Data colonialism fuses economic and cognitive power in an order as durable as capitalism
Evidence
Data colonialism requires the creation of a new social and economic order that is potentially as enduring as the order that enabled capitalist market societies from the nineteenth century onward. The third point concerns how the power relations generated by this emerging order work: data colonialism appropriates not only physical resources but also our very resources for knowing the world. This means that economic power (the power to make value) and cognitive power (the power over knowledge) converge as never before. Therefore, what is happening with data can be fully understood only against the background not just of capitalism but of the longer interrelations between capitalism and colonialism. The exploitation of human life for profit through data is the climax of five centuries’ worth of attempts to know, exploit, and rule the world from particular centers of power. We are entering the age not so much of a new capitalism as of a new interlocking of capitalism’s and colonialism’s twinned histories, and the interlocking force is data. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 30
Categorization
- DEFINE: This is the book’s core definitional claim about what data colonialism is: the interlocking of capitalism’s and colonialism’s histories via data, converging economic and cognitive power.
- XREF: Connects to surveillance-capitalism discourse (Zuboff) and to Couldry/Mejias’ rival framing that insists on colonialism rather than just capitalism — the key comparative move for this reader’s purposes. — connects to: Data colonialism is jointly driven by corporate and state power — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 162; Data colonialism requires transforming society itself, not just extracting value — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 365; Data colonialism expands capitalism by absorbing previously uncommodified life streams — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 68 (+10 more)
- SEED: Angle: ‘five centuries of knowing, exploiting, and ruling the world’ as a lineage for platform extractivism — a genealogy essay connecting colonial cartography/natural-history collecting to contemporary data extractivism.
Broader Connections
- Data colonialism is jointly driven by corporate and state power
#expands(0.88) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 162 - Data colonialism expands capitalism by absorbing previously uncommodified life streams
#expands(0.85) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 68 - Data colonialism extracts human life as data for profit through data relations.
#expands(0.85) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 32 - Data colonialism requires transforming society itself, not just extracting value
#expands(0.80) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 365 - Data colonialism replaces cheap resources with cheap social data as its raw material
#expands(0.80) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 579 - Resistance to data colonialism must confront global capitalism, not just platforms
#expands(0.78) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 650 - Unaccountable abstract social knowledge functionally serves data-colonialist capitalism.
#corroborates(0.75) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 453