What is at stake when any of us try to refuse data colonialism? What would it mean to articulate a vision of how individuals, communities, and nations can know themselves other than through the tools of data colonialism? A vision that rejects a rationality that claims to bind all subjects into a universal grid of monitoring and categorization and instead views information and data as a resource whose value can be sustained only if locally negotiated, managed, and controlled. We might call this a socialism of data because of the primacy it gives to social choices over data, but this is not a vision for a global socialist data-state; we must certainly reject the vision of an integrative social order exemplified by the data-driven market socialism of China today.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 595