Recall that the whole trajectory of data colonialism started out from the banal fact that to function, computers must capture data about their changes of state. It is a curious irony that B. J. Fogg, a leading developer of unconscious behavioral influence through online choice architectures, named his new science of intervention "captology." Knowledge by capture, influence by appropriation. When the cutting edge of social knowledge is a tool kit for achieving power at scale (or what Walmart more comfortingly calls "personalization at scale"), then the stakes of the social-knowledge game just got higher and its potential contribution to social justice more tenuous.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 461