The merciless power of the Cloud Empire comes from an overarching rationality in which data shadows—and eventually stands in for—the very thing it is supposed to measure: life. Apps, platforms, and smart technologies capture and translate our life into data as we play, work, and socialize. AI algorithms then pore over the data to extract information (personal attributes from “likes,” emotions from typing patterns, predictions from past behaviors, and so on) that can be used to sell us our lives back, albeit in commodified form. Science, technology, and human ingenuity are put at the service of this exploitation, making it likely that, unless resisted, the Cloud Empire will in a few decades seem like the natural order of things. This is indeed a bleak picture, but it is not entirely new. The larger pattern harks back to a previous era of rampant extraction—that of historical colonialism, as we will explore in the next chapter.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 243