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Data colonialism extracts human life as data for profit through data relations.

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tagsja-picks, define, xref, seed, addendum, definitional_content, trade, corroborated, category/definitional-content
aliases@couldry_costs_2019, loc. 32, @couldry_costs_2019, loc. 47, @couldry_costs_2019, loc. 85

7 min read

Data colonialism extracts human life as data for profit through data relations.

Evidence

Data colonialism is, in essence, an emerging order for the appropriation of human life so that data can be continuously extracted from it for profit. This extraction is operationalized via data relations, ways of interacting with each other and with the world facilitated by digital tools. Through data relations, human life is not only annexed to capitalism but also becomes subject to continuous monitoring and surveillance. The result is to undermine the autonomy of human life in a fundamental way that threatens the very basis of freedom, which is exactly the value that advocates of capitalism extol. … These fundamental transformations of human life have dramatic consequences for the social world too. They enable what we call social caching, a new form of knowledge about the social world based on the capture of personal data and its storage for later profitable use. As social relations are thus transformed, we see the emergence of the Cloud Empire, a totalizing vision and organization of business in which the dispossession of data colonialism has been naturalized and extended across all social domains. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 32

More explicitly defined, data colonialism is our term for the extension of a global process of extraction that started under colonialism and continued through industrial capitalism, culminating in today’s new form: instead of natural resources and labor, what is now being appropriated is human life through its conversion into data. The result degrades life, first by exposing it continuously to monitoring and surveillance (through which data is extracted) and second by thus making human life a direct input to capitalist production. Data colonialism is, in other words, an emerging order for appropriating and extracting social resources for profit through data, practiced via data relations. Unlike historical colonialism, whose vast profits helped create the preconditions for what we now know as industrial capitalism, data colonialism emerges against the backdrop of the entire intertwined history of colonialism and capitalism. This means that the basic colonial move of appropriating data from human life (data colonialism) works hand in hand with social arrangements and technological infrastructures, some that emerged during earlier capitalism and some new, that enable that data to be transformed into a commodity, indeed, a direct input to contemporary capitalist production. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 47

At the core of data colonialism is the creation of a new type of social relation that we call “data relations,” as defined in detail later. Data relations make the appropriation of human beings’ data seem normal, just the way things are. Data relations are of many sorts, but all share one basic feature: they ensure informational resources (data) for capitalism in areas of human life that, previously, were not considered direct inputs to production. Far outside the sphere of normal productive activity, ordinary social interaction is increasingly lived in environments of continuous data collection, behavior prediction, and choice shaping. But this is possible only because social actors now enter more or less voluntarily into data relations that secure regular data flows for capital. The drive to expand data relations explains a lot about contemporary capitalism. So, for example, it is the need to make data relations routine everywhere that drives Facebook’s offer of simplified internet connection (Facebook Free Basics) in more than twenty countries with weak or uneven internet infrastructure, principally in Africa. The emergence of data relations increasingly complements labor relations’ contribution to capitalism’s reproduction. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 85

Data colonialism is, in essence, an emerging order for the appropriation of human life so that data can be continuously extracted from it for profit. This extraction is operationalized via data relations, ways of interacting with each other and with the world facilitated by digital tools. Through data relations, human life is not only annexed to capitalism but also becomes subject to continuous monitoring and surveillance. … They enable what we call social caching, a new form of knowledge about the social world based on the capture of personal data and its storage for later profitable use. As social relations are thus transformed, we see the emergence of the Cloud Empire, a totalizing vision and organization of business in which the dispossession of data colonialism has been naturalized and extended across all social domains. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 32

Data colonialism appropriates for profitable exploitation a resource that did not begin to be universally appropriated until two decades ago: data. According to an authoritative definition, data is the “material produced by abstracting the world into categories, measures and other representational forms … that constitute the building blocks from which information and knowledge are created.” More than that, human life, and particularly human social life, is increasingly being constructed so that it generates data from which profit can be extracted. In doing so, ever more of life is required to be continuously monitored and surveilled, removing the boundaries that previously existed between internal life and external forces. In this double sense, human life is appropriated through data, becoming something else, a process tied to external processes of data extraction. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 71

Categorization

  • DEFINE: The core architectural definitions of the book’s key terms — data colonialism, data relations, social caching, the Cloud Empire, and the social quantification sector — laid out in a single passage.
  • XREF: The ‘Cloud Empire’ framing parallels Zuboff’s surveillance capitalism as an extractive order, and its naturalization echoes the totalizing social system in Zamyatin’s ‘We’. — 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 is defined by its external storage infrastructure and profit destination — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 31 (+25 more)
  • SEED: Facebook Free Basics in Africa as an exemplar of infrastructure-driven data extraction is a strong case-study angle for an essay on platform expansion into the Global South.
  • ADDENDUM: The appropriation-of-life frame parallels the sacrificial logic in ‘Grafting & Growth’ and ‘On Sacrifice’ — value extracted from living process rather than outright destruction.
  • corroborated: 5 independent passages support this claim — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 32; Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 47; Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 85 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

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