Advance Praise - The Costs of Connection

A profound exploration of how the ceaseless extraction of information about our intimate lives is remaking both global markets and our very selves. The Costs of Connection represents an enormous step forward in our collective understanding of capitalism’s current stage, a stage in which the final colonial input is the raw data of human life. Challenging, urgent and bracingly original.

— Naomi Klein, Gloria Steinem Chair of Media, Culture and Feminist Studies, Rutgers University

Couldry and Mejias have written a profoundly important book, demonstrating the lasting value of social theory to the interpretation (and improvement) of our new digital reality. They deeply understand the nature of platform capitalism. They draw striking and rigorously reasoned parallels between modern tech giants and the firms and governments that exploited colonies in centuries past. And they advance an agenda for decolonizing data that promotes a healthier ecology of online interaction. This book is an essential guide to understanding the depths of the crises in data protection, privacy, and automation that we now face.

—Frank Pasquale, Professor of Law, University of Maryland Carey School of Law, author of The Black Box Society

A provocative tour-de-force. A powerful interrogation of the power of data in our networked age. Through an enchanting critique of different aspects of our data soaked society, Couldry and Mejias invite the reader to reconsider their assumptions about the moral, political, and economic order that makes data-driven technologies possible.

— danah boyd, Microsoft Research and founder of Data & Society

This book is among the most insightful and important contributions to our understanding of the political economy of data and the ‘internet of things.’ It brings together historical analysis, critical theory, and a trenchant sense of urgency to reveal what’s really at stake as we choose to send information through everything and connect our bodies and minds to streams of data.

— Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy

This book is a must-read for those grappling with how the global data economy reproduces long-standing social injustice, and what must be done to counter this phenomenon. With a feast of insights embedded in visceral historical and contemporary illustrations, the authors brilliantly push the reader to rethink the relations between technology, power, and inequality.

— Payal Arora, author of The Next Billion Users: Digital Life beyond the West

There’s a land grab occurring right now, and it’s for your data and your freedom: companies are not only surveilling you, they’re increasingly influencing and controlling your behavior. This paradigm-shifting book explains the new colonialism at the heart of modern computing, and serves as a needed wake-up call to everyone who cares about our future relationship with technology.

— Bruce Schneier, author of Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-Connected World

This is a deeply critical engagement with the systems that enable ‘data colonialism’ to extend its reach into the past, present and future of human life itself. Couldry and Mejias provide a comprehensive and well-considered challenge to the seeming inevitability of this transformative development in capitalism. Theirs is a giant step forward along the path toward rediscovering the meaning and possibility of self-determination. It is not too late to join in!

— Oscar H. Gandy, Jr., Emeritus Professor, Annenberg School of Communication, University of Pennsylvania

Couldry and Mejias show that data colonialism is not a metaphor. It is a process that expands many dark chapters of the past into our shiny new world of smartphones, smart TVs, and smart stores. This book rewards the reader with important historical context, fascinating examples, clear writing, and unexpected insights scattered throughout.

—Joseph Turow, Robert Lewis Shayon Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, author of The Aisles Have Eyes: How Retailers Track Your Shopping, Strip Your Privacy, and Define Your Power.

Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias go digging deeply into the digital: its spaces, its layers, its deployments. One guiding effort concerns what it actually takes to have this digital capacity in play. It is not an innocent event: it is in some ways closer to an extractive sector, and this means there is a price we pay for its existence.

—Saskia Sassen, Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, author of Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy