Data is the resource, and our lives are the territory. Ulises Mejias, co-author of Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back, reflects on data colonialism as a new social order that extends the extractive logic of historical colonialism into our everyday lives. Highlights include:

• How terms of digital service agreements, written in dense legalese, resemble past colonial proclamations to indigenous people intended to dispossess;
• How data colonialism, a system of continuous data extraction from our everyday lives, mirrors traditional colonialism in that both generate wealth for the few and enable new forms of social and behavioral control;
• Why colonialism was essential for the development of capitalism and remains central in understanding today's data-driven capitalism;
• How data colonialism uses the 4 X's of traditional colonialism - explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate - to move into new 'data territories' like education, health, agriculture, policing, and war;
• How both traditional and data colonialism use 'civilizing narratives' to justify their extraction and colonize peoples' minds;
• How AI amplifies the worst of bureaucratic proceduralism and the costs fall on the least powerful in society;
• What resistance to data colonialism can learn from resistance to traditional colonialism: working within the system, against the system, and beyond the system.

See episode website for show notes, links, and transcript:

https://www.populationbalance.org/podcast/ulises-mejias

OVERSHOOT | Shrink Toward Abundance

OVERSHOOT tackles today's interlocked social and ecological crises driven by humanity's excessive population and consumption. The podcast explores needed narrative, behavioral, and system shifts for recreating human life in balance with all life on Earth. With expert guests from wide-ranging disciplines, we examine the forces underlying overshoot: from patriarchal pronatalism that is fueling overpopulation, to growth-biased economic systems that lead to consumerism and social injustice, to the dominant worldview of human supremacy that subjugates animals and nature. Our vision of shrinking toward abundance inspires us to seek pathways of transformation that go beyond technological fixes toward a new humanity that honors our interconnectedness with all beings.

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