<<... And if digital imperialism is happening — if smartphones and other gadgets are bearing cultural freight as they cross borders — there is little doubt as to which nation’s values are hiding in the hold. As of 2013, eight of the world’s top 10 Internet companies by audience were based in the United States, though 81 percent of their online visitors were not. (This fact was made painfully obvious to those users and their governments that same year, when Edward Snowden’s trove of N.S.A. documents showed just how low these American Internet giants had stooped to cooperate with surveillance demands.) Smartphones themselves, from their precision-milled exteriors to their tiled grids of apps on-screen, are patterned largely on Apple’s blueprint, even when designed and made by companies based in South Korea or China. The question is not whether the spread of technology is promulgating, as Hollywood once did, an American vision of what the world should be. Rather, the question is how the rest of the world will respond. ...>>

<<... In Silicon Valley, the notion that technology spreads values is part of the corporate culture — as evidenced in the manifesto that Facebook published, rather incongruously, in the filing papers for its $16 billion I.P.O. three years ago. Declaring at the outset that Facebook was “built to accomplish a social mission,” the document goes on to promise a sort of Facebook revolution: “By giving people the power to share, we are starting to see people make their voices heard on a different scale from what has historically been possible.” It continues: “Through this process, we believe that leaders will emerge across all countries who are pro-Internet and fight for the rights of their people, including the right to share what they want and the right to access all information that people want to share with them.” This evangelical stance, pervasive in the Valley, explains why a major part of Facebook’s and Google’s philanthropic efforts in the past two years has been concentrated on taking Internet access to the developing world. Executives of these companies genuinely believe that over the long run, information technology — including, naturally, the services they themselves provide — is crucial to bettering society. ...>>

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/welcome-to-the-age-of-digital-imperialism.html