WHAT DOES IT MEAN to be human—to remain distinctively human—in the twenty-first century? A decade and a half ago, it still made sense for one of the United States's leading privacy advocates, Philip Agre, to assert that “your face is not a barcode.” But in May 2018, the black rap artist Donald Glover, a.k.a. Childish Gambino, released a video that went viral called “This is America.” As the song fades, he sings, “You just a barcode.” The chasm between these two sentences says much about the recent trajectory of poverty and race relations in the United States, already touched on in the last chapter. But it also opens an even larger story about the violence that data colonialism does everywhere to the core human values of freedom and autonomy.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 466