Host, Guest, Enemy: Rethinking Digital Colonialism through Derrida’s Aporia of Hospitality

Abstract

This paper rethinks digital colonialism on social media platforms and the infrastructural dominance of big tech corporations from the Global North through the lens of Jacques Derrida's aporetic concept of hospitality. While digital platforms often brand themselves as spaces of openness and global connectivity, they enact a form of conditional hospitality that mirrors colonial structures of control: users from the Global South are invited as guests, yet only within tightly controlled, surveilled, and extractive frameworks. They are welcome, but only as long as they do not threaten the sovereignty of the host here, the tech corporation that controls the home of the platform. Derrida's distinction between conditional and unconditional hospitality allows us to interrogate these dynamics with philosophical depth. Conditional hospitality, tied to rights, laws, and borders, always affirms the mastery of the host. In digital terms, it manifests in algorithmic gatekeeping, linguistic hegemony, and exploitative datafication welcoming the Global South only when it serves the hosts interest. Conversely, Derrida's ideal of unconditional hospitality the impossible but necessary openness to the anonymous, undocumented Other demands a radical ethics that would decentre platform sovereignty and open up digital infrastructures to genuine plurality, even at the cost of control and stability. The paper argues that tech platforms self image as hosts becomes ethically untenable when their hospitality turns into hostility: when content moderation perpetuates structural racism, when users are exploited as unpaid digital laborers, and when environmental burdens are externalised onto vulnerable communities. Drawing on Derrida's claim that hospitality is always haunted by its possibility of turning into hostility, I propose a deconstructive critique of digital inclusion narratives. Rather than advocating for a naive digital openness, this paper calls for a reconfiguration of the digital commons through Derrida's aporetic lens acknowledging the impossibility of absolute hospitality while striving toward a more just, heterogeneous, and decolonised digital future.