialism. Similar to colonialism, which placed Africans at the bottom of the world system, contemporary data colonialism places Africans at the “bottom of the data pyramid” in Arora’s (2016) sense. For this reason, while South Africa and Morocco have introduced biometric identification systems and machine to machine solutions, there are concerns that chipification and digitalisation of citizens’ identities intensifies surveillance systems and the attendant dictatorships by those who control the data notwithstanding its avowed relationality (Ndubuaku and Okereafor 2015; Breckenridge 2005; Duncan 2014). While relationality denies human essence and distinctions between humans and nonhumans, it is important to note that since the precolonial era, Africans were guided by tenets of Chivanhu/Ubuntu (from southern African languages including Shona, Nguni and Xhosa), which spell out African humanistic philosophies, including ethics and morality. In terms of Chivanhu/Ubuntu, human beings are expected to distinguish themselves from animals and nature by hunhu/unhu (although the Shona spellings are different, the meanings are the same) encompassing humanistic ethics, self-respect, accountability for one’s behaviour, civility, good manners, prudence, reverence of human nature, integrity, good behaviour, moral uprightness, humanness, respect for human life, respect for human dignity, etiquette, hospitality, autonomy, ownership and control of resources, and so on – these aspects should also apply in research that appreciates the hospitality of the Other (Hapanyengwi-Chemhuru and Makuvaza 2017; Pearce 1990). Although some scholars have argued that Africans are animists without making distinctions between humans and animals (Burnett and waKang’ethe 1994: 156), other scholars have correctly argued that Africans are not animists, do not worship nature or even ancestors but have the notion of God/Supreme Being (Bullock 1927; Nhemachena 2017; Tempels 1959; Gelfand 1959). Put in other words, the key question for Africans is not whether or not technological objects/nature has vitality or agency or is an actor, but that human beings are defined in terms of hunhu/unhu rather than simply in terms of vitality as some contemporary relational theorists would have it. In short, human beings in Africa are defined in terms of hunhu/unhu and not simply in terms of vitality/agency. The point here is that colonial scholarship has suffered from what is called the “crisis in representation” and there have been critical debates, for instance, as to whether anthropology, as a colonial discipline, accurately represented the colonised peoples, who are still deemed to be indistinct from nonhuman technological artefacts, in relational data systems. Of course, some colonial scholarship depicted Africans in ways that suited colonial racist ideologies and that portrayed Africans as beasts, as four legged, as one eyed monsters, and so on (Magubane 2007; Nhemachena 2017; Fanon 1963). Even Hegel, arrogantly, and in a racist way, described Africans as children of the forest, as wild and at the level of nature, as lacking morals, as people without history and as inconsequential in world history and therefore as fit for enslavement in the matrix of racial relations of the world (Adegbindin 2015; Terada 2019; Andindilile 2016). Because Africans were dehumanised and deanthroposised, as it were, during colonialism within which they were depicted and treated as indistinct from machines and animals, emancipation for them does not lie in postanthropocentrism or posthumanism but in humanisation wherein hunhu/unhu, rather than mere vitality or entanglements, would be central in matters of data collection. In other words, African humanism is traceable not necessarily to the European Enlightenment but to precolonial African Chivanhu/Ubuntu. Put differently, the Enlightenment humanised Europeans some of whom became colonialists who dehumanised African people whom they subjected to [data] colonialism.
1NC Links – Bioprospecting
Indigenous peoples rights are being STRIPPED away
[Fred Powledge 2001; a former reporter for the New York Times;Patenting, Piracy, and the Global Commons;Oxford Academics; 01/04/2001; https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/51/4/273/247095; DB]
Mexico again “Two collecting expeditions, both funded by the US National Institutes of Health, have halted their bioprospecting in Mexico while they wait to see what the new government headed by Vicente Fox does, or doesn't do, about his country's sovereignty over plant germ plasm. The expeditions, composed of US and Mexican researchers and begun under the former Mexican government, which had been in power for 80 years, have been accused of exploiting indigenous peoples. In one of the projects, sponsored by the University of Georgia, researchers collected plants and interviewed traditional healers in Chiapas regarding the substances they use. In the other, the University of Arizona and the National Autonomous University of Mexico planned to collect plants used by the Mayans. Any discoveries useful to industrialized medicine would be developed by American Home Products, a United States–based pharmaceutical corporation. A bizarre case of seed patenting
A Canadian federal judge created an unusual precedent this spring when he found a Saskatoon farmer liable for genetically engineered rape oil plants that he said he never wanted. Investigators from the biotech giant Monsanto had taken samples from a field tended by Percy Schmeiser, a 70-year-old farmer, and found them to contain Monsanto-engineered genes for tolerance to a herbicide that Monsanto makes. Apparently pollen from the seeds had blown in from the fields of neighboring farmers. Schmeiser says he has been growing oilseed rape (canola) for 40 years, using the time-honored method of saving seeds from one year's harvest to plant the next year. He denied that he deliberately used, or even wanted, the seeds from Monsanto, which requires that farmers repurchase seed each year. The judge ruled that, regardless of whether the plants were invaders or not, Schmeiser must pay the multinational corporation about $85,000 and promise not to use the seed again. Schmeiser was quoted as saying: “I've been using my own seed for years, and now farmers like me are being told we can't do that anymore if our neighbors are growing [genetically modified] crops that blow in. Basically, the right to use our own seed has been taken away” (Marc Kaufman, “Farmer Liable for Growing Biotech Crops,” Washington Post, 30 Mar 2001, p. A3).”
The biggest problem with biopiracy is that it is not easy to trace.
Yoonus Imran 21, Faculty of Medical Sciences, University of Sri Jayewardenepura, Nugegoda, Sri Lanka, “Biopiracy: Abolish Corporate Hijacking of Indigenous Medicinal Entities,” PMC PubMed Central,
According to [3], the definition of biopiracy is “the unauthorized extraction of biological resources and/or associated traditional knowledge from developing countries, or the patenting of spurious inventions based on such knowledge or resources without compensation.” The hidden cases of biopiracy were started opposed, and the term biopiracy was coined in the 1990s by environmentalists and nongovernmental organizations [6]. Biopiracy as “a silent disease” is hardly detectable because it frequently does not leave any traces. Unfortunately, the electronic media favours to highlight environment pollution and deforestation, while biopiracy incidents are less reported. This silent pillaging is depriving countries that lack proper advancement in biotechnology primarily in Africa, Latin America, and Asia of the means to financially support developing and sustaining biotechnological projects. Biopiracy disrupts biodiversity conservation efforts [7–9].
1NC Links – Biotechnology (Sustainability)
Sustainable biotech is built on biopiracy in the third world – kills biodiversity
Banerjee 02, [Subhabrata Bobby, Strategic Management and Director of Research at the International Graduate School of Business, University of South Australia, “Reinventing Colonialism: Biotechnology, Intellectual Property Rights and the New Economics of Sustainable Development", Digital Library Of The Commons Repository, 6-21-02, https://hdl.handle.net/10535/1813]ec
Sustaining Colonial Control of Biodiversity: The Role of Biotechnology and Intellectual Property Rights The globalization of industrialized agriculture has been under attack for more than twenty years. Increased production per hectare was achieved at significant environmental costs including the use of greater chemical and non-renewable energy inputs. The practice of monoculture, involving the transformation of centuries old traditions of self-sustaining crop rotational practices into cash crop agriculture, had serious ecological, biological and economic consequences for peasant farmers in the Third World. Modern agricultural methods may have created bumper harvests, however it also replaced biological diversity with uniformity making crops more vulnerable to attack from pests, leading to a greater dependence on chemical pesticides. The focus on the technologies involved in the production of chemical pesticides also served to marginalize existing indigenous knowledge about plant and seed varieties. The chemical revolution depended on the genetic resources that were cared for and sustained for thousands of years by peasant farmers, these were obtained free of charge by corporations and scientific institutions to develop high-yielding varieties that were dependent on chemical fertilizers for their yield levels and subsequently sold to the farmers as a package, complete with chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Thus, these production techniques determined what kinds of crops could be grown in order to recoup investments on modern agricultural techniques. While economic value was placed on cash crops bought and sold through international markets, there was no evaluation, economic or otherwise, on the loss of agricultural biodiversity and its effects (Guha and Martinez-Alier 1997). For instance, there were more than 30,000 varieties of rice grown in India at the turn of the last century, today there are less than 50 varieties and is expected to diminish to ten in the next five years (Shiva 1993; Wilson 1992). Measuring output per hectare is an easy task but it is virtually impossible to construct indicators that measure genetic erosion. More importantly, it is impossible to forecast the ecological and economic consequences of such a loss. However, science has once again come to the rescue, with a new revolution: biotechnology. As we shall see, this new revolution of biotechnology is simply a logical continuation from the “chemical revolution” of the 1950’s and not only serves to sustain corporate and scientific structures of power but also threatens to colonize life forms and recolonize spaces in the Third World, a region that contains two-thirds of the world’s plant species. If the success of development was based on transforming “untamed” nature into a more manageable environmental resource, it should not come as a surprise that advances in science and technology would ultimately lead to the control and ownership of life itself, via the transformation of genetic material in plants and animals into “knowledge” and “intellectual property” belonging to corporations. The fact that this “knowledge” existed and has been used by indigenous communities for thousands of years is somehow not relevant: it is either dismissed as a “philosophical” issue or incorporated into the Western environmental discourse as “traditional ecological knowledge” that needs protection because of its “world heritage” value. Laws governing protection of intellectual property are governed by Western technocentric notions that are biased against indigenous communities (Blakeney 1997). Under existing laws, patents are granted for inventions that must be “novel” and the rights of the creator of this novelty are protected. Novelty is assessed by reference to prior technological use. There are millions of people in the world who do not fit this model, indigenous custodians of medical knowledge and peasant cultivators of seeds for example, and who are denied intellectual property protection. Patents and intellectual property laws on genetic resources such as seeds, protect and serve corporate and institutional interests of developed countries while violating peasant and farmers’ rights in the Third World. Medicinal plants, cared for and sustained by indigenous cultures, were appropriated by pharmaceutical companies without any payment and later used to develop profitable drugs that were protected by patents and trademarks. The knowledge of indigenous cultures in recognizing and using the medicinal properties of these plants is positioned as “traditional” and not “novel” and hence can be obtained without payment, while the “knowledge” of pharmaceutical companies requires protection. Indigenous knowledge does not fit into the current intellectual property framework and their knowledge by itself has no “economic value” unless it is commodified for the purposes of the market. Only then can it be assigned “value” and be eligible for protection, which explains the current alacrity at which chemical and pharmaceutical corporations are investing in genetic engineering and biotechnology. Biotechnology, touted as a champion of sustainable development, simply sustains a more sophisticated mode of colonial control that continues to inscribe its violence on peasant communities. Peasant struggles to control seeds and medicinal plants are being fought in many countries and several social movements in Mexico, Latin America and Asia have raised these issues at international conventions of the United Nations Economic Program. The International Convention on Biodiversity was established at Rio de Janeiro in 1992 to address the implications of biodiversity conservation and use. However, as Shiva (1993: 151) argues, the Convention on Biodiversity (CBD) was primarily “an initiative of the North to ‘globalize’ the control, management and ownership of biological diversity… so as to ensure free access to the biological resources which are needed as ‘raw material’ for the biotechnology industry”. The biodiversity “crisis” arose because of rampant industrialization and unbridled economic growth resulting in habitat destruction and the replacement of diversity with homogeneity in agriculture and forestry (Shiva 1993). This crisis is almost always represented as a Third World phenomena and the solution developed and applied by the North is to conserve biodiversity in the South. Evidence of this can be seen in policy documents of the World Bank and United Nations Environmental Program as well as in scientific texts. For instance, in his popular book The Diversity of Life, Edward Wilson describes in detail the biological history of the planet and the negative human impact on biodiversity. While acknowledging that richer countries dictate the rules of international trade, Wilson claims that it is their responsibility to “use this power wisely”. In providing some solutions to the biodiversity problem, Wilson advocates promoting sustainable development – for the “striving billions of rural poor in the Third World”. Almost nothing is said about the corresponding responsibility of the striving millions of urban rich in the First World. A similar slippage can be observed in the Agenda 21 document: the “action plan” for sustainability involves “enabling the poor to achieve sustainable livelihoods” (Hawken 1995: 216) without any mention of the unsustainable livelihoods of the rich that do not allow the poor to achieve sustainable livelihoods. Thus, sustainable development proceeds the way as development did – the problems are located in the South, the solutions in the North - and continues to obscure how the political economy of the process destroys biological diversity (Shiva 1991). Despite using the right phrases – “sustainable”, “inclusiveness”, “local custodians”, the CBD is very much a top down process imposed on local communities, similar to the way the “Green Revolution” was orchestrated. The CBD negotiations took place after years of North-South conflicts over resources and 

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