In what ways are new media practices like “traditional” forms of colonization?
	as did conquerers when they took over land & people
	as do conquerers when they continue to utilize the resources of conquered 
		land & people

Example: The mediated self-monitoring imperative 
“The human body has been reworked into something that requires a distant infrastructure, from which, incidentally, profit can be made.”

“this is just one small example of something much bigger: the systematic attempt to turn all human lives and relations into inputs for the generation of profit. Human experience, potentially every layer and aspect of it, is becoming the target of profitable extraction.”

Colonization by data. 

Why not just “decolonize the internet”?
	Cause the trouble isn’t just the new media companies. 
	The real troubles are the social and economic orders that colonialism comprises
[it’s how the infrastructure uses/misuses power]

“although the modes, intensities, scales, and contexts of today’s dispossession are distinctive, the underlying function remains the same as under historical colonialism: to acquire large-scale resources from which economic value can be extracted.”

“data colonialism’s power grab is both simpler and deeper: the capture and control of human life itself through appropriating the data that can be extracted from it for profit.”

Some signposts

1: Our everyday relations with data are becoming colonial in nature; that is, they cannot be understood except as an appropriation on a form and scale that bears comparison with the appropriations of historical colonialism.

2: Our second argument is that this new colonialism does not just happen by itself but is driven by the imperatives of capitalism.

[These reflect back on why it was important for me to retain the Zuboff book for it’s in-depth descriptions, explanations, and analyses of the economics of surveillance capitalism. New media-driven data collection is the mechanism for broader socio-economic changes.]

a. driven by new media infrastructures.
b. use accomplishes the technological changes. No adoption/uptake, no change. use embedded in every aspect, 24/7, 365, HUGE changes. A new social and economic order emerges from ubiquitous use.
c. colonialism appropriates epistemology and ontology (ways of knowing and ways of being). Capitalism and colonialism together. 

All knowledge and activities get translated into code, turned into data, and manipulated for power and profit. 

The autonomy of human life is thereby undermined as the Cloud Empire leverages the social quantification sector (big data).

the social quantification sector (big data).

Devices to connect people
Processes to analyze the data people generate

Social caching is often hidden from users of platforms and internet services. Stripped of their veneer of convenience, “the deal” no longer appears to be so sweet for the consumer/user/human.

“should human beings in the twenty-first century accept a world in which their lives are unceasingly appropriated through data for capitalism?”

Colonial Echoes

Empire & capital. 

“the appropriation of human life in the form of data (the basic move that we call data colonialism) generates a new possibility: without ending its exploitation of labor and its transformation of physical nature, capitalism extends its capacity to exploit life by assimilating new or reconfigured human activities (whether regarded as labor or not) as its direct inputs. . . In this emerging form of capitalism, human beings become not just actors in the production process but raw material that can be transformed into value for that production process. . .  This transformation of human life into raw material resonates strongly with the history of exploitation that preceded industrial capitalism—that is, colonialism.”

“human life today is becoming the object of appropriation for extraction and, in the process, enabling capitalism to move to a still higher scale and integration of operation.”

What is Data Colonialism?

“our term for the extension of a global process of extraction that started under colonialism and continued through industrial capitalism, culminating in today’s new form: instead of natural resources and labor, what is now being appropriated is human life through its conversion into data.”

life is thereby degraded.