Data Colonialism: You Are the Resource

'Data colonialism' (Couldry and Mejias) and 'surveillance capitalism' (Zuboff) name the same shift from different angles: human experience itself has become a raw resource to be claimed, extracted, and refined. Where industrial capitalism mined nature and labor, this logic mines behavior — your clicks, location, voice, pauses, and relationships — and processes it into 'prediction products' sold to those who want to influence what you do next. The colonial metaphor is pointed: the extraction is framed as inevitable and even beneficial ('personalization,' 'free' services), the terms are dictated by the powerful, and the resource (you) has little say. DOCUMENTED [Historical record]: the data-broker industry, the ad-tech auction that sells your attention in milliseconds, and the harvesting documented by Snowden and Cambridge Analytica. The reframe matters because it changes the question from 'do I have something to hide?' to 'who profits from knowing me, and what power does that give them over me?' — which is the right question for the whole track.