Immanuel Wallerstein observed that “profit is often greater when not all links in the chain are in fact commodified.” By this he meant that capitalism has always relied on indirect modes of exploitation that can operate in addition to the direct modes of exploitation related to wage labor. Put differently, unpaid or underpaid work is of utmost importance in capitalism, whether that work is the work of the slave, the housewife, or the selfie poster. Historically, this has served both to externalize costs so that it is members of society, not employers, who have to bear them and to extend capitalism beyond the formal economy. Today, social quantification represents the most extensive attempt to construct a whole economy based on the free ride that capitalism can extract from our lives, so that modes of unpaid and underpaid work that were unimaginable before are legitimized, normalized, and, in the long run, naturalized.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 214