Another deep continuity with classic Marxist accounts comes from the data-driven possibilities of management control over production. The core of how industrial capitalism transformed work was not technological but social. The organization of work came under the exclusive control of management and, as such, became controllable at every stage of performance. Traditional industrial management remained limited, however, to mechanical data collection based in observation or form filling. By contrast, data-driven logistics, built on infrastructures of connection and fueled by artificial intelligence, convert all aspects of production—far beyond the factory walls and in every corner and moment of a transnational supply chain—into a managed assembly line. The new infrastructure of data processing that sustains data relations extends so-called scientific management in ways that recall classic diagnoses of industrial capitalism: “The image of the process, removed from production to a separate location and a separate group, controls the process itself.” Through data, capitalism begins to govern the whole social domain with management logic, another aspect of its annexation of human life.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 103