Data plays the role today that money played in industrial capitalism

Evidence

In this new world, corporations act as colonizers that deploy digital infrastructures of connection to monetize social interactions, and the colonized are relegated to the role of subjects who are driven to use these infrastructures in order to enact their social lives. Just as, to meet the requirements of industrial capitalism, all economic relations were transformed into market relations via the medium of money, today social relations and human life in general are increasingly transformed into potential market relations through the medium of data. Because it is very often the stuff of a subject’s own life that is being exchanged, data relations comprise what in the perspective of colonial history can be seen as an embryonic “mode of production,” a new form of tributary relationship between colonizer and colonized. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 278

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the money-to-data homology that carries the core causal claim: data as the medium of a new mode of production.
• DEEPTHINKING: The tributary ‘mode of production’ claim is a genuinely dense analytic move — data relations as a class relation with extraction built into everyday social enactment — that reframes how we read the attention economy.
• XREF: connects to: Data infrastructure lets markets and states produce basic social knowledge for the first time. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 89; Falling recording costs turned data from peripheral to central capitalist resource. — Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism, 44; Industrial platforms extract data to cement monopolies over global manufacturing — Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism, 62 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Falling recording costs turned data from peripheral to central capitalist resource. #expands (0.75) — Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism, 44