Our argument in this book—that human life is being colonized by data and needs to be decolonized
The underlying question on which this book will focus: should human beings in the twenty first century accept a world in which their lives are unceasingly appropriated through data for capitalism?
- although the modes, intensities, scales, and contexts of today’s dispossession are distinctive, the underlying function remains the same as under historical colonialism: to acquire large-scale resources from which economic value can be extracted.
- just as historical colonialism created the fuel for industrial capitalism’s eventual rise, so too is data colonialism paving the way for a capitalism based on the exploitation of data. Human life is quite literally being annexed to capital.
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By data we mean information flows that pass from human life in all its forms to infrastructures for collection and processing.
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.
- The result is to undermine the autonomy of human life in a fundamental way that threatens the very basis of freedom, which is exactly the value that advocates of capitalism extol.
Social caching, a new form of knowledge about the social world based on the capture of personal data and its storage for later profitable use.
As social relations are thus transformed, we see the emergence of the Cloud Empire, a totalizing vision and organization of business in which the dispossession of data colonialism has been naturalized and extended across all social domains.
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RTBF: The capture of personal data through social caching and its storage for later profi table use—normal today but two decades ago barely imaginable—has major implications for our quality of life as human beings.
As a leading computer-security expert, Bruce Schneier, put it, “The primary business model of the internet is based on mass surveillance.” 12
- The tracking of human subjects that is core to data colonialism is incompatible with the minimal integrity of the self that underlies autonomy and freedom in all their forms.
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New territories from which to extract resources and new bodies from which to extract labor.
~ from labor to data “In this emerging form of capitalism, human beings become not just actors in the production process but raw material that can be transformed into value for that production process.”