Digital Mind 🧠

🪵 The Threshold

Data extraction extends capitalism's exploitation to all human life, echoing colonial raw-material logic

Properties2
tagsja-picks, define, xref, seed, definitional_content, trade, singleton, category/definitional-content
aliases@couldry_costs_2019, loc. 42

4 min read

Data extraction extends capitalism’s exploitation to all human life, echoing colonial raw-material logic

Evidence

Capitalism has been expanding from the start, in the sense of exploiting new resources, finding new ways of making profit, and finding new markets. But until recently, this expansion has been based on the exploitation of human production through labor relations, as classically theorized by Marx, resulting in the ever-greater transformation of physical nature as an input to capitalism. But the appropriation of human life in the form of data (the basic move that we call data colonialism) generates a new possibility: without ending its exploitation of labor and its transformation of physical nature, capitalism extends its capacity to exploit life by assimilating new or reconfigured human activities (whether regarded as labor or not) as its direct inputs. The result, we argue in chapter 1, is the expansion of the practical scope of capitalist exploitation, but in ways that can be linked back to Marx’s own sense of capitalism’s expansionary potential. In this emerging form of capitalism, human beings become not just actors in the production process but raw material that can be transformed into value for that production process. Human life, in the form of profitably abstracted data, becomes more like the seed or manure that Marx noted became factors of capitalist production, having once just been part of human beings’ cycle of interaction with the land. This transformation of human life into raw material resonates strongly with the history of exploitation that preceded industrial capitalism—that is, colonialism. … The very concept of raw material has deep colonial roots. Raw, in this context, means available for exploitation without resistance rather than a substance that needs no processing. The natural environment itself first had to be reconstructed so that it became available for value extraction. Then, through the practice of slavery (which preceded colonialism but which reached a massive scale under colonialism), human bodies were transformed into a raw material for capitalism in the form of slaves. Historians have warned us against treating slavery—usually imagined as a premodern practice—in isolation from the development of industrial capitalism. The plantation and the factory coexisted for a long time. The treatment of human beings as mere property stimulated the rationalities of profit maximization, accounting precision, and data optimization that we now tend to associate with modern rationality. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 42

Categorization

  • DEFINE: Defines the book’s core construct ‘data colonialism’ as capitalism’s move to appropriate human life in data form.
  • XREF: Builds a bridge between the surveillance/attention school and Marx’s labor theory of value, placing data extraction inside rather than outside capital accumulation. — connects to: Data extraction is historically unprecedented yet clarifies through colonial-capitalist continuity. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 33; Data colonialism expands capitalism by absorbing previously uncommodified life streams — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 68; Data colonialism extracts ever more layers of human life as raw material — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 66 (+14 more)
  • SEED: Angle: ‘raw material’ as a shared analytical category bridging colonial slavery and contemporary platform data extraction — the plantation and the server farm.

Broader Connections

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