Couldry and Mejias argue that contemporary digital infrastructures should be understood as a new phase of colonialism: no longer organised primarily around the seizure of territory, labour, or natural resources, but around the systematic capture of human life through data. Their concept of “data colonialism” names an economic order in which everyday experience — communication, movement, consumption, work, health monitoring, platform use, and urban connectivity — is converted into informational flows available for extraction, processing, prediction, and monetisation. The book situates this transformation within the long entanglement of capitalism and colonialism, showing that digital connection is not a neutral infrastructure but an architecture of appropriation that turns social relations, bodily routines, and cognitive traces into productive assets. The “social quantification sector” — platforms, device manufacturers, data brokers, artificial intelligence systems, and connected services — produces a surveillance economy in which profit depends on rendering behaviour measurable, legible, and governable. The central thesis is that human life is being annexed to capital through data, weakening autonomy, normalising surveillance, and reorganising freedom under corporate conditions. Against the celebratory rhetoric of connection, Couldry and Mejias insist on counting its costs: the loss of control over experience, the concentration of cognitive and economic power, and the consolidation of a global infrastructure that transforms the social world into raw material.
URBANISM MEETS ART