Making data colonialism liveable: how might data’s social order be regulated?

Abstract

Humanity is currently undergoing a large-scale social, economic and legal transformation based on the massive appropriation of social life through data extraction. This quantification of the social represents a new colonial move. While the modes, intensities, scales and contexts of dispossession have changed, the underlying drive of today’s data colonialism remains the same: to acquire “territory” and resources from which economic value can be extracted by capital. The injustices embedded in this system need to be made “liveable” through a new legal and regulatory order.