The Internet of Things extends capital extraction into post-purchase consumption

Evidence

If logistics aims to rationalize production, the recent growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) aims to incorporate consumption—what we do with products after we buy them—into an extended chain of profit extraction through the processing of data. The bigger vision of the IoT, and of data colonialism as a whole, has been expressed by a company normally seen as the enemy of the entrepreneurs who built social media platforms—IBM. By turning the human environment into a network of listening devices that capture data about all activities, IBM suggests that they can “liquify” areas previously inaccessible to capital. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 49

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the IoT’s role in data colonialism through the ‘liquify’ concept — capital turning formerly-inaccessible human activity into extractable resource.
• XREF: The ‘liquify’ framing parallels how attention economics turns human attention into a tradable resource; useful for mapping where the two schools converge and diverge. — connects to: Automation-triggered falling profit rates push capital toward social quantification as a new revenue stream — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 167; Physical assets are becoming tradeable commodities in real-time digital markets — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 653; IoT sensors can modify human behavior as easily as device behavior — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 917 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• IoT sensors can modify human behavior as easily as device behavior #expands (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 917
• Automation-triggered falling profit rates push capital toward social quantification as a new revenue stream #expands (0.80) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 167
• Physical assets are becoming tradeable commodities in real-time digital markets #expands (0.78) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 653
• Capital is a social relation conferring extractive power, not just machinery #expands (0.75) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 792
• Technology results from capital’s development, not the reverse #corroborates (0.72)