Data colonialism is a literal process, not merely a metaphor

Evidence

Couldry and Mejias show that data colonialism is not a metaphor. It is a process that expands many dark chapters of the past into our shiny new world of smartphones, smart TVs, and smart stores. This book rewards the reader with important historical context, fascinating examples, clear writing, and unexpected insights scattered throughout. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 18

This book’s argument will therefore be a double one. Our first assertion is that our everyday relations with data are becoming colonial in nature; that is, they cannot be understood except as an appropriation on a form and scale that bears comparison with the appropriations of historical colonialism. Our second argument is that this new colonialism does not just happen by itself but is driven by the imperatives of capitalism. Whereas the relations between historical colonialism and what emerged as industrial capitalism became clear only after centuries, the new data colonialism occurs against the background of centuries of capitalism, and it promises to take familiar aspects of the capitalist social and economic order to a new and more integrated stage, a stage as yet too new to reliably name. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 29

Our argument in this book—that human life is being colonized by data and needs to be decolonized—is no approximation. We are not playing Indian. There is nothing metaphorical about the new era of coloniality that we will describe. By tracing continuities from colonialism’s historical appropriation of vast territories, such as contemporary Brazil, all the way to data’s role in contemporary life, we suggest that although the modes, intensities, scales, and contexts of today’s dispossession are distinctive, the underlying function remains the same as under historical colonialism: to acquire large-scale resources from which economic value can be extracted. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 27

Categorization

• DEFINE: Blurb staking the book’s core definitional claim: data colonialism is a process, not a trope.
• QUESTION: The authors admit the new stage is ‘too new to reliably name’ — worth pursuing how they operationalize scale-comparability to historical colonialism vs. where that analogy breaks.
• XREF: The double-argument structure (colonial appropriation + capitalist imperative) maps onto the reader’s goal of opposing/complementing the attention/surveillance school. — connects to: Data extraction constitutes a new phase of colonialism rather than a metaphor. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 179; Data colonialism’s raw material is human life itself, not territory or labor — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 66
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 18; Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 29; Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 27

Broader Connections

• Data colonialism’s raw material is human life itself, not territory or labor #expands (0.90) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 66