Data exploitation resembles capitalism’s free ride on uncommodified life, not factory labor

Evidence

Natural resources, or cheap nature, could be exploited by colonialists and capitalists only through employing cheap labor, which framed the productive capacity of a certain class of human beings (first slaves and then workers) as exploitable also. Like cheap nature, cheap social data can be fully capitalized only through the exploitation of cheap labor. But as we argued in chapter 1, data relations are not labor relations in the strict sense of the word. Jason Moore explains that “capitalism must commodify life/work but depends upon the ‘free ride’ of uncommodified life/work to do so.” Similarly, with data colonialism, the exploitation that occurs through social quantification has less to do with the kind of exploitation that happens in a factory and more with the “free ride” that capitalism benefits from when extracting wealth from our broader social lives. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 326

Categorization

• DEFINE: Core definitional move: positions data exploitation as a ‘free ride’ on social life rather than as labor exploitation, extending Jason Moore’s cheap nature/cheap labor framework.
• CANDY: The ‘free ride’ framing of data extraction is a compact, tweetable way to distinguish data colonialism from factory exploitation.
• XREF: connects to: Data extraction extends capitalism’s exploitation to all human life, echoing colonial raw-material logic — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 42; Capitalism is indifferent to the origin of the data it exploits for value. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 72; Continuous human data collection is not rational life-organization but a commercial fix. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 621 (+14 more)

Broader Connections

• Data colonialism expands capitalism by absorbing previously uncommodified life streams #corroborates (0.88) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 68
• Data colonialism extracts human life as data for profit through data relations. #corroborates (0.82) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 32
• Under surveillance capitalism the product is behavioral data, not the goods themselves #expands (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 418
• Surveillance capitalism threatens human sovereignty over life and authorship of experience #expands (0.72) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1650