The value of data colonialism's extractive processes depends on the comprehensiveness of the data generated. As a result, and certainly not by accident, a new form of knowledge emerges that appears to cover the whole of the social world, but only because no part of that world is exempt from processes of data extraction. This new social knowledge begins to override older forms of social knowledge. In making a historical comparison here to North America's and Europe's nineteenth century, we have no wish to romanticize the fierce social and political conflicts of that era, still less to romanticize the term social. What is new today is not the quantification of the social or its measurement but the depth at which datafied social knowledge conducts its operations and how the resulting social knowledge is (or is not) accountable to the social actors it describes.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 367