Corporate-controlled social knowledge reorders society in favor of corporations over citizens.

Evidence

The social quantification sector is fast building its own social knowledge. That knowledge is commercially controlled, generally opaque in its production, not open to public debate, and thoroughly oriented first to capitalist drives before it is oriented to the interests of government. It shapes everyday actions quite differently than did earlier forms of social knowledge. The result, as we already hinted in chapter 1, is a different type of social order in which the agency and control of corporations is enhanced and that of individual citizens is reduced and sometimes even erased. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 368

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the attention/surveillance school’s platform-power analysis; this frames the same phenomenon through data-colonization lens. — connects to: States now depend on corporate data knowledge about their own citizens. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 88; Corporations now command a ‘God view’ of the social world called social caching — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 580; Social caching grants corporate power privileged legibility over human life — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 419 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Surveillance capitalists now control society’s definitive principle of social ordering through privatized knowledge. #expands (0.92) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 603
• The Corpocene inverts corporate personhood so people adopt corporate structure and function. #expands (0.87) — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 343
• Social media promotes an ideal of privatizing the self into corporate form #expands (0.84) — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 354
• Influencers synthesize individual identity with capitalist infrastructure such that personhood itself becomes corporate #expands (0.82) — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 394
• Mechanized knowledge creates monopolies that endanger freedom of thought #complicates (0.74) — Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication, 1123