In this new world, corporations act as colonizers that deploy digital infrastructures of connection to monetize social interactions, and the colonized are relegated to the role of subjects who are driven to use these infrastructures in order to enact their social lives. Just as, to meet the requirements of industrial capitalism, all economic relations were transformed into market relations via the medium of money, today social relations and human life in general are increasingly transformed into potential market relations through the medium of data. Because it is very often the stuff of a subject's own life that is being exchanged, data relations comprise what in the perspective of colonial history can be seen as an embryonic “mode of production,” a new form of tributary relationship between colonizer and colonized.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 278