The Costs Of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism
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Overview
Just about any social need is now met with an opportunity to ‘connect’ through digital means. But this convenience is not free-it is purchased with vast amounts of personal data transferred through shadowy backchannels to corporations using it to generate profit. The Costs of Connection uncovers this process, this ’data colonialism’, and its designs for controlling our lives-our ways of knowing, our means of production, our political participation.
Data colonialism is, in essence, an emerging order for the appropriation of human life so that data can be continuously extracted from it for profit. Colonialism might seem like a thing of the past, but this book shows that the historic appropriation of land, bodies and natural resources is mirrored today in pervasive datafication. Apps, platforms and smart objects capture and translate our lives into data, and then extract information that is fed into capitalist enterprises and sold back to us. The authors argue that this development foreshadows the creation of a new social order emerging globally - and it must be challenged. Confronting the alarming degree of surveillance already tolerated, they offer a stirring call to decolonize the internet and emancipate our desire for connection.
A sophisticated, devastating account of the broader human costs of data mining and our new media landscape.
One of the foundational texts that first proposed a ’data colonialism’.
This book is a must-read for those grappling with how the global data economy reproduces long-standing social injustice, and what must be done to counter this phenomenon.
A profound exploration of how the ceaseless extraction of information about our intimate lives is remaking both global markets and our very selves. The Costs of Connection represents an enormous step forward in our collective understanding of capitalism’s current stage, a stage in which the final colonial input is the raw data of human life. Challenging, urgent, and bracingly original.
A provocative tour-de-force. A powerful interrogation of the power of data in our networked age. Through an enchanting critique of different aspects of our data soaked society, Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias invite the reader to reconsider their assumptions about the moral, political, and economic order that makes data-driven technologies possible.
- Title: The Costs Of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism
- Authors: Nick Couldry, Ulises A. Mejias
- Publisher: Bloomsbury India
- Print Publication Date: 2022
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Pages: 352
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9789354358937, 9354358934
- Resource ID: LLS:9789354358937
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-04-22T11:28:19Z
NICK COULDRY is Professor of Media, Communications and Social Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
ULISES A. MEJIAS is Associate Professor Communication Studies and Director of the Institute for Global Engagement at the State University of New York, College at Oswego.