Data colonialism gives states and markets new power to produce social knowledge

Evidence

Because data reinterprets the traces of the everyday world, large-scale data processing recalibrates social knowledge, with the consequences depending on the type of market society under analysis. In liberal market societies, the new data infrastructure involves for the first time market institutions in producing basic social knowledge. But in state-led market societies, such as China, the state acquires a remarkable new tool to direct the production of social knowledge in its own interests. It is now an explicit goal of the Chinese government to use artificial intelligence to “establish [an] intelligent monitoring platform for comprehensive community management.” Direct social governance shaped by data colonialism becomes not a distant ideal but a practical reality. The result, as the Chinese government put it with no apparent irony, is “a market improvement of the economic and social order.” — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 89

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to surveillance/attention schools the reader studies; the same data infrastructure serves liberal-market and state-directed logics, which bears directly on rival-school comparison. — connects to: Data colonialism, social quantification, and Cloud Empire form a single framework — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 163; 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 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 (+4 more)
• DEFINE: Distinguishes data colonialism’s operation in liberal versus state-led market societies, a key scope criterion for defining the contested term.

Broader Connections

• Data colonialism is jointly driven by corporate and state power #corroborates (0.90) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 162
• Unaccountable abstract social knowledge functionally serves data-colonialist capitalism. #corroborates (0.85) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 453
• 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 fuses economic and cognitive power in an order as durable as capitalism #expands (0.82) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 30
• Data colonialism replaces cheap resources with cheap social data as its raw material #corroborates (0.75) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 579
• Data colonialism extracts human life as data for profit through data relations. #complicates (0.75) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 32