Natural resources, or cheap nature, could be exploited by colonialists and capitalists only through employing cheap labor, which framed the productive capacity of a certain class of human beings (first slaves and then workers) as exploitable also. Like cheap nature, cheap social data can be fully capitalized only through the exploitation of cheap labor. But as we argued in chapter 1, data relations are not labor relations in the strict sense of the word. Jason Moore explains that “capitalism must commodify life/work but depends upon the ‘free ride’ of uncommodified life/work to do so.” Similarly, with data colonialism, the exploitation that occurs through social quantification has less to do with the kind of exploitation that happens in a factory and more with the “free ride” that capitalism benefits from when extracting wealth from our broader social lives.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 326