Imagine a product designed to enforce the long-distance economic dominance of one group over another, a product that creates passivity and dependence on the part of those who consume it, that can be used to destabilize the economic and political relations within a society, and whose usage entails an exploitative chain of transnational dimensions. The fact that we could just as easily be talking about opium or the latest app from the social quantification sector suggests how much things have not changed in colonial relations over the last two centuries.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 346