The Costs of Connection: how data is colonizing human life and appropriates it

Contributor(s): Mutale Nkonde, Professor Ulises Ali Mejias, Professor Nick Couldry | Nick Couldry and Ulises Ali Mejias will discuss their book, The Costs of Connection: How Data Colonizes Human Life and Appropriates it for Capitalism.
Couldry and Mejias argue that the role of data in society needs to be grasped as not only a development of capitalism, but as the start of a new phase in human history that rivals in importance the emergence of historic colonialism. This new "data colonialism" is based not on the extraction of natural resources or labour, but on the appropriation of human life through data, paving the way for a further stage of capitalism. Today’s transformations of social life through data must therefore be grasped within the long historical arc of dispossession as both a new colonialism and an extension of capitalism. Resistance requires challenging in their new material guises forms of coloniality that decolonial thinking has foregrounded for centuries. The struggle w