But that should not blind us to what remains a disturbing line of continuity: as happened historically, but under new conditions, human life today is becoming the object of appropriation for extraction and, in the process, enabling capitalism to move to a still higher scale and integration of operation. Our intent is not to make comparisons to the detailed contents or form of historical colonialism but to focus on colonialism’s enduring function, which we see as enacting illegitimate appropriation and exploitation and as redefining human relations so that the resulting dispossession comes to seem natural.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 46