Data colonialism expands capitalism by absorbing previously uncommodified life streams

Evidence

This progressive opening up of human life to externally driven data extraction is what we mean by the capitalization of human life without limit. In this phrase, we recognize Marx’s long-standing insight that capitalism has always sought to manage human life for the maximization of profit; at the same time, we emphasize that data colonialism absorbs new aspects of human life streams directly into the productive process. It is not that social limits to life’s capitalization can no longer be imagined—indeed, the whole point of this book is to argue for the necessity of such limits—but that, as things currently stand, much corporate discourse fails to recognize any limits except those that it sets itself. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 68

Colonialism is about appropriation; whereas historical colonialism appropriated land, resources, and bodies, today’s new colonialism appropriates human life through extracting value from data. We uncovered the basic features of data colonialism: the processing of ever more personal data, the universalization of logistics as a mode of management, the datafication of most aspects of labor, and the creation of data relations that draw us into arrangements whereby data is gathered and value extracted from it, regardless of whether we are at work or somewhere else. Platforms play a key role in making our participation in data relations seem natural, but pressures at work and elsewhere also play a part. We argued that underlying these was something even more fundamental: the drive to capitalize human life itself in all its aspects and build through this a new social and economic order that installs capitalist management as the privileged mode for governing every aspect of life. Put another way, and updating Marx for the Big Data age, human life becomes a direct factor in capitalist production. This annexation of human capital is what links data colonialism to the further expansion of capitalism. This is the fundamental cost of connection, and it is a cost being paid all over the world, in societies in which connection is increasingly imposed as the basis for participating in everyday life. The resulting order has important similarities whether we are discussing the United States, China, Europe, or Latin America. The drive toward this order is sustained by key ideologies, including the ideologies of connection, datafication, personalization, and dataism. The result is not a new type of capitalism but certainly a new means by which and a new scale on which capitalism is operating; this result transcends earlier diagnoses of neoliberalism or the social factory and may, in the long run, provide the basis for an entirely new mode of production. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 577

The result is a rearrangement of life so that it is configured directly under the “hand” of capitalist management and its infrastructures of connection; the goal is, literally, to annex life to capitalism. It is the absoluteness of this ambition to order a world made tractable to capitalism’s operations that gives data colonialism its simplicity: the mutual implication of human life and digital technology for capitalism. A capitalism without limitation, obstruction, or remainder. A capitalism that encompasses every scale of human life (across space) at every layer (in depth) of individual and collective experience, all unfolding without limitation or interruption (in time). — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 578

To reiterate, data colonialism is what happens when life becomes the input of capitalism and becomes organized through data relations. As part of this process, data colonialism comes to depend on an emerging transformation of social relations both within the formal economy and outside of it. Urgent calls for us to submit to this new order are portrayed as inevitable, when in fact they are not. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 213

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the book’s master concept ‘capitalization of human life without limit’ and situates it against Marx’s account of profit maximization.
• XREF: Connects to critical data studies and Marx’s labor theory of value; the ‘outside’ that capitalism consumes echoes Rosa Luxemburg’s accumulation by dispossession passed through Harvey. — connects to: Data colonialism annexes human life itself to capital — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 28; Data colonialism fuses economic and cognitive power in an order as durable as capitalism — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 30; Data colonialism extracts human life as data for profit through data relations. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 32 (+20 more)
• SEED: The phrase ‘dataism’ as an ideology parallel to data colonialism suggests an article contrasting dataism-as-faith with attention economy as exploitation.
• DEEPTHINKING: The threefold claim — no spatial, no depth, no temporal remainder — is the most precise statement of the totalizing ambition that distinguishes this frame from attention/surveillance critiques, which typically have narrower scope.
• corroborated: 4 independent passages support this claim — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 68; Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 577; Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 578 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Data colonialism replaces cheap resources with cheap social data as its raw material #expands (0.85) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 579