Platform data extraction operates as a continuous cache-gathering of social life.

Evidence

Almost every time we do something online, and sometimes when we are offline too, a small data packet for later use is grabbed via infrastructures of connection. Let’s call those packets “caches.” In computing, caches are, as Christian Sandvig notes, stores of content that are held so as to be available for later use; an important practical application of the term cache is the stored version of a video on a local server, available when a local customer wants to download it for streaming. The gathering together of data caches and their processing into more useful material generates a live-streamed vision of social reality for the social quantification sector’s institutional players. Such social caching is data colonialism’s extractive dynamic in action. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 411

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces ‘social caching’ as the book’s technical term for data colonialism’s extractive dynamic, borrowing the computing concept of a cache.
• XREF: Connects to the dominant attention/surveillance school framing of data capture (Zuboff-style surveillance capitalism) and lets me compare how each school names the same mechanism. — connects to: Platforms reconfigure human life to continuously produce extractable data streams. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 45; Refashioning humans as data-open inforgs makes them continuously available for external modulation. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 479; Corporations now command a ‘God view’ of the social world called social caching — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 580 (+10 more)

Broader Connections

• Platforms extract behavioral surplus from human activity to predict and modify it. #expands (0.88) — , The Braided Reading EPUB, 809
• Digital platform enclosure is continuous with historical land enclosure, transforming relational life into extraction #expands (0.85) — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 126
• Digital platforms hijack life into data whose insights are sold back to us #expands (0.85)
• Continuous surveillance archives make every life retrospectively traceable across space and time. #expands (0.82)
• Continuous connection converts lived activity into machine-readable data and a branded, conditional ‘truth’. #expands (0.80) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 401
• Sharing-economy platforms fuse data extraction with labor at unprecedented scale #exemplifies (0.75)
• The cloud operates as an episteme that pre-organizes social life for datafication #expands (0.75) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 173
• Facebook data employees work continuously to influence users’ moods and behavior #exemplifies (0.72) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 940