Colonialism, in its old and new forms, operates through the dispossession of resources. This dispossession happens through the appropriation of things that belong to someone else and through the extraction of value from the appropriated resources. By doing this, the natural and the social worlds are implicated in new modes of production, transformed into factors in ever-changing capitalist cycles of production. Put differently, appropriation and extraction convert life, particularly human life, into profit centers for capitalism.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 283