If lack of accountability to context is becoming a principle of the new social knowledge, then this serves data colonialism (the mutual implication of human life and digital technology for capitalism) rather well. Abstraction means removing from view the textures of social life that might otherwise provide the reference point for social actors to hold social knowledge to account. Above all what risks being hollowed out by the new social knowledge is the space from which human actors could once imagine themselves with a license to speak truth to power. When the social world, in all its possible layers of action, thought, and expression, becomes merely an input to capital, the once resounding Foucauldian principle that for every power there is resistance starts to ring hollow.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 453