Review of Mejias and Couldry’s Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back

Drawing on the chilling lessons of historical colonialism, Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back (2024) highlights the exploitative role Big Tech plays in colonising and capitalizing on human experiences through the continuous extraction of data by digital means.The book emphasises that the consequences of this colonial-like undertaking are diffused in all levels of society but are most profound in previously affected areas such as the Global South.To this end, Mejias and Couldry voice the struggles and efforts of people who fight to decolonise data and question the future that is in store if human freedom and autonomy are lost.This book reimagines the argument put forward in their 2019 co-authored book The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism (Couldry and Mejias 2019).The principal theory of both books is that data colonialism is "a social order in which the continuous extraction of data from our lives generates massive wealth and inequality on a global scale" (12).The goal of this book is twofold: (1) to convey a sense of evolution from historical forms of colonialism to data colonialism and (2) to argue that an alternative vision can be imagined by way of resistance.And, while Mejias and Couldry refer in the title to data grab as the "new colonialism of Big Tech," they contend that this phenomenon is not new, but rather a continuation of colonial ways.For instance, practices of colonial landgrabs are compared to the data grab, examining the new way in which Big Tech utilises the colonial formula to organise the world's resources.They refer to the formula as the four X's of colonialism: Explore, Expand, Exploit, and Exterminate.Unlike theories that observe the exploitative nature of datafication as a new form of post-industrial capitalism (notable theories include surveillance capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff [2019] or platform capitalism by Nick Srnicek [2017]), the authors situate capitalism as a parallel and interlinked process, one that cannot be understood without colonialism.It provides prominent historical context on practices of surveillance, extraction, and exploitation of our data by the Social Quantification Sector (SQS).The SQS refers to all industries in the economy that are in some way involved in the quantification of various aspects of human life.We are given a glimpse into several such sectors throughout the book, ranging from a detailed analysis of the US Data Empire (Google/Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook/Meta, Apple, and Microsoft, also