Data Colonialism: Rethinking Big Data’s Relation to the Contemporary Subject

By Nick Couldry, Ulises A. Mejias. Television & New Media, 2018

1,090 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We are often told that data are the new oil. But unlike oil, data are not a substance found in nature. It must be appropriated. The capture and processing of social data unfolds through a process we call data relations, which ensures the “natural” conversion of daily life into a data stream. The result is nothing less than a new social order, based on continuous tracking, and offering unprecedented new opportunities for social discrimination and behavioral influence. We propose that this process is best understood through the history of colonialism. Thus, data relations enact a new form of data colonialism, normalizing the exploitation of human beings through data, just as historic colonialism appropriated territory and resources and ruled subjects for profit. Data colonialism paves the way for a new stage of capitalism whose outlines we only glimpse: the capitalization of life without limit.

Subfields: Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d22e8ae8236a669053c4646b4859cdf1fadb64c2

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Citations in the corpus

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 for economic expansion.”
The decolonial turn in data and technology research: what is at stake and where is it heading? (2021, methodology): “The concept of data colonialism therefore expands, not narrows, our understanding of data practices within an arc of historical comparison that includes both China and North America/Europe (Couldry & Mejias, 2019b, chapters 2 and 3).”
Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning (2019, background): “se of widespread adoption of smart meters is the impact on mineral use and embodied energy use arising from their production [305]. Finally, smart home applications present security and privacy risks [306] that require adequate regulation. 3.2 Urban planning For many impactful mitigation strategies ”
Between Subjectivity and Imposition (2020, background): “Moreover, data about human behavior is increasingly sold for profit [81], which could result in surveillance [81] and exploitation [26].”
Digital platforms for development: Foundations and research agenda (2021, background): “Concentration of power by the big tech platforms also calls for approaches that would tackle the new form of ‘ data colonialism ’ , that is, the predatory extractive practices of historical colonialism with the quantification methods of computing (Couldry & Mejias, 2018).”
Decolonizing Content Moderation: Does Uniform Global Community Standard Resemble Utopian Equality or Western Power Hegemony? (2023, background): “For example, data colonialism [34] and the promise of algorithmic utopia [6] have accumulated unrestrained power in the hands of predictive AI systems that perpetuate biases and harms disproportionately against the historically marginalized populations [33, 106, 113, 133].”