Social quantification has shifted from a state capacity to a private-sector one

Evidence

Reversing the earlier pattern in which the corporate sector relied on the state’s statistics, social quantification today is principally a capacity of the commercial sector, with states the dependent users. Only in this era did it become imaginable that a government might, as the United Kingdom did in 2013, float the idea of abolishing its census and relying instead on privately acquired data. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 386

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels the surveillance/attention school’s claim that platform power has displaced state centering; relevant to the reader’s rival-school comparison. — connects to: Social quantification today serves corporate private access, not societal legibility. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 390; Privately controlled data extraction produces social classifications that entrench inequality — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 443; Social quantification lets corporations profit from participation without commodity purchase — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 166 (+1 more)
• SEED: Angle: the 2013 UK census-abolition float as the moment data colonialism’s reversal of state-corporate dependence became thinkable.

Broader Connections

• Social quantification today serves corporate private access, not societal legibility. #corroborates (0.95) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 390
• Privately controlled data extraction produces social classifications that entrench inequality #expands (0.80) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 443
• Social quantification lets corporations profit from participation without commodity purchase #expands (0.78) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 166
• Automation-triggered falling profit rates push capital toward social quantification as a new revenue stream #expands (0.75) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 167