Data colonialism requires the creation of a new social and economic order that is potentially as enduring as the order that enabled capitalist market societies from the nineteenth century onward. The third point concerns how the power relations generated by this emerging order work: data colonialism appropriates not only physical resources but also our very resources for knowing the world. This means that economic power (the power to make value) and cognitive power (the power over knowledge) converge as never before. Therefore, what is happening with data can be fully understood only against the background not just of capitalism but of the longer interrelations between capitalism and colonialism. The exploitation of human life for profit through data is the climax of five centuries' worth of attempts to know, exploit, and rule the world from particular centers of power. We are entering the age not so much of a new capitalism as of a new interlocking of capitalism's and colonialism's twinned histories, and the interlocking force is data.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 30