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, loc. 49