Machine-to-machine data traffic will soon make humans minority participants in communication

Evidence

Human inputs are only part of the territory that data colonialism seeks to annex to human capital. Machine-to-machine connections significantly deepen the new web of social knowledge production. Consider the fast-growing Internet of Things (IoT). The goal is clear: to install into every tool the capacity to continuously and autonomously collect and transmit data within privately controlled systems. Cisco predicts that by 2022, machine-to-machine connections will be 45 percent of all internet connections. Since machines can communicate with each other continuously, as human beings cannot, we can expect within a few years that the everyday world will have become a communication space in which human beings are minority participants and interpersonal communication a mere subset of what gets profitably tracked. The language of capture implies an unending series of territorial expansion: from the Internet of Things to “the internet of medical things,” from “the internet of services” to “the internet of everything.” — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 422

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the attention-school claim that human attention becomes a dwindling subset of tracked activity — ‘interpersonal communication a mere subset’ parallels platform surveillance’s expansion beyond human-originated signal. — connects to: Social interactions are now technology-mediated and increasingly formed between humans and AI, reshaping communication — The techno-social turn: how digital technologies reshape minds, bodies, and relationships
• QUESTION: Check Cisco’s actual 2022 prediction retrospectively; would strengthen or undercut the colonial ‘annexation of everything’ claim.