Social caching grants corporate power privileged legibility over human life

Evidence

Continuously caching the social enables corporations and all forms of authority to gain the sense that the social world, or at least selected slices of it, can be continuously streamed just for them—not for their entertainment but to enable that world’s modulation or management in their interests. When the CEO of Shotspotter, makers of algorithmically processed surveillance mechanisms for the law enforcement sector, was asked to disclose his company’s data to the US public, he responded that it would be like “taking someone else’s Netflix subscription.” So social caching is more than an academic metaphor: it is the practice that de facto—and, increasingly, de jure—authorizes the privileged viewpoint on human life that corporate power claims for itself in the era of data colonialism. Just as historical colonialism installed numerous extractive and other privileges for mining, trading, and other companies, so too data colonialism brings legibility privileges for the social quantification sector over the lives of data subjects. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 419

Categorization

• DEFINE: Crystallizes the book’s core definition of ‘social caching’ as a colonial-style legibility privilege.
• XREF: The Shotspotter CEO’s ‘Netflix subscription’ remark resonates with the surveillance/attention-school literature on platform accumulation and with Zuboff-style extraction framing, marking where data colonialism overlaps and diverges. — connects to: 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; Social media promotes an ideal of privatizing the self into corporate form — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory: A Marxist…, 354; Surveillance capitalism exploits the human hunger for recognition — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 797 (+7 more)
• ADDENDUM: The framing of data extraction as installing extractive privileges parallels the infrastructure logic in the trees essay, where control over a substrate confers ongoing rights over its yield.
• SEED: A piece on ‘intellectual property in reverse’: how corporations frame public data requests about their extraction as theft of their streaming subscription, inverting who owns social knowledge.

Broader Connections

• Corporate-controlled social knowledge reorders society in favor of corporations over citizens. #corroborates (0.90) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 368
• Surveillance capitalism threatens human sovereignty over life and authorship of experience #corroborates (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1650
• Corporations treat streamed social data as a management surface #expands (0.82) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 419
• Social quantification lets corporations profit from participation without commodity purchase #corroborates (0.82) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 166
• Surveillance capitalism exploits the human hunger for recognition #corroborates (0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 797
• Social media promotes an ideal of privatizing the self into corporate form #corroborates (0.78) — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 354
• Web 2.0 openness ideology serves corporate profit over individual benefit #corroborates (0.75) — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 640
• Abstracting value from life processes enables new commodified social relations #expands (0.75)