Data colonialism proposes a connected world that appears to know itself through its absolute connectability and through unfettered data flows between all its points (whether living or not). Indeed, dataism claims to find a higher force than human life, the force of information processing or algorithmic power, which appears to know human life better than life can know itself. But this ideology clashes with a much older vision of how human life should be, an ecological view of human life, unchallenged until very recently, which assumes that human life, like all life—whatever its limits, constraints, and deficits—is a zone of open-ended connection and growth.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 605