Co-Opting AI: Data Colonialism
NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge invites you to the book launch of The Costs of Connection: How Data is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating it for Capitalism by Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias (Stanford University Press, 2019). The event is part of our series on “Co-Opting AI” and will feature the authors Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias, as well as IPK’s Mona Sloane. It will explore how the social quantification that underpins many AI systems produces a new social order that is steeped in patterns of colonials violence.
In The Costs of Connection: How Data Colonizes Human Life and Appropriates it for Capitalism, 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 once again the 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.
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).
Ulises Ali Mejías 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). He is the principal investigator in the Algorithm Observatory project.
Mona Sloane is a sociologist whose work examines the intersection of design and social inequality, particularly in the context of AI design and policy, valuation practice, data epistemology, and ethics. She currently is a fellow at NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge, where she convenes the “Co-opting” AI series. She is also an adjunct professor at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering and a contributing editor with Public Books.
Image credit: Philipp N. Hertel
