Indeed, capitalism’s standard ways of understanding itself as a rational order are effective in masking the colonial scale of appropriation that is underway. Much of today’s data appropriations are not seen in daily life as appropriation at all but as part of everyday business practice. As such, data relations introduce into business management a new bureaucracy, as first theorized by Max Weber. This bureaucracy is based on the apparent “rationality” of organizations’ continuous data extraction.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 101