The challenge that data colonialism poses for social life and for critical social research is entirely new and disturbing. Because this new colonialism's mode of operation involves producing the materials from which information, and ultimately knowledge, are made, its operations cannot be insulated from how we understand the worlds we share, from our social imagination and even our politics. Data relations generate value in the very same movement in which they redescribe and remap the world, fusing knowledge production and value extraction.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 362