Smart-city narratives mask extractive data capitalism by rendering the unconnected invisible.

Evidence

If no resistance is forthcoming, the capitalization of life is destined to reconstruct Hobbes’s “state of nature”—a battle of all against all—via an algorithmic simulation that preserves, indeed stimulates, social appearances while regrounding them in capitalism’s general drive to profitable extraction. The process will be heavily disguised. Popular narratives of “smartness” (for instance, the smart city) are an example: in the smart landscape, there are only connected individuals, natural and willing targets of commercial messaging and sources of commercially useful data, functioning within the larger cycle of capitalized life. Everyone else is by definition invisible. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 460

Categorization

• SEED: A ‘the smart city was never about you’ essay angle: how the marketing of algorithmic urbanism rewrites citizenship as ‘eligible data supplier.’
• DEFINE: Clarifies what ‘capitalization of life’ concretely means: profitable extraction regrounding social life while preserving its appearances.
• XREF: connects to: Framing technology as autonomous disguises who profits from data extraction — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 511; Colonial maps and modern network diagrams both render non-valued entities invisible. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 312; Utopian techno rhetoric is strategic propaganda that legitimates surveillance capitalism’s drive toward totality — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1284 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Utopian techno rhetoric is strategic propaganda that legitimates surveillance capitalism’s drive toward totality #expands (0.78) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1284