Continuously caching the social enables corporations and all forms of authority to gain the sense that the social world, or at least selected slices of it, can be continuously streamed just for them—not for their entertainment but to enable that world's modulation or management in their interests. When the CEO of Shotspotter, makers of algorithmically processed surveillance mechanisms for the law enforcement sector, was asked to disclose his company's data to the US public, he responded that it would be like "taking someone else's Netflix subscription." So social caching is more than an academic metaphor: it is the practice that de facto—and, increasingly, de jure—authorizes the privileged viewpoint on human life that corporate power claims for itself in the era of data colonialism. Just as historical colonialism installed numerous extractive and other privileges for mining, trading, and other companies, so too data colonialism brings legibility privileges for the social quantification sector over the lives of data subjects.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 419