The TRANSformacije Collection, vol. 52
Authors: Nick Couldry, Ulises A. Mejias
Editor: Aleš Mendiževec
Translation: Blaž Kavšek
Design and layout: Ajdin Bašić and Špela Razpotnik
Publisher: Maska Ljubljana
The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism
If we follow the theoretical definition of data colonialism, we can recognize it as the consequence of data extraction from the Western user of technological platforms within a dispositif of control. If, however, we take the phrase “data colonialism” more literally, we can connect it with the use of contemporary technologies for the actual surveillance and killing of colonized subjects. It is crucial here to emphasize two things: that there is a fundamental difference between these two definitions, and that the Orwellian fears often associated by certain Western critics with the first definition are already the reality of the second.
(Neja Berger, from the afterword)
The TRANSformacije Collection, vol. 52
Authors: Nick Couldry, Ulises A. Mejias
Editor: Aleš Mendiževec
Translation: Blaž Kavšek
Design and layout: Ajdin Bašić and Špela Razpotnik
Publisher: Maska Ljubljana
Excerpt from the book
In the hollowed-out social world of data colonialism, data practices impose on everyday life the demand to submit to surveillance, coupling the sphere of selfhood with the network of data extraction, a network scarcely regulated by legislation, and in doing so, intruding upon the minimal space of the self. The extractive social relations on which data colonialism is founded dictate a fundamental form of dispossession. A life that is under constant surveillance is a dispossessed life, one whose space is continually intruded upon and subordinated to extraction by an external power.
About the Authors
Nick Couldry is a sociologist and teaches media, communication, and social theory at the London School of Economics. His work explores media from the perspective of symbolic power, historically condensed in media institutions. In addition to The Costs of Connection, he has published numerous other influential books, including Media: Why It Matters, The Mediated Construction of Reality (co-authored with Andreas Hepp), and Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight It (co-authored with Ulises A. Mejias).
Ulises A. Mejias teaches Communication Studies at SUNY Oswego in New York and is co-founder of the Non-Aligned Technologies Movement, an association for the communal use of digital technologies, as well as the decolonial activist network Tierra Común. His work engages with data colonialism, philosophy of technology, the sociology of data, and the political economy of digital media.