Data colonialism completes capitalism’s shift from extracting nature to extracting social life.

Evidence

Problem 3: As natural resources are depleted, social life emerges as the next big reserve of resources available for extraction. The depletion of our planet’s natural resources can no longer be denied, and capitalism needs to find new horizons of appropriation. The social quantification sector poses as a “green” form of capitalism because it produces wealth by putting social, not natural, resources to work. Because the resources comprised by data from social life are symbolic and do not represent material wealth to the people from whose lives that data is extracted, it could conceivably but wrongly be argued that people are not dispossessed when corporations use that data. The effect of data colonialism, however, is to give corporations control of resources that can be extracted from social life by installing into people’s lives corporate powers and rights of surveillance that did not exist before. The result is to appropriate human life to corporate power and thus dispossess it of its independent agency, which is why we refer to this process as a form of colonialism. Data colonialism completes the process of appropriating life that the expropriation of nature started. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 168

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is the core definitional passage for the entire ‘data colonialism’ frame — precisely what the reader set out to pin down.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that dispossession no longer requires transfer of material wealth, only appropriation of agency, reframes what exploitation even means and is worth extended sitting with.
• XREF: Speaks directly to surveillance-capitalism and attention-economy literatures where surplus is extracted from behavior rather than labor; material for the comparison essay. — connects to: Data colonialism expands capitalism by absorbing previously uncommodified life streams — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 68; Data extraction extends capitalism’s exploitation to all human life, echoing colonial raw-material logic — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 42; Data colonialism requires transforming society itself, not just extracting value — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 365 (+4 more)
• SEED: The ‘green capitalism’ parallel — data colonialism marketed as clean extraction of a renewable symbolic resource — is an arguable essay hook.

Broader Connections

• Data colonialism expands capitalism by absorbing previously uncommodified life streams #expands (0.92) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 68
• Data colonialism extracts ever more layers of human life as raw material #expands (0.90) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 66
• Data extraction extends capitalism’s exploitation to all human life, echoing colonial raw-material logic #expands (0.88) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 42
• Data colonialism extracts human life as data for profit through data relations. #exemplifies (0.85) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 32
• Data colonialism requires transforming society itself, not just extracting value #expands (0.78) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 365
• Data colonialism’s extractive logic predates social media by decades in globalized industrial capitalism. #complicates (0.75) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 48