Gayatri Spivak once famously asked, "Can the subaltern speak?" Similarly, today we might ask: Can data colonialism's subjects speak up against the structures that dispossess them? An affirmative answer is possible if we take seriously the temporal dislocation that postcolonial theory grasped so well when it defined itself as an "active transformation of the present out of the clutches of the past." Except that today the dislocation is subtly different. Even though we have explored the roots of data colonialism in the past, the debates started here must address the kind of future that is already being created in the clutches of the present.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 637