To sum up, the problem and challenge of contemporary data practices is neither data nor simply the particular platforms that have emerged to exploit data. The problem is the interlocking combination of six forces, unpacked in the previous chapters: an infrastructure for data extraction (technological, still expanding); an order (social, still emerging) that binds humans into that infrastructure; a system (economic) built on that infrastructure and order; a model of governance (social) that benefits from that infrastructure, order, and system and works to bind humans ever further into them; a rationality (practical) that makes sense of each of the other levels; and finally, a new model of knowledge that redefines the world as one in which these forces together encompass all there is to be known of human life. Data, in short, is the new means to remake the world in capital's image.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 582