Datafied connection is sold as solidarity while actually substituting platform-mediated service

Evidence

The representatives of data colonialism try to convince us that there is nothing hollow in our assent to their order, that we are choosing familiar values of connection and human solidarity when we choose this datafied social order. They tell us that we need to go on connecting with and through them. But that is a ruse. The ruse depends on inducing human beings to forget ways of living that were left behind when we came to spend so much time servicing the social quantification sector. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 649

Categorization

• XREF: Directly challenges the attention-economy framing: platforms reframe surveillance as benign connection, which maps against the surveillance-critique school’s emphasis on capture. — connects to: Digital connection is a means to commercial ends, not intrinsically pro-social — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 38; Empty networking reveals outsider status rather than building connections — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 203; The internet functions as a factory producing the self as commodity — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory: A Marxist…, 18

Broader Connections

• Digital connection is a means to commercial ends, not intrinsically pro-social #corroborates (0.88) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 38
• The internet functions as a factory producing the self as commodity #corroborates (0.80) — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 18
• Empty networking reveals outsider status rather than building connections #corroborates (0.75) — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 203