Instead of looking at them as discrete and separate moments in history, it is more productive to look at colonialism as an “uncivilized” mode of production allowed to operate at the margins of a more “civilized” capitalism. Let us then conceive of colonialism and capitalism as two sides of the same coin: one side enacting dispossession in a brutal and rampant manner and the other normalizing this process by relegating it to the outside (outside the present, outside the civilized, outside the measurable, and so on). All the while, however, the process of dispossession itself is presented as a necessary and beneficial step in human progress. Various critics of neoliberalism and datafication9 have already recognized in our times a renewed race to amass wealth through new kinds of dispossession. But to understand why this form of accumulation is a continuation and not a break with the historical arc of the past five centuries, we need to look more closely at the history of colonialism and its role within capitalism.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 280