Colonialism is about appropriation; whereas historical colonialism appropriated land, resources, and bodies, today's new colonialism appropriates human life through extracting value from data. We uncovered the basic features of data colonialism: the processing of ever more personal data, the universalization of logistics as a mode of management, the datafication of most aspects of labor, and the creation of data relations that draw us into arrangements whereby data is gathered and value extracted from it, regardless of whether we are at work or somewhere else. Platforms play a key role in making our participation in data relations seem natural, but pressures at work and elsewhere also play a part. We argued that underlying these was something even more fundamental: the drive to capitalize human life itself in all its aspects and build through this a new social and economic order that installs capitalist management as the privileged mode for governing every aspect of life. Put another way, and updating Marx for the Big Data age, human life becomes a direct factor in capitalist production. This annexation of human capital is what links data colonialism to the further expansion of capitalism. This is the fundamental cost of connection, and it is a cost being paid all over the world, in societies in which connection is increasingly imposed as the basis for participating in everyday life. The resulting order has important similarities whether we are discussing the United States, China, Europe, or Latin America. The drive toward this order is sustained by key ideologies, including the ideologies of connection, datafication, personalization, and dataism. The result is not a new type of capitalism but certainly a new means by which and a new scale on which capitalism is operating; this result transcends earlier diagnoses of neoliberalism or the social factory and may, in the long run, provide the basis for an entirely new mode of production.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 577