UCLA

Electronic Empires and Digital Domains examines the material history of telecommunications development through the lens of settler colonialism to argue that information and communication infrastructures (ICTs) have always been shaped by settler spatial and property regimes in the United States. This work positions the electric telegraph as a precursor to internet infrastructure and offers networked settler logics to name the creation and deployment of ICTs in the project of setter colonial expansion. This framework insists on drawing out the connections between land, dispossession, telecommunications infrastructure, and the project of settler state nation building. Where Digital Humanities and Critical Infrastructure Studies often overlook Tribal Law and Treaty, Chapter One foregrounds Indigenous dispossession and the racial, gendered violence integral to settler state formation by tracing the erection of ICT infrastructure in right-of-way clauses and public lands legal discourse in the 18th and 19th century. Chapter Two offers cybergeographies of settler violence to name the settler colonial spatial and scopic logics which seek to de-materialize the telecommunications infrastructure and are contingent upon anti-Indigenous discursive violence to posit settler technological supremacy. Here, I trace the emergence and persistence of cyberspace-as-frontier space and analyze the spatial logics in Joseph Licklider’s “Intergalactic Computer Network,” Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media, and the work of John Perry Barlow in conjunction with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Chapter Three analyzes Google Earth and Keyhole Markup Language (KML) to illustrate how settler notions of land-as-property are encoded into digital cartographic products and examines the predefined functions of code to argue the program structure and interface help (re)produce settler subjects through settler colonial scopic views. This work advocates for multi-level analysis—including infrastructure, discourse, and code—rather than surface-level readings of digital interfaces. I argue limited critiques of the state in the fields of Critical Infrastructure Studies and the Digital Humanities is in part produced by a lack of attention to the settler colonial logics at the core of the social and legal antecedents that constitute the fabric of our social, economic, and political realities. Ultimately, this dissertation calls for a reckoning with settler colonialism and challenges dominant views of the internet as democratic and disembodied, revealing how such narratives obscure the enduring logics of settler occupation and control.