Normal human activities that feel unproductive become exploited as data

Evidence

We appreciate that Marx himself had an extremely broad understanding of “labor” to encompass not just productive activity but also the wider activities and pleasures of human life (Berki, “Nature and Origins,” 36) or, as Marx put it, “Life activity, productive life itself” (Manuscripts, 113). But this unusually expansive notion of labor risks obscuring the transformation underway whereby new forms of exploitation emerge through the collection and transformation of data from countless human activities that are not understood by human beings as involving any productive activity at all (for example, just chatting online, looking at things other people show us, or monitoring oneself). — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 675

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the scope problem: Marx’s expansive notion of labor obscures how data extraction exploits activities people never experience as work.
• XREF: Connects to the attention/surveillance school debate: this is the crux where data colonialism parts ways with labor-based critiques and with Zuboff’s surveillance capitalism. — connects to: Apps now colonize even trivial bodily functions like thirst into trackable social data — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 23; Apps collect data beyond user control while framing collection as enhanced experience — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 517; Continuous human data collection is not rational life-organization but a commercial fix. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 621 (+9 more)
• QUESTION: If data-collected activities are not experienced as labor, what normative frame better captures the harm — expropriation, enclosure, or something else?

Broader Connections

• Data exploitation resembles capitalism’s free ride on uncommodified life, not factory labor #expands (0.80) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 326
• Doing nothing is disengagement from attention economy plus reengagement with place #complicates (0.80)
• Privacy and data-ownership debates miss why experience becomes behavioral data at all #expands (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 731
• Autonomist ‘social factory’ theory cannot explain data extraction because it presumes labor-like activity #expands (0.75) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 153