Abstract
This is an extended dialogue with Nick Couldry, a leading media scholar at the London School of Economics and one of the most influential critical voices in contemporary communication studies. Over the past two decades, Couldry has developed an increasingly urgent theoretical framework for understanding how digital technologies reshape human social life—and how resistance remains possible. The conversation unfolds around three foundational works that chart the evolution of his thought: The Space of the World: Can Human Solidarity Survive Social Media and What If It Can’t? (2024), which diagnoses how social media platforms have fundamentally restructured social interaction through systematically flawed spatial design; Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back (2024) (co-authored with Ulises Mejias), which situates digital data extraction within the long history of Western colonialism; and the forthcoming Predatory AI: How We Can Resist the Corporate Capture of the Human Mind (planned for 2026), which confronts the systematic capture of human cognitive autonomy.
Theory and methodology: defining the crisis
With so many terms already in circulation—platform capitalism, surveillance capitalism, and digital capitalism—why do we need “data colonialism”? What specific part of the picture does this concept paint that the others might be missing?
There is no doubt that earlier theorizations of what is happening with data are very important and valuable. Platform capitalism highlights the new role of platforms, built through software and code as spaces where we live our social lives, and how they reshape the way capitalism can operate. Surveillance capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff’s very US-centered model, identifies how our attention and behavior are extracted on those platforms. Digital capitalism is perhaps less analytically distinct, since everything in modern capitalism is now digital.
However, the transformation driven by data is both deep and vast, and these conceptual frameworks are insufficient to capture it. It is almost as if our whole lives are being rendered into data. Working with Ulises Mejias, we call this datification, and it goes beyond what happens on social media. Every business is trying to capture data about the world and process it. So, we wondered what would be a better theoretical framework for giving us a sense of the size of this transformation? And we decided that the
Colonialism, as it developed in the West from the fifteenth century onward, was fundamentally about
In some ways, Western colonialism ended in the 1960s, but in other ways, it continues and evolves. European extraction from the Americas and Africa fueled capitalism’s rise. Capitalism was only possible because of colonialism. What is happening with data is the latest stage of colonialism:
Generative AI provides a perfect example of this logic evolving. If we take the most influential account of recent capitalist change, surveillance capitalism, it focuses on assets extracted when we are under surveillance on platforms. But if you create a beautiful song and choose to put it online because you are proud of it, that is not “surveillance.” It is your decision to publish it. Yet it can still be taken as input to train AI models.
Does using the language of colonialism also make resistance easier to imagine—compared with critiques framed only around capitalism?
That is a very good point. It is often said that it is impossible to imagine the end of capitalism; it is easier to imagine the end of history than the end of capitalism. People do not know what comes after. However, we do know that colonialism has been resisted, in Indonesia, in India, in South Africa, and many other places. So perhaps we can more readily imagine the end of colonialism: a world where small elites are not dominating everyone else. In that sense, there may be more hope in the idea of data colonialism than in data capitalism.
You introduce the concept of “the space of the world” in your work. How does this theoretical framework differ from simply discussing “the space of social media”? What specific structural problems or hidden dimensions does this concept reveal that might otherwise remain invisible to us?
There are very special dynamics to the way social media platforms developed. The original idea of social media was sound: people were tired of centralized media and wanted something closer to themselves and their friends. So why not connect more? That is entirely natural. The problem is that about twenty years ago, especially in the United States, a series of serious mistakes were made.
That period was marked by hostility to regulation and a belief that markets should be free to develop without oversight (very different from the situation in China). That climate encouraged the first mistake. We delegated to companies, whose primary goal is profit, not designing a better social world, the power to build not just one space or another, but what I call “the space of all possible spaces where we could be social.” Crucially, we allowed this to happen for a long time almost without any regulation. As a result, platforms became larger than the biggest countries. Facebook, for example, has roughly 3.2 billion users, more than India or China.
When any possible space of social interaction is routed through a platform, that higher-dimensional, overarching environment becomes the space of the world, the social world we end up living in when we spend so much of our time on social media, naturally wanting to connect with friends and family. And that is why I say the space of the world, not the space of social media.
Second, we allowed this very natural desire to connect to develop in a very unnatural setting: platforms designed to track us continuously and extract profit by incentivizing us to do more, to like, tag, follow, because attention can be sold to advertisers. This was a tremendous mistake that we made in allowing social media platforms to be designed this way.
Although the original mistake was made in the West, China has now perfected this model through TikTok and Douyin: tracking everything you do to predict what you will want to see, and profiting from it. This creates a vicious cycle. The platform’s design inherently encourages us to express preference, like this, not that, which naturally intensifies polarization. Business models then exploit this dynamic to keep us more engaged and more polarized, because polarization attracts advertisers.
Third, we allowed these platforms to scale as large as possible. A profit-maximizing platform wants the largest possible user base and the maximum possible interaction, because that is how it maximizes profit. But that is not how social life is built. If you host a party, in theory you could invite seven billion people, but it would be absurd. You invite twenty, maybe a hundred, because you have a room, you want people to talk, to look at each other, to enjoy a calm time together. Social life works better at smaller scales.
As a result, we built social media with a design fundamentally bad for social life, at a scale impossible for social life. That is why I needed the concept of “the space of the world” to name what went wrong at the level of space itself. The problems we discuss, mental health harms for young girls, political polarization, harassment and abuse, are symptoms of this deeper structural error. We designed the space wrongly, not only in particular platforms. That is the fundamental problem we need to correct.
In your research and writing, like the Space of the World, you draw on a wide range of studies and concrete examples. How do you select and use cases to support your arguments?
The Space of the World was written for a general audience, for people outside universities, and it should also be accessible to undergraduates and graduates. So, it is written in plain language. But it was essential that the argument not be merely my opinion, what I feel, but something backed up by evidence.
Methodologically, what I tried to do was to combine my general theory of what went wrong with my reading of the past 20 years, a broadly social-theoretical reading. I am a social theorist, and I think the core problem lies in the design of space, not only in the design details of any particular platform.
At the same time, I tried to review as much relevant evidence as I could, from social psychology, sociology, some economics, and political communication, on specific issues such as polarization, declining trust in facts (and in the factuality of what we see on social media), and isolation: people becoming cut off from the normal social world. I reviewed that literature and then formed my own judgment about the balance of evidence. That is basically how I proceeded. Because it is a popular book, most of the detailed sourcing is in the footnotes, but if readers follow them, they can see the evidence behind the claims I make.
China’s place in the new framework
In the Space of the World, you describe China as a hugely important player in building today’s space of the world. You note that few people outside China celebrate China’s use of platforms for social surveillance and of AI to build a more controlled social order, but China has been much more ready to control the damaging consequences of social media than the West. Are you suggesting that China’s approach may offer useful insights for reconstructing the space of the world? How do you envision China’s role in this global project?
In relation to social media, I think that the Chinese government recognized from the beginning that allowing platforms such as Alibaba and WeChat to develop would reshape the design of society. Because it understood that, it was more prepared to address certain problems as they emerged. For example, China was the first country to impose time limits on how long children could spend on Douyin, and among the first to monitor these kinds of social impacts. That is worth remembering amid anti-China rhetoric in the United States about TikTok. People in the United States often forget that TikTok is just a more efficient version of Facebook, and they blame TikTok but not Facebook. And TikTok in its Chinese form is more actively regulated than Facebook.
So yes, we need to listen to China, and it is important to have dialogue. It is not healthy to demonize China as a society that simply does not respect privacy. That is not true. There is evidence that Chinese people do care about privacy, and there are debates about privacy in China, though they take place within a different set of governmental values. I do not think we can have an intelligent debate about the future of social media, or AI, without engaging seriously with China’s policies.
What role China will play is difficult to predict, not least because US policy is currently hard to anticipate. But the future, in my view, depends on dialogue: listening carefully to what China gets right. It is important for people in the West to read Chinese policy documents closely and seriously, including AI action plans, Internet Plus, the social credit system and the reasons it was proposed, and the recent 5-year plan with its detailed proposal for rolling out AI across society. It is not what I would choose for Western societies, but it is an intelligent attempt to think through social order, its possibilities, weaknesses, and problems. My point is that sustained engagement with China is essential, and that is what I have been trying to do in my work for the last 15 years.
China’s Digital Silk Road presents itself as providing digital infrastructure, cloud services, platforms, and connectivity to Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Africa to support digital development. Different stakeholders—governments, local communities, and international observers—have raised various concerns about data security, technological dependency, and control over digital resources. From your “data colonialism” perspective, how do you assess this?
As Ulises Mejias and I developed the theory of data colonialism, we wanted a framework that could fit China as well as the West, because so much writing about platforms focuses only on the West. That is not good enough: China is as important, perhaps in some ways more important, than the West. I take Chinese policy very seriously. China is now the second largest country in the world dealing with some of the most complex problems that human beings have to resolve.
The United States clearly exercises colonial power through global platforms—Meta, Google, Microsoft—in very deep ways. China also has very large platforms with enormous influence. It is true that China has used the provision of technology, cloud services, and infrastructure to acquire influence across parts of Africa, Latin America, and Asia. In that sense, China should be aware of data colonialism. But this is not a story where only one side is “colonial” and the other is not. The point is that we need to be honest about the power dynamics and have more serious dialogue about what different ways forward could be.
At the moment, we are in a world where there is this massive conflict between the United States and China over world dominance. The United States is now in a defensive posture, deeply concerned by China’s stated ambition to become the world leader in AI by 2030. If we want to move beyond data colonialism, it would mean giving countries, and even local communities, more power to negotiate their own terms: control over digital infrastructure, the platforms they use, the contractual conditions, and the ways data can be collected and used. In other words, reversing data colonialism means decentralizing power, bringing it closer to communities, so that human connection is not treated simply as an asset to be exploited for profit by businesses or for power by states.
A positive direction would be using data to build common knowledge and strengthen the social fabric, something that may be happening in some parts of China and the West, but it is not the norm. The broader vision is to move away from treating data—and therefore our lives, insofar as they become data—as something to be extracted, toward treating data as a shared resource governed for common benefit.
So, does it ultimately come down to how the data is used?
Yes, but also, sometimes it depends on not collecting certain data at all. It is important that some aspects of life remain private, or remain outside the world of data completely—how we are with our family, with our friends.
Scholar responsibility and critical engagement
Both of your books feel urgent and openly critical, and they do not just diagnose problems, they call for action. How do you navigate the boundary between scholarship and activism? Furthermore, what specific role should critical media researchers play in shaping technology governance, particularly given the rapid acceleration of AI?
It is a difficult question, because things are changing very fast, especially with AI, and there is intense conflict about where society should go and how we should use technology. Much of that conflict is not happening in public; it happens in private. People feel uneasy and worried, but very little of that private debate reaches the public in a meaningful way. Corporations often do not want it, and governments often do not want it either. Governments also want close relationships with corporations because that can be useful for public infrastructure. I understand that, but it is not good for public debate.
So, at a time of rapid change and real uncertainty about where we are going, and where we should go, the role of critical scholars is substantial. Our responsibility is to speak clearly, based on evidence and on decades of thinking about social change, about what is healthy for society. We need to explain the deepest problems, and the beginnings of solutions, in language that everyone can understand, without jargon. And that may mean disagreeing with governments. I disagree strongly with my own government’s policy on AI.
In fact, I think there is an even greater role for critical scholars today than 40 or 50 years ago, because technological change is now reshaping the fabric of society in profound ways. These changes are without precedent; perhaps nothing comparable has happened for 500 years. And communication scholars in particular have a special responsibility, because many of the deepest changes are happening through the redesign of everyday communication infrastructures.
Does this mean scholars are obligated to take a definitive stance? And how do you balance taking a stance with the requirement for objectivity?
I think so, because the bigger the problem, the more important it is to take a side. Take the climate emergency: it is hard to treat that as neutral.
As for the balance, this has been a debate in sociology for over 60 years. Since the 1960s, critical sociologists have argued that “pure objectivity” is a myth. Of course, we should try to minimize the influence of personal likes and dislikes, and we should aim to be as objective as we can. But our search for objectivity is still shaped by values, just as governments make value-based choices about what kind of society they want to build. Scholars also contribute to one kind of society rather than another. The key is to be honest and open about those values, not to hide them, while still being rigorous about evidence, clear about arguments, and as transparent as possible about what we find. I do not see a contradiction there.
Future research: Predatory AI and resistance
You mentioned your next book will focus on AI. Could you share where the project stands right now, and what its central argument will be?
Yes. If everything stays on track, it should be published by Polity toward the end of 2026. The working title is Predatory AI: How We Can Resist the Corporate Capture of the Human Mind.
The core question is: what happens if we make the wrong deal, the wrong agreement, the wrong “
My worry is that if we get it wrong, more and more of our everyday thinking, planning, fact-finding, and even how we relate to the world, will be shaped by corporate sources, corporate habits, and corporate AI tools. AI as rapid calculation can be extremely useful, but the point is to harness that capacity for social goals and public good, not simply for profit. Otherwise, we repeat the mistake we made with social media: we allowed corporations to build our social world for their own benefit. With AI, the stakes are even higher, because we are talking about tools that shape the mind, how we think, and how our children will learn to think. Organizing that primarily around selling products and licenses is a dangerous model.
I am arguing that right now we are making the wrong social contract around AI because we are allowing corporate profit to be dominant. Instead, we need to put social values first.
A concrete example is education. We should be asking: what role should AI play in schools? Is it helpful for children to be encouraged to use ChatGPT all the time? Companies are already building these tools directly into everyday devices, encouraging students to scan an assignment and receive an instant starting point of an answer. If that becomes routine, why would a child do homework in the same way again?
In that sense, AI is redesigning what we might call “cognitive production”—how knowledge is made in society. If we do this the right way, it could be tremendous. We could enhance our own agency, using AI’s calculations to give us more information and possibilities. However, if we use it the wrong way, we will fundamentally undermine our own skills and those of future generations. We risk deskilling ourselves to the point where we become dependent on AI. While that scenario is very good for profits, it is very bad for the human mind.
Yet in practice, we are allowing these products to spread as fast as possible without asking the crucial questions first. Sweden, Take Sweden, for example, which has essentially declared access to ChatGPT a basic right for every citizen and child. This presupposes that AI is inherently beneficial, much like clean water. You would not let everyone have access to water unless you knew the water was safe. But do we know ChatGPT is good for people? We do not yet. We really do not.
We are taking massive risks without a serious debate about the potential costs to the individual and, consequently, to society. A robust society relies on the cognitive development of its members to form a collective intelligence. By rushing to adopt AI tools whose effects are unknown and unpredictable, we gamble with the very fabric of our social intelligence.
We need to decelerate and exercise much greater caution. In this regard, there is merit in one key aspect of the Chinese approach. Whatever other differences I may have with Chinese policy, the idea of framing what we are doing with technology in terms of social consequences—which has always been a Chinese approach—is correct and more useful than a simple pro-market approach. That is where we have to start, not from how to make maximum profit for AI developers. That is the wrong choice. I guarantee that.
Footnotes
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.