Human inputs are only part of the territory that data colonialism seeks to annex to human capital. Machine-to-machine connections significantly deepen the new web of social knowledge production. Consider the fast-growing Internet of Things (IoT). The goal is clear: to install into every tool the capacity to continuously and autonomously collect and transmit data within privately controlled systems. Cisco predicts that by 2022, machine-to-machine connections will be 45 percent of all internet connections. Since machines can communicate with each other continuously, as human beings cannot, we can expect within a few years that the everyday world will have become a communication space in which human beings are minority participants and interpersonal communication a mere subset of what gets profitably tracked. The language of capture implies an unending series of territorial expansion: from the Internet of Things to "the internet of medical things," from "the internet of services" to "the internet of everything."

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 422