Meanwhile, existing social relations (including labor relations) for hundreds of millions of people are increasingly datafied—that is, managed through data, including data gathered from the surfaces or insides of workers’ bodies. Work, for many, increasingly occurs within the sort of corporate environment of sensors that Davenport imagined; in its absoluteness, this recalls the continuous surveillance, if not the violence, that slave labor endured on a large scale under historical colonialism. Labor relations are becoming more directly and continuously extractive, whatever the formalities that cloak them. This has implications too for inequality, as exposure to (or freedom from) continuous surveillance becomes a key factor that distinguishes lower-status from higher-status jobs.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 86