Cloud infrastructure shapes social reality by predisposing everyday experience toward datafication.

Evidence

The concept of the cloud functions in a similar way. The cloud can be a metaphor to suggest that data is gathered together in a remote location. It can be a template to organize how data is extracted, stored, and analyzed so that it can be managed together “in” the cloud. And the cloud, especially the Cloud Empire, can act as an episteme, a model for knowledge that organizes our social realities—even those that are not datafied—into structures that can facilitate their datafication. When we say things such as “Pics or it didn’t happen!” or we participate in weekday memes like #ThrowbackThursday, we imply that the way to understand life is to package it and distribute it according to models specified by the dynamics of the Cloud Empire. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 173

Categorization

• XREF: The claim that the cloud-as-episteme ‘datafies’ even non-datafied life extends the data-colonialism school’s infrastructure argument in a direction complementary to attention-economy accounts of how platforms colonize lived time. — connects to: The cloud operates as an episteme that pre-organizes social life for datafication — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 173; The cloud metaphor actively shapes rather than merely describes social reality — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 171; Billions now organize personal lives around data-dependent platform infrastructures — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 585 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• The cloud operates as an episteme that pre-organizes social life for datafication #corroborates (0.95) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 173
• The cloud metaphor actively shapes rather than merely describes social reality #expands (0.82) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 171
• Data relations extend capital extraction beyond labor into all social life #expands (0.78) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 85
• Billions now organize personal lives around data-dependent platform infrastructures #exemplifies (0.75) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 585
• Technology transforms human thought and social relations as much as it transforms matter #complicates (0.75) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 47
• Daily use of financialized digital platforms instills a speculative mode of being and relating #exemplifies (0.72) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 98