(16) CoC—Ch 1. + Ch. 2, 37-54

1 The Capitalization of Life without Limit

Cambridge Analytica’s plans and actions as manifestation of data colonialism.

“four key components to historical colonialism: 
-the appropriation of resources; 
-the evolution of highly unequal social and economic relations that secured resource appropriation (including slavery and other forms of forced labor as well as unequal trading relations); 
-a massively unequal global distribution of the benefits of resource appropriation; 
-the spread of ideologies to make sense of all this (for example, the reframing of colonial appropriation as the release of “natural” resources, the government of “inferior” peoples, and the bringing of “civilization” to the world).”

NO MERE METAPHOR
“we use the term colonialism not because we’re looking for a metaphor but because it captures major structural phases within human history and specifically within capitalism.”

“The discovery of new forms of raw material is what makes the current moment distinctively colonial. If historical colonialism expanded by appropriating for exploitation geographical territory and the resources that territorial conquest could bring, data colonialism expands by appropriating appropriating for exploitation ever more layers of human life itself.”

“Data colonialism is concerned with the external appropriation of data on terms that are partly or wholly beyond the control of the person to whom the data relates. This external appropriation is what makes possible such data’s exploitation for profit.”

“This progressive opening up of human life to externally driven data extraction is what we mean by the capitalization of human life without limit.”

“that, human life, and particularly human social life, is increasingly being constructed so that it generates data from which profit can be extracted.”

“Yet the internet was developed against the background of the values of freedom and human cognitive enhancement characteristic of the US counterculture of the 1960s.”

“At the core of data colonialism is the creation of a new type of social relation that we call “data relations,” as defined in detail later. Data relations make the appropriation of human beings’ data seem normal, just the way things are.”

Saturation of control into the hands of a few corporations.

New Ideologies
-“First, there is the ideology of connection itself, which presents as natural the connection of persons, things, and processes via a computer-based infrastructure (the internet) that enables life to be annexed to capital. Connection is, of course, a basic human value, but the requirement to connect here and now—connect to this particular deeply unequal infrastructure—means submission to very particular conditions and terms of power.”

-“There is also the ideology of datafication which insists that every aspect of life must be transmuted into data as the form in which all life becomes useful for capital.”

-“The marketing ideology of personalization makes such tracking and surveillance seem attractive.”

Capitalist structures build EVERYWHERE

Even where economic motives don’t really belong/aren’t endemic under relations other than datafied relations.

“steps, the capacity to order the social world continuously and with maximal efficiency has become, for the first time, a goal for corporate power and state power.”

2. The Cloud Empire

The cloud empire operates by making all of life available to capitalization through data by sustaining the expansion of exploitable spaces.
The estimates about how much our data is worth are probably WILDLY low. 
	Studies (by the companies themselves or by outside researchers) have looked only at “first sale” value
	First sale value accounts for an estimation of the $ earned when the collecting company, say Google, trades/sells the data for, 	say, advertising revenue. 
	This amount does not account for further trades and sales downstream.
	Data is sold into the "data marketplace and is bought and sold/created many times over. 
	Your data is worth a lot more than the estimates of first sales indicate.

Human life as organized through data relations becomes the direct input of capitalism
	the logistics of new media support and enable this kind of colonialism as data relations penetrate every market sector and increasing numbers of everyday activities.
Transnational corporate networks play a huge role in the expansion of the cloud empire.
	Even without massive data collection this global network would present imperialistic incursions into daily life.
	Computerization, networks, the Internet, "smart devices," and the rest utilize and multiply corporate networks.
Although the actual relationships are not the same in every society, governments are implicated with competition on networks in one way or the other. Most often governmental policy prevails over unadulterated business practices.

How the cloud empire came to be
	We should note that these authors provide a creation narrative that is alternative to those beginning with media.
	From an economic point of view, the needs of capitalism drove the cloud empire bus as capitalists looked for ways to multiply 	markets and increase market share by lowering the cost of doing business and thereby the cost of products and services.
		I would tell the story a slightly different way in that the commercial sector did not initiate the invention and build-out of half of the equation.
		We can blame development of computerization on industry but we have to attribute the development of the Internet to 	government intervention leveraged by inventors, entrepreneurs, and investors – – principally, initially, in the 	Silicon Valley. 
	In either sense, cloud empire appropriates data from human activities and decreases human agency. Data replaces raw 	natural resources and even services.
	Neo-Liberalism moves beyond opening up free markets and removing government control.

The Cloud: From Metaphor to Episteme (from “AS IF/AS LIKE” to “the way of an age”

	The term "the cloud" is certainly metaphoric. However, moving all data from individual machines to corporate servers is not a metaphor. Virtually everything that happens using computers and networks is now external to the device of creation.
	Very little in the process now belongs to users as most of the hardware and software is leased or licensed for use. 

One Buyer to Rule Them All
	Google as both monopoly and monopsony (single buyer of goods or services). As such, Google sets the terms of all use.
	The BIG 4, 5, 6 dominate the space where, literally, thousands of corporate entities participate using our data (the data 	marketplace).
	The producers of data (us)—are legion, but the buyers of what we produce are few.
		[this is only true for the first sale. Thousands participate down-stream]
	Costs are held down by paying fewer workers to do more for less $ (think jobs at Walmart or McDonalds). 
“The internet, which originally represented a rejection of mass media, is being remassified. On a regular day, Netflix and YouTube account for half of all internet traffic in the United States, with massive implications for their ability to “buy” and distribute content for money or otherwise.”

“We seek to expand this discussion by articulating a theory of data-based social quantification as the key means to install a new method of economic and social power. Our point is that through datafication, social interactions in all their forms become a domain in which market power can be exercised and value can be extracted, sometimes through extended means of labor and other times without any apparent activity on the part of those dominated but always under the rubric of a kind of appropriation and exploitation.”

The Logic of the Cloud Empire

“if colonialism can be understood, among other things, as a process that allows one party to occupy the living space of another and appropriate his resources, overpowering him through a combination of ideological rationalizations and technological means (which include the use of surveillance and dominance), then we propose that we have entered a new phase of colonialism.”

not to be forgotten: the physical work that produces the computers and networks depends on old-fashioned imperialistic exploitation of people, labor, and natural resources. These aspects double (more?) the effects of data colonialism found in electronically mediated interactions. 

How the Social Quantification Sector Works 
	Moving data to the cloud moves ownership to the operators. The data center becomes the "center" of extracting value from individual activities.
“The infrastructure of the cloud thus enforces a certain violence of dispossession.
 	Networks only facilitate the activities of leaders of the information and communication technology sector.
“The point is that the social quantification sector is more of a subsector of the entire ICT business sector, useful in identifying specific activities and approaches that revolve around the capturing of everyday social acts and their translation into quantifiable data, which is then analyzed and used for the generation of profit.”

I probably would not exclude IBM in the way that our authors to since they are desperate to get involved in all the activities that they been boxed out of. Particularly with regard to developing artificial intelligence, IBM would like to be a major player in social quantification. 

The Big Five
Amazon
Apple
	on the other hand, I would probably leave Apple out of this list. Our authors appeared to dismiss Apple's business model that relies on manufacturing products rather than on trading the data that they collect. On the one hand Apple does collect the data 	on the other hand they keep it within their own infrastructure and use it only to inform their own business practices. This is absolutely unlike the way that the other companies in this sector behave with regard to data. Our authors leave Apple in their critique because of their reliance on cheap overseas labor that looks a lot like imperialistic colonialization. Without these 	manufacturing practices Apple would not dominate new media markets as they do.
Facebook/Meta
Google/Alphabet
Microsoft

Beyond the Big Five

hardware, software, platforms, data analytics, and data brokerage: this does not imply that the big five do not participate  in the sectors, because they do. It merely points out that there are corporations that operate in and around the cloud empire that are not one of the five companies named.

Examples include the hardware manufacturers, software providers, network and infrastructure providers, producers of so-called "smart" devices, the social media outlets, and the various data manipulators – – collectors, analysts, traders, etc.

On-boarding has become an important part of the process as it moves the day-to-day activities in the real world into the virtual spaces of interactive media.

next up: china.