The closest Habermas comes to unpacking the metaphor of "colonization" is on page 355, where he says system imperatives "make their way into the lifeworld from the outside—like colonial masters coming into a tribal society—and force a process of assimilation upon it." But this idea is not developed as a theory of colonialism, and its starting point—the separation of technological systems from lifeworld—is hard to reconcile with life in most, if not all, contemporary societies. More recently, and in a similar vein, Adam Greenfield has written about the Internet of Things as "the colonization of everyday life by information processing" (Radical Technologies, 32).

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 745