Colonial extraction logics are structurally recapitulated in contemporary data platforms
Evidence
Imagine a product designed to enforce the long-distance economic dominance of one group over another, a product that creates passivity and dependence on the part of those who consume it, that can be used to destabilize the economic and political relations within a society, and whose usage entails an exploitative chain of transnational dimensions. The fact that we could just as easily be talking about opium or the latest app from the social quantification sector suggests how much things have not changed in colonial relations over the last two centuries. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 346
Categorization
- XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s ‘data colonialism’ vs attention/surveillance framing — this is the rival school’s core structural claim in miniature. — connects to: Data extraction functions like colonial resource appropriation despite different modes — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 27; Data colonial extraction persists by converting data relations into durable social relations — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 84; Colonial maps enabled wealth extraction by exploiting resource-access differentials — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 919 (+9 more)
- ADDENDUM: Parallels ‘On Sacrifice’ and the colonial-commercial logic entries; the drug-as-extractive-technology analogy could enrich that article’s treatment of exploitative economic chains.
Broader Connections
- Platform data extraction continues historical colonialism’s logic of appropriation
#corroborates(1.00) — , The Braided Reading EPUB, 398 - The 4X framework exposes continuity between historical and data colonialism
#exemplifies(0.85) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 274 - Indigenous frameworks offer alternatives to data-colonial modes of being
#responds-to(0.80) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 1231 - Micro-level data relations are rendered commonsensical by extractive rationalities
#expands(0.80) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 297 - Colonial knowledge-gathering fused governance questions with totalizing encyclopedic cataloguing
#qualifies(0.70) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 202 - The logic of mapping the world is structurally inexhaustible expansion
#expands(0.70) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 475