Wojciech Dragan

So... this book has taught me one very important thing: That how you decide to define a particular (social) issue is a choice - not a given. I have been busy with a set of problems intimately related to data collection, data-based surveillance and the undue influence that the insights gained by data analysis can provide for more than 5 years now. The issues, challenges and problems around it are real, serious, important and demand dedicated efforts to be rectified. However, to frame this as "data colonialism" is not just a choice - it is also a really dumb, prejudiced, pointless and in fact counter-productive distraction. The authors go out of their way to ensure you will end up convinced that the Internet, social media and all any any IoT devices are expressly created by evil profit-maximizing corporations, intent on turning us all into data-providing slaves, indifferently being forced to comply with the demands of our data-hungry oppressors. The fact that most of the services from which data is being shamelessly appropriated actually in and of themselves have a utility barely gets a mention. No no, the reason they at all exist is just so data can be collected. And collected it must be, no matter what. New services are devised solely for the purpose of getting data. This data collection is then reframed as a soon-to-be-totalitarian surveillance apparatus which then in turn has the sole purpose to debase the very meaning of human life (and eliminate freedom, obviously!) and turns us all into algorithm-commanded droids. Yes. Really. No hyperbole or malicious intention, however improbable, has been spared to make sure you understand you are nothing more than a tiny cog in the machinations of greed and deliberate destruction of anything remotely valuable in our soon to be exterminated human existence. Perhaps the authors (whose intelligence surely is substantial, I'd think) should ask themselves why they CHOOSE to see the entire online world in such dark, negative, life-destroying terms. They don't have to. Yes, corporations and governments appropriate exabytes of data, so they may analyze it and turn the insights into a profit. They definitely often do this in ways that the data subjects have no control over, and no idea about. Yes, that should be remedied. But NO, calling it "Data Colonialism" and thereby (deliberately!) yet again making the haves and richer countries forced at shame-point to feel guilty for... well - being good at what they do, I guess...? being successful...? is not going to make us more interested in solving these issues. If anything, it will antagonize us yet again, cause at last some of us to see it as something we (apparently) inflict on some out-group and so ultimately judged as less important than issues faced by the in-group. We care *more* about the in-group. We do. *That's why its called the in-group* - get it...? That's confoundingly dumb - see - the problems caused that are related to data-collection are perfectly urgent for our in-group as it is already. Making it sound like a problem we inflict to an outgroup can't possibly make solutions arrive faster. An utter waste of paper, space and money.