More explicitly defined, data colonialism is our term for the extension of a global process of extraction that started under colonialism and continued through industrial capitalism, culminating in today’s new form: instead of natural resources and labor, what is now being appropriated is human life through its conversion into data. The result degrades life, first by exposing it continuously to monitoring and surveillance (through which data is extracted) and second by thus making human life a direct input to capitalist production. Data colonialism is, in other words, an emerging order for appropriating and extracting social resources for profit through data, practiced via data relations. Unlike historical colonialism, whose vast profits helped create the preconditions for what we now know as industrial capitalism, data colonialism emerges against the backdrop of the entire intertwined history of colonialism and capitalism. This means that the basic colonial move of appropriating data from human life (data colonialism) works hand in hand with social arrangements and technological infrastructures, some that emerged during earlier capitalism and some new, that enable that data to be transformed into a commodity, indeed, a direct input to contemporary capitalist production.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 47