Appropriation and exploitation are the reasons we believe it is still relevant to talk about colonialism in the age of data. They are not outdated features of an old system but relations that newly define our present age. Marx, in an attempt to identify the characteristics of industrial capitalism, differentiated what he was trying to describe from previous modes of production, including those forms of primitive accumulation that can be said to include historical colonialism. But as David Harvey points out, the problem with this approach is that it relegates “accumulation based upon predation, fraud, and violence to an ‘original stage’ that is considered no longer relevant or . . . as being somehow ‘outside of’ the capitalist system.” Our thesis is that primitive accumulation does not precede capitalism but goes hand in hand with it. We follow authors such as Shoshana Zuboff, Julie Cohen, and Saskia Sassen25 in recognizing an emergent phase of primitive accumulation so unique and historically significant that it deserves treatment as a new stage of history that we call data colonialism.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 178