. His “response” omits critical information and fails to address any of the core substance of our article.readers that he is the chief executive of Zenprop, a major funder driving the River Club development. That is to say, Tannenberger stands to make money for himself if the project goes through.
On matters of content, Tannenberger fairs no better. Bizarrely, he fails to address the entire content of our article: the many reasons to oppose Amazon’s expansion into South Africa and the African continent. Instead, he focuses on indigenous culture and environmental impact, which is not what our op-ed discussed., as well as Amazon’s abhorrent track record of exploiting workers, environmentally destructive practices and the littering of communities with surveillance technologies.
Alongside other critics of Big Tech’s role in the Global South, we label this “digital colonialism”, because the domination of core features of the digital economy, like cloud computing and e-commerce, reinforces globally uneven development.
Like generations of colonisers before him, Tannenberger calls this unequal exchange and division of labour “development and progress” — one that he benefits from personally, not unlike local elites who collaborated with European colonisers to secure a tiny slice of the bounty.