Polanyi’s analysis has provocative implications for today. As he makes clear, the market transformation that data colonialism involves will not succeed by itself: it will require its own social transformation that, initially, is likely to be violent, or at least dislocating. At the core of any such social transformation will be “the commodity concept.” Capitalism, to reap the benefits of data colonialism, must make the social domain into a marketized space whose every point has value and is available for commodity exchange. Data relations, and the new forms of “knowledge” to which they give rise, are the key means to this.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 365