Colonized by Data: The Costs of Connection - Nick Couldry, Ulises Mejias, Sonal Shah - RxC 2020
Channel: RadicalxChange
Date: 2020-08-13

This talk will introduce the speakers’ new book, The Costs of Connection: How Data Colonizes Human Life and Appropriates it for Capitalism (Stanford University Press, August 2019). Couldry and Mejias argue that the role of data in society needs to be grasped as not only a development of capitalism, but as the start of a new phase in human history that rivals in importance the emergence of historic colonialism. This new "data colonialism" is based not on the extraction of natural resources or labor, but on the appropriation of human life through data, paving the way for a further stage of capitalism. Today’s transformations of social life through data must therefore be grasped within the long historical arc of dispossession as both a new colonialism and an extension of capitalism. Resistance requires challenging in their new material guises forms of coloniality that decolonial thinking has foregrounded for centuries. The struggle will be both broader and longer than many analyses of algorithmic power suppose, but for that reason critical responses are all the more urgent. New forms of solidarity are needed that help build connection on different terms from those currently on offer.

SPEAKERS
Nick Couldry is a sociologist of media and culture. He is Professor of Media Communications and Social Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and from 2017 has been a Faculty Associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. In fall 2018 he was also a Visiting Professor at MIT. He jointly led, with Clemencia Rodriguez, the chapter on media and communications in the 22 chapter 2018 report of the International Panel on social Progress: www.ipsp.org. He is the author or editor of fourteen books including The Mediated Construction of Reality (with Andreas Hepp, Polity, 2016), Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice (Polity 2012) and Why Voice Matters (Sage 2010). His latest books are The Costs of Connection and Media: Why It Matters (Polity: October 2019). nickcouldry.org

Ulises Ali Mejias is associate professor of Communication Studies and director of the Institute for Global Engagement at the State University of New York, College at Oswego. He is a media scholar whose work encompasses critical internet studies, network theory and science, philosophy and sociology of technology, and political economy of digital media. He is the author of Off the Network: Disrupting the Digital World (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) and various articles including ‘Disinformation and the Media: The case of Russia and Ukraine’ in Media, Culture and Society (2017, with N. Vokuev), and ‘Liberation Technology and the Arab Spring: From Utopia to Atopia and Beyond’ in Fibreculture (2012). ulisesmejias.com

Sonal Shah is Professor and Executive Director of the Beeck Center for Social Impact & Innovation at Georgetown University. An economist and entrepreneur, Sonal has spent her career focused on actionable innovation in the public and private sectors. Most recently, she was the Deputy Assistant to the President and founding Director of the White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation.
She spent seven years at the U.S. Department of Treasury where she was an international economist working on timely issues, including post-conflict development in Bosnia, Asian financial crisis, and poverty reduction in Africa. She then went to Goldman Sachs and Google while simultaneously co-founded Indicorps, a nonprofit building a new generation of socially conscious global leaders. She is a senior fellow at the Case Foundation and the Center for American Progress. Sonal serves on the Board of Social Finance, Inc., Oxfam America, The Century Foundation, Case Foundation and the Urban Alliance.
She has served as Senior Fellow at the Case Foundation working on Impact Investing focusing increasing the flow of capital to impact investments and the Center for American Progress working on Social Impact Bonds. In the fall of 2012 she served as a Fellow of the Institute of Politics at Harvard University.