Almost every time we do something online, and sometimes when we are offline too, a small data packet for later use is grabbed via infrastructures of connection. Let's call those packets "caches." In computing, caches are, as Christian Sandvig notes, stores of content that are held so as to be available for later use; an important practical application of the term cache is the stored version of a video on a local server, available when a local customer wants to download it for streaming. The gathering together of data caches and their processing into more useful material generates a live-streamed vision of social reality for the social quantification sector's institutional players. Such social caching is data colonialism's extractive dynamic in action.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 411