EBOOK
The Costs of Connection
How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism
Nick CouldrySeries: Culture and Economic Life(0)
About
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.
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 this new era of 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.
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 this new era of 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.
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Reviews
"Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias go digging deeply into the digital: its spaces, its layers, its deployments. One of their guiding efforts concerns what it actually takes to have this digital capacity in play. It is not an innocent event: it is in some ways closer to an extractive sector, and this means there is a price we pay for its existence."
Saskia Sassen,author of Expulsions
"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. With a feast of insights embedded in visceral historical and contemporary illustrations, the authors brilliantly push the reader to rethink the relations between technology, power, and inequality."
Payal Arora,author of The Next Billion Users: Digital Life beyond the West
"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."
Naomi Klein, Gloria Steinem Chair of Media, Culture, and Feminist Studies,Rutgers Universi