Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back

In their new book, Data Grab, Ulises A. Mejias and Nick Couldry 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 form of ‘data colonialism’ gives shape to a social order based not on the extraction of natural resources or labor, but on the appropriation of human life through data. Resisting it will require strategies that decolonial thinking has foregrounded for decades.

Ulises A. Mejias is Professor of Communication Studies at the State University of New York at Oswego, recipient of the 2023 SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship, and a Fulbright Specialist from 2021 to 2025. He is the author of Off the Network (University of Minnesota Press 2013), as well as multiple articles. He serves on the boards of Humanities New York (a National Endowment for the Humanities affiliate) and of the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law.

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 since 2017 a Faculty Associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. He is the author or editor of seventeen books including The Mediated Construction of Reality (with Andreas Hepp, Polity, 2016), Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice (Polity 2012), Why Voice Matters (Sage 2010), Media: Why It Matters (Polity: 2019) and Media, Voice, Space and Power: Essays of Refraction (Routledge 2021). His latest book is The Space of the World: Can Human Solidarity Survive Social Media and What if it Can’t? (Polity 2024).

Together, Couldry and Mejias have authored The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism (Stanford University Press 2019) and Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back (W. H. Allen / Chicago University Press 2024). They are also co-founders, with Paola Ricaurte, of the Tierra Común network of scholars and activists (https://www.tierracomun.net).