But the outcome is hardly something to celebrate. For the unwelcome truth is that, just as in Marx's eyes capitalism had disrupted human beings' relations with physical nature, in the era of data colonialism, capitalism risks disturbing humanity's relations to its nature—that is, our lives as reflexive, relatively autonomous human beings. Data colonialism interposes infrastructures of data extraction directly into the texture of human life and so risks deforming human experience in a fundamental way, invading the space of the self on which the values of autonomy and freedom in all their forms depend.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 148