Yet the scandal was important. It was as though a side deal by Facebook with independent data prospectors had accidentally left open a hole in the ground that allowed the general public, for the first time, to see clearly into an underground anteroom. There, in that anteroom, visible for all to see, was the entrance to social media's real data mine, although few understood exactly what lay behind that subterranean door in Facebook's exclusive domain, let alone the planetary scope of capitalism's data mining. The long-anticipated "techlash" had begun but, as yet, without a map of the wider pattern of exploitation, whose traces had suddenly become visible.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 61