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

In their new book, Data Grab, Mejias and Couldry argue that today’s tech corporations have engineered an extractive form of doing business that builds an unjust social and economic order, leads to job precarity, and degrades the environment. Like the land grabs of the past, today’s data grab converts our data into raw material for the generation of corporate profit against our own interests, as can be seen in the case of AI and particularly genAI. The role that data plays in contemporary power relations is not only a development of capitalism, but represents a new colonial phase in human history that rivals in importance the emergence of historic colonialism. But resistance is possible. To defy this new form of data colonialism, we must learn from previous forms of anti-colonial resistance and work together to imagine entirely new ones.