We appreciate that Marx himself had an extremely broad understanding of "labor" to encompass not just productive activity but also the wider activities and pleasures of human life (Berki, "Nature and Origins," 36) or, as Marx put it, "Life activity, productive life itself" (Manuscripts, 113). But this unusually expansive notion of labor risks obscuring the transformation underway whereby new forms of exploitation emerge through the collection and transformation of data from countless human activities that are not understood by human beings as involving any productive activity at all (for example, just chatting online, looking at things other people show us, or monitoring oneself).

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 675