These specific ideologies are examples of “dataism.” They are tools for shaping practice and thus highly specific in their applications. They are often combined with an overarching imaginative claim that we might call myth: the myth that all this is inevitable and that today’s infrastructures of connection and data extraction fulfill human beings’ collective potential in some transcendent way. The term community, as something seemingly inherent to human life, can easily fuel this myth. Think not just of Mark Zuckerberg’s frequent appeals to Facebook’s “global community” but also of the Tencent CEO’s invocation of a “digital ecological community.” This ideology of inevitability also has its counterpart in ideas on the anticapitalist left that treat networks as the basis for a leap toward overthrowing capitalism.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 98