MODERNITY AND CYBERSPACE: REFLECTIONS DRAWING ON DECOLONIALITY AND ACTOR-NETWORK THEORY

Abstract

The science originating from modernity demands that the answers to the problems faced by humanity be validated by science itself. Cultures, knowledge, and wisdom alienated from world history—which is Eurocentric and limited by the scope of the modern period—do not have a space for validation, according to the colonizing world-system. This essay intends to reflect upon inequality and exclusion, which originate from the understanding of science through the lens of modernity, its expansion through the world-system, its arrangements within the cyberspace environment, and the overcoming of this way of seeing and understanding science, as proposed by certain theoretical fields. The reflections span the Decolonial perspective, mainly based on Immanuel Wallerstein's concept of the world-system theory, and Bruno Latour's Actor-Network Theory (ANT), in which cyberspace is seen as a network of actants—humans, algorithms, technologies, and knowledge—that mediate and act upon interactions. It is in this intertwining that interdisciplinarity materializes. Thus, this reflection starts from the premise that the social interactions occurring in the cyberspace environment, as a product of cybernetics as a discipline, position it as a timely element for analysis, characterized by tensions, challenges, and opportunities, and also capable of enabling alternatives to the development structured by the world-system.