But confronting data colonialism as a whole is seriously inconvenient. That is because data colonialism's model for organizing things underlies countless business models and everyday resources. That is why, as Mark Andreessen inadvertently implied (in the chapter's opening quote), the point of opposing colonialism was never immediate economic success. Worse, over the past two decades, billions of people have started to organize much of their personal lives around the infrastructures of digital platforms and other services that depend, or seem to depend, on seamless flows of data.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 585