New forms of collectivity are separable from the exploitative data relations that coinhabit them

Evidence

The Cloud Empire’s myth that the only way to harness new social resources is to surrender to platforms’ control of how and where we make knowledge, organize resources, or even just express solidarity and connection must be unlearned, and even more rapidly than it came into being. Recent infrastructures of connection have facilitated new forms of collectivity, but this does not mean that we must accept the forms of exploitation that are indissolubly tied to the data relations associated with those infrastructures. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 642

Categorization

• XREF: Challenges a premise common to the surveillance-school literature: that platform infrastructure and its extractive data relations are analytically inseparable. — connects to: Subjectivity can fuse with objective form without blotting it out — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 96