{"id":55446,"date":"2019-01-15T10:00:37","date_gmt":"2019-01-15T09:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hiig.de\/?p=55446"},"modified":"2023-06-02T12:07:29","modified_gmt":"2023-06-02T10:07:29","slug":"data-colonialism-nick-couldry-digital-society","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hiig.de\/en\/data-colonialism-nick-couldry-digital-society\/","title":{"rendered":"Colonised by data: the hollowing out of digital society"},"content":{"rendered":"

What exactly is colonial about the economic use of data? On November 20, Nick Couldry<\/strong> continued the lecture series <\/span><\/i>Making Sense of the Digital Society<\/span><\/i><\/a>. In his lecture, he focused on the social consequences of data collection by private companies. He characterised the current tendencies as a new form of colonisation that has serious consequences for society. In this blogpost, Marc Pirogan<\/strong> takes a look back at Couldry’s lecture.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Ever since the Snowden revelations in 2013, it is clear that something big is going on with data. But the real story behind the data collection by surveillance agencies such as the NSA, is how much data private companies collect. In a \u201cpublic-private surveillance partnership,\u201d government agencies profit from the private sector that leads the way. Couldry emphasised that this development is not only a new phase of capitalism, but also a new phase of colonialism.<\/span><\/p>\n

What is colonial about data colonialism?<\/h3>\n

Colonialism\u2019s function was historically the appropriation of resources on a vast scale. Territory was acquired, and with it the bodies, for a long time those of enslaved people, who extracted the value from the resources. The resource that is being appropriated under digital capitalism is human life, in the form of data. Therefore, humans are the target in this new phase of colonialism.<\/span><\/p>\n

Every time we join a platform, we accept its terms of service, usually without reading it. By doing so we enter a set of \u2018data relations\u2019 that we do not totally understand. Couldry compared this to the Spanish conquest of Latin America, where local populations were forced to accept the Spaniards\u2019 demands in a document called <\/span>Requerimiento<\/span><\/i>. The locals were forced to listen to and accept the demands, even though they did not even understand the language of the document.<\/span><\/p>\n

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