Continuous data appropriation erases the boundary separating self from economic power

Evidence

Sensors never work in isolation but are connected in wider networks that cover ever more of the globe. All business relations get reorganized in the process, and new types of business (for selling and controlling data flows and for managing the new infrastructure of data processing and data storage) become powerful. This affects all types of business, not just social media platforms. As one business manager put it, “We make more money selling data to retail data syndication firms than we do selling meat.” It is all too easy to see this as simply a shift within capitalism’s modes of operation while forgetting that the cost is always the expansion of surveillance regimes that intrude on the autonomy of human beings. As we show in detail in chapter 5, all notions of autonomy, until now, have assumed that individuals have access to a minimal space of the self that is its space of becoming. But the goal of continuous data appropriation intrudes on this space and changes humanity’s relations to external infrastructures decisively, erasing, potentially forever, the boundary between the flow of human experience and the environment of economic power that surrounds it. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 75

Categorization

• XREF: The meat-syndication quote and autonomy-erosion claim engage surveillance-capitalism literature (Zuboff) and the Frankfurt School’s critical theory. — connects to: Datafication erases the prior boundary between inner life and external forces — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 71; Data appropriation threatens the minimal space of the self — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 75; Data colonialism constitutes an antiecology that disrupts the self’s home space — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 606 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Data appropriation threatens the minimal space of the self #expands (0.92) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 75
• Data colonialism may attack the very boundaries of the self. #corroborates (0.92) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 463
• Data extraction infrastructures deform the self that autonomy and freedom depend on #corroborates (0.85) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 148
• Data colonialism constitutes an antiecology that disrupts the self’s home space #expands (0.82) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 606
• Internet self-representation conceals a capitalist infrastructure producing the self as commodity #expands (0.78)
• Data colonialism fuses economic and cognitive power in an order as durable as capitalism #expands (0.75) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 30