Why “Colonialism” is being discussed
The most recent Hacker News stories and comments contributing to this topic's mentions.
> Low pay is partially a reason why people have off-shored their industries there. Exactly. That is precisely the financial imperialism I'm criticizing. Instead of gunboats, it…
by vrganj · Oct 27, 2026
Sound more like modern day colonialism than an attempt to promote useful tech. This deal seems to reflect the desires of a company that wants to profit from AI , and not what re…
by gulugawa · Oct 27, 2026
So China does engage in lithium colonialism and apparel colonialism? I'm struggling to parse that part of your comment.
by Sabinus · Oct 26, 2026
I would say it’s no less convenient for those that tend to overuse the word to label anything as colonialism or terrorism. It absolves them from building any sort of coherent an…
by reliabilityguy · Oct 26, 2026
> I’m hoping this might start to fill in a larger picture of what AI colonialism actually looks like. This is exactly the kind of nonsense I would expect from an Ivy League seni…
by drnick1 · Oct 26, 2026
> I cringe with AI "colonialism". It initially got an eye roll our of me, but it looks like the term that's been thrown around increasingly, and not entirely without cause. If t…
by autoexec · Oct 26, 2026
Interest
Proportion of Hacker News items mentioning "colonialism" over time.
Mentions
Total number of Hacker News items mentioning "colonialism" over time.
Colonialism is the practice of extending and maintaining political, social, economic, and cultural domination over a territory and its people by another people in pursuit of interests defined in an often distant metropole, who also claim superiority. While frequently an imperialist project, colonialism functions through differentiating between the targeted land and people, and that of the colonizers. Rather than annexation, this typically culminates in organizing the colonized into colonies separate to the colonizers' metropole. Colonialism sometimes deepens by developing settler colonialism, whereby settlers from one or multiple colonizing metropoles occupy a territory with the intention of partially or completely supplanting the existing Indigenous peoples, possibly amounting to genocide. Read more on Wikipedia