Older critiques of historical capitalism can provide valuable insights here. One important idea is that of the “fetish.” For Karl Marx, the fetish (classically the “commodity fetish”) made the economic relations of capitalism seem necessary. Marx delineated a trinity of fetishized objects: interest as the fruit of capital, rent as the fruit of land, and wage as the fruit of labor. Now we can add a fourth object: data as the fruit of life processes. This is exactly how business now speaks (think of the mantra of data as the new oil).

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 102