“Orders of Capture: How a Decolonial Framework Helps Understand Big Data,” Nick Couldry

This talks draws on the author’s joint work with Ulises Mejias on data colonialism - most recently Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back (Chicago UP 2024) and his forthcoming book on redesigning social media (Polity October 2024 UK/December 2024 US). It explores how a decolonial framework that does more than identify enduring neocolonial forces – that is, an analysis of how more of the world’s resources have in recent decades been captured in a new stage of colonial appropriation – can help understand, first, what’s going on with Big Data and large-scale AI and, second, how the spaces of social life became captured by the extractive business models of commercial social media. The way forward lies in reasserting the role of communities on multiple scales to set the terms on which knowledge is generated and social life conducted. 

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 Costs of Connection (with Ulises Mejias, Stanford University Press, 2019), The Mediated Construction of Reality (with Andreas Hepp, Polity, 2016), Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice (Polity 2012) and Why Voice Matters (Sage 2010). His latest books are The Space of the World: Can Human Solidarity Survive Social Media and What if it Can’t? (Polity, 2024) and Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back(Chicago University Press 2024, with Ulises Mejias). Nick is also the co-founder of the Tierra Común, a network of scholars and activists.