‘Data Colonialism’ and the Political Economy of Big Tech

Chinmayi Arun

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Last year, I carried Ulises A. Mejias and Nick Couldry’s new book “Data Grab” with me to two formerly colonizing and two formerly colonized countries. In Amsterdam’s imposing Rijksmuseum, my Dutch-Indian friend said, “You’ve seen the beauty; now comes the horror,” and he led me to the painting of a Dutch sugar factory in Java, with a slave bell for the enslaved workers. He showed me beautiful seascapes of ships and said that one of the museum’s exhibits marked out several as slave ships. Without the annotations and commentary, I might have missed the violence hidden in the art. For the tech industry, Couldry and Mejias do the same kind of valuable work my friend did for me in the museum, by highlighting the colonial, extractive violence that underlies and defines our digital lives, both historically and in the present. They started this project in a co-authored article and in their previous co-authored book, “Costs of Connection.” Their latest book, titled “Data Grab” to invoke colonialism’s land and resource grabs, continues their compelling work. “Data Grab” presents a more accessible, reorganized exposition of the authors’ views.

Mejias and Couldry’s account of the capitalism-driven “social quantification” sector (as they call it) fills gaps in Shoshana Zuboff’s compelling and popular “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.” Zuboff did the valuable work of making mainstream the idea that we, the datafied subjects, stand in an asymmetric relationship with “surveillance capitalist” companies. Although powerful and influential, Zuboff’s account of the Big Tech companies’ business models does not engage with how far their harmful characteristics come from capitalism, their disparate impact on different groups of people, or their reliance on law for their power. Julie Cohen has offered a magisterial account, framed as “informational capitalism” (from Manuel Castells’s “The Rise of the Network Society”), covering this ground in a book more suitable for academic readers. However, Zuboff’s book captured the public imagination, and her discussion of colonialism is confined to Britain’s relationship with the United States, eliding the slavery and worldwide extraction and exploitation integral to European colonialism.