“We have to transform ourselves yet again into something that has not yet existed on this planet before, a kind of techno-indigenous people.”
- James Cameron, A Message From Pandora, 2009 (10)
James Cameron’s poorly phrased quote calls to attention the inherent narrative of colonization present in any attempt to name the internet for one group. Who is the internet for? The first large-scale and major usage of computers was in government resource sharing, making cyberspace seem to be a space for men who exert power. However, the origins of the computer often intertwine with and are built upon the work and labor of women. Ada Lovelace’s Jacquard Loom (20) and the Raytheon space-age needleworkers are examples of women’s work crossing paths with computer science and women building the foundation of the connection between the word web in a literal sense and a figurative sense in the digital sphere (27). It’s often women who solder the microchips that computers are built from, and, as shown in the film Hidden Figures, most visibly, it’s women who coded the foundations of computers within our government.
The internet may only be inherently for those born into the internet, namely, Millenials and beyond who grew up with the tools of the internet as part of the fabric of their lives, capable of understanding the meaning of a pre-internet and post-internet collective consciousness. Still, can the iPad babies and “zoomers” claim to be these aforementioned “techno-indigenous” people James Cameron speaks of?
James Cameron’s movie Avatar was the perfect example of the colonial myth that wanted to pretend to be something more. Pandora makes for the perfect example of the Terra Nullius–a land considered untouched to Westerners, for its lack of Western influence and/or culture in a Westernized, and especially Christian oriented, sense ( 11). Cameron, in his film A Message from Pandora, draws a parallel between himself and his character Jake Sully, painting the two of them as white saviors of the cultures which they enter into. Cameron attempts to intervene in what he calls the “battle” against the Belo Monte Dam Project in Brazil on behalf of the indigenous tribes along the Xingu river. He then belabors the point of the Western world being “out of touch” with their “ancient” practices, saying that, unlike the Kayapo, we cannot “abandon cities… strip off all our clothes and try to run into the forest” in a misappropriation of the culture he’s engaged with throughout the film, saying we rather must become “techno-indigenous” people (10). This term, in Cameron’s perspective, is reflective of a more evolved ecologically advantageous future for humanity that integrates technology and nature in a way forward. Ultimately, Cameron’s “battle” against the Belo Monte Dam Project fails, although the film does not show this. The Kayapo and other indigenous tribes along the river are left in the reality of colonization and the environmental decimenation Cameron has drawn attention to, Cameron has pat himself on the back for “raising awareness,” and his simulation of his savior myth propagates another day in stark contrast.