Data colonialism through accumulation by dispossession: New metaphors for daily data

By Jim Thatcher, David O'Sullivan, Dillon Mahmoudi. 2015

444 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Media Technology, Safety Research, Transportation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/97b630c76348244dd8f0f4755d9a68a4b1120b1d

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Media Technology

1. John M. Cinnamon
2. Shakir Mohamed
3. Jathan Sadowski

In Safety Research

1. Nick Couldry
2. Ulises A. Mejias
3. William S. Isaac
4. John M. Cinnamon
5. Shakir Mohamed
6. Marie-Therese Png
7. Jathan Sadowski
8. Paola Ricaurte

In Transportation

1. John M. Cinnamon
2. Nick Couldry
3. Ulises A. Mejias
4. Jathan Sadowski

Citations in the corpus

• The Internet of Landlords: Digital Platforms and New Mechanisms of Rentier Capitalism (2020, background): “…analysed the historical relations of inequity and exploitation that are deeply embedded in these modern systems of extraction, such as the accumulation by dispossession of “ data colonialism ” (Thatcher et al. 2016) and the appropriation and sovereignty struggles of “ data grabbing ” (Fraser 2019).”
• Social Injustice in Surveillance Capitalism (2017, background): “In any case, the economic value of personal data is largely realized in the aggregate—patterns and future potential become visible when data points are linked together through data analytics and algorithmic processing (Thatcher et al. 2016).”
• When data is capital: Datafication, accumulation, and extraction (2019, background): “…influence over how businesses and governments behave (Bouk, forthcoming; Fourcade and Healy, 2017; Zuboff, 2016); and (3) data systems are rife with relations of inequity, extraction, and exploitation (Aitken, 2017; Andrejevic, 2014; Fourcade and Healy, 2013; Poon, 2016; Thatcher et al., 2016).”
• Data Colonialism: Rethinking Big Data’s Relation to the Contemporary Subject (2018, background): “More helpful are approaches which see what is going on with data as a form of fundamental appropriation (Greene and Joseph 2015; Thatcher et al. 2016, drawing on Harvey 2004) or extraction (Mezzadra and Neilson 2017) of resources.”
• Data Epistemologies, The Coloniality of Power, and Resistance (2019, background): “We must also acknowledge the ways this regime is rooted in a complex process of colonization through data by dispossession (Thatcher et al. 2016) and the capture of life (Couldry and Mejias 2019) at a supranational level.”
• Decolonial AI: Decolonial Theory as Sociotechnical Foresight in Artificial Intelligence (2020, background): “The emerging theories of data colonialism (Thatcher et al. 2016; Ricaurte 2019; Couldry and Mejias 2019a) and data capitalism (Zuboff 2019) recognise this nature of historic continuity and the role of data as the material resource that is exploited”
• The decolonial turn in data and technology research: what is at stake and where is it heading? (2021, background): “…‘ data colonialism ’ : while they foreground data extractivism (cf. Mezzadra & Neilson, 2018), they propose the term ‘ data colonialism ’ as just a metaphor (Thatcher et al., 2016, p. 992), con fi rming Harvey ’ s implication (2004) that the main explanatory model for understanding ‘ accumulation…”