“I wish that Data Grab was required reading when I was a graduate student working in the field of AI. Perspectives like these are crucial if we are to break the colonial paradigm that pervades computing disciplines.”
-Timnit Gebru, founder of the Distributed AI Research Institute
“In this essential and original work, Mejias and Couldry lay out a powerful and persuasive analysis of the logical continuity between modern colonialism and the extraction of data by Big Tech and its platforms. Their call to resist data colonialism could not be more urgent or more timely.”
-Jeremy Gilbert, author of ‘Hegemony Now: How Big Tech and Wall Street Won the World’ and ‘Twenty-First Century Socialism’
“A profound exploration of how the ceaseless extraction of information about our intimate lives is remaking both global markets and our very selves. The Costs of Connection represents an enormous step forward in our collective understanding of capitalism’s current stage, a stage in which the final colonial input is the raw data of human life. Challenging, urgent, and bracingly original.”
-Naomi Klein, Gloria Steinem Chair of Media, Culture, and Feminist Studies, Rutgers University
“This is an extraordinary book. The ‘paranodal’ critique made in Off the Network demands that we look both at the social spaces that lie between, and are ignored by, network nodes; at the material basis on top of which supposedly immaterial networks rest, and at the vertical structures of political economic power that control the apparent horizontality of networks. In doing so, Ulises Ali Mejias delivers a devastating intellectual slam against conventional thinking about the Internet from both the left and right.”
-Nick Dyer-Witheford, coauthor of Games of Empire
| Translations of Off the Network: | |||
 | Mejias, U. (2017). Desmantelando la Red. Revista 404. Ciudad de Mexico: Centro de Cultura Digital. [SPANISH – abridged version] | link | |
 | Mejias, U. (2014). Odmapowując sieć. In P. Celiński (ed.) Nowe media = nowa partycypacja. Lublin, Poland: Instytut Kultury Cyfrowej. [POLISH – abridged version] | link | |