Colonial maps enabled wealth extraction by exploiting resource-access differentials

Evidence

The purpose of maps has always been to make it possible to locate the most efficient paths of circulation. Colonial expansion was facilitated by the pioneering of mercantile routes that mapped newer and faster channels of commodity exchange, creating wealth for European colonizers and merchants by enabling price differentials based on differential access to the assets that the maps represented (see Wolf, People without History, 88). — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 919

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels the data-colonialism argument: colonizers profited from differential access to mapped assets, just as platforms profit from differential access to data users can’t see. Maps-as-infrastructure connects to the trees-as-infrastructure piece. — connects to: Platform data extraction continues historical colonialism’s logic of appropriation — , The Braided Reading EPUB: 5-Year…, 398; 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; Data colonialism replaces cheap resources with cheap social data as its raw material — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 579 (+4 more)
• ADDENDUM: The map-as-infrastructure-not-worldview angle extends the trees-as-infrastructure piece’s thesis that infrastructure forms the real substrate of social worlds.

Broader Connections

• Colonial extraction logics are structurally recapitulated in contemporary data platforms #expands (0.82) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 346
• Platform data extraction continues historical colonialism’s logic of appropriation #expands (0.78) — , The Braided Reading EPUB, 398
• Data extraction extends capitalism’s exploitation to all human life, echoing colonial raw-material logic #expands (0.76) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 42
• Data colonial extraction persists by converting data relations into durable social relations #expands (0.75) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 84
• Data colonialism replaces cheap resources with cheap social data as its raw material #expands (0.74) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 579
• Colonial spatial order fragments daily life into discrete function-specific locations #expands (0.72)