Data extraction stabilizes only when naturalized as a normal social form.

Evidence

To be an effective foundation for a new type of social order, data relations need not have the solidity we imagine in many work contracts. Indeed, Zuboff plausibly argues that much data extraction today is not a contract or relation at all, in that data just seems to get extracted at a distance. But the wider set of arrangements on which data colonialism relies would be ineffective unless they operated as something like a social form that seems both natural and normal, quite unlike an arbitrary act of theft or extraction. It is this social form we call data relations; data relations enable the basic processes of social construction on which the stabilization of data colonialism depends for the long term. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 134

Categorization

• XREF: Refining the data-colonialism rival frame; ‘data relations’ as naturalized social form parallels Bourdieu’s habitus and Couldry’s own ordering-as-totalitarian-form claims. — connects to: Data acquires extractability only through socially constructed relations, not as a natural given — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 133; Data extraction needs to feel natural and normal, not like theft, to stabilize — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 134; Data relations are the social form that makes data extraction seem natural and normal — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 132 (+4 more)
• DEFINE: Introduces the book’s core construct ‘data relations’ and distinguishes it from Zuboff’s surveillance-capitalist extraction-as-distance.

Broader Connections

• Data extraction needs to feel natural and normal, not like theft, to stabilize #corroborates (0.95) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 134
• Data relations are the social form that makes data extraction seem natural and normal #corroborates (0.93) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 132
• Data acquires extractability only through socially constructed relations, not as a natural given #corroborates (0.92) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 133
• Data is a social by-product, not a natural substance, captured by distant third parties #corroborates (0.80) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 287
• Ideology succeeds only when naturalized from value into fact #expands (0.80) — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 37
• Data does not become a commodity until extraction processes demarcate it #qualifies (0.75) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 472
• Social systems form only through communication as interdependent selection processes. #qualifies (0.72) — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 587