Communicative Human Rights and Colonial Digital Capitalism

This chapter is entitled “Communicative Human Rights and Colonial Digital Capitalism”. Generally recognised in feminist culture and communication critical studies is the innovative contribution of the political scientist Jodi Dean. It is notable that the culture and communication feminism of this author, in their pioneering formulation of “communicative capitalism”, deprioritises and renders as largely irrespective the advertising medium of the communicative message. Such that the circulation of communication digitally and the circulation of messages through analogue channels are considered and treated as interchangeable features of communicative capitalism. Dean recognises that messages, in communicative capitalism, “are contributions to circulating content – not actions to elicit responses” (ibid.: 58). Discounting the medium of the message within dot.com media communication is a consistent feature of Dean’s Communicative Capitalism. The unmitigated parturition of the message from its medium is disputed and in so doing bringing into question the assertion that “uncoupled from contexts of action and application – as on the Web or in print and broadcast media – the message is simply part of a circulating data stream” (ibid.). It is my contention that Dean’s work has some anticolonial feminist application in terms of a challenge to the colonising features of digital communication. This chapter develops the notion of communicative capitalism. It accomplishes this through the use of anticolonial feminist frames, so as to explore the extent to which the inflation and excessive supply of tickets for the case studied 15th December 2022 Asake concert at the O2 Academy Brixton was attributable to covetous and avaricious capitalistic promotional advertising exploitation of a largely Black female populated community of #BlackTwitter social media users.