Corporate rationality masks everyday data extraction as routine business rather than appropriation

Evidence

Indeed, capitalism’s standard ways of understanding itself as a rational order are effective in masking the colonial scale of appropriation that is underway. Much of today’s data appropriations are not seen in daily life as appropriation at all but as part of everyday business practice. As such, data relations introduce into business management a new bureaucracy, as first theorized by Max Weber. This bureaucracy is based on the apparent “rationality” of organizations’ continuous data extraction. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 101

Categorization

• XREF: Weberian bureaucratic rationality as masking device connects to the attention/surveillance schools’ accounts of normalization of constant datafication. — connects to: Data analytics progressed from describing internal data to prescribing every process and behavior — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 79; Sharing’s semantic unboundedness masks the corporate capture of data — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 514; Framing technology as autonomous disguises who profits from data extraction — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 511 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Platform executives speak as social theorists to legitimize their data extraction models #corroborates (0.85) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 426
• Micro-level data relations are rendered commonsensical by extractive rationalities #expands (0.80) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 297
• Industry discourse framed data exhaust as a benign by-product recycled to improve services #corroborates (0.78) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1873