States now depend on corporate data knowledge about their own citizens.

Evidence

Data relations give corporations a privileged window into the world of social relations and a privileged handle on the levers of social differentiation. States have become increasingly dependent on access to what the corporate sector knows about the lives of those states’ citizens, reversing the long-subsisting direction of knowledge transfer (from states to corporations). — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 88

The relations between state and economy are also being transformed. Data relations give corporations a privileged window into the world of social relations and a privileged handle on the levers of social differentiation. States have become increasingly dependent on access to what the corporate sector knows about the lives of those states’ citizens, reversing the long-subsisting direction of knowledge transfer (from states to corporations). — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 88

Categorization

• XREF: Links to Couldry’s data colonialism thesis and the broader surveillance/attention literature; the reversal of knowledge flow echoes platform-capitalism critiques like Zuboff’s surveillance capitalism. — connects to: State surveillance depends on corporate data collection — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 40; State-mandated privacy standards coexist with mass state data access. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 557; Data colonialism is jointly driven by corporate and state power — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 162 (+5 more)
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how exactly does this reverse knowledge transfer operate institutionally, and what evidence supports the state-dependency claim beyond the Apple/FBI and China cases?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 88

Broader Connections

• Data colonialism is jointly driven by corporate and state power #expands (0.88) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 162
• Corporate-controlled social knowledge reorders society in favor of corporations over citizens. #corroborates (0.85) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 368
• State-mandated privacy standards coexist with mass state data access. #complicates (0.82) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 557
• Every government in the world claims power to compel disclosure of corporate-held data #corroborates (0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 383
• Identifying citizens with corporations converts corporate power gaps into a shared cause to defend. #responds-to (0.78) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 322
• Statistics are knowledge that constitutes and orders the state #expands (0.75) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1727