The belief that all life should become data is ideological, not neutral.
Evidence
There is also the ideology of datafication, which insists that every aspect of life must be transmuted into data as the form in which all life becomes useful for capital. … These specific ideologies are examples of “dataism.” They are tools for shaping practice and thus highly specific in their applications. They are often combined with an overarching imaginative claim that we might call myth: the myth that all this is inevitable and that today’s infrastructures of connection and data extraction fulfill human beings’ collective potential in some transcendent way. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 98
Categorization
- XREF: The ‘myth of inevitability’ echoes the reader’s existing notes on how techno-optimist inevitability discourse functions under surveillance capitalism, e.g. Zuboff’s ‘big Other’ claims. — connects to: Data colonialism extends neoliberal ideology by appropriating all of life, not just non-market spheres. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 169; Datafication ideology removes the obstacles that once limited capital’s extraction from life streams. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 96; Dataism masks itself as anti-ideology while functioning as a controlling ideology. — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 130 (+2 more)
Broader Connections
- Data colonialism extends neoliberal ideology by appropriating all of life, not just non-market spheres.
#expands(0.85) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 169 - Dataism masks itself as anti-ideology while functioning as a controlling ideology.
#expands(0.85) — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics, 130 - A liberatory universalism opposes Big Data’s totalizing reduction of life to data
#expands(0.85) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 637 - Dataism disavows ideology yet constitutes a new ideology of digital totalitarianism
#corroborates(0.85) — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics, 130 - Datafication ideology removes the obstacles that once limited capital’s extraction from life streams.
#expands(0.75) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 96