Living in a World of Big Data
We live and move and have our being in the context of big data. When corporations collect data about people—tracking their behavior, preferences, and interactions—they are collecting abstractions. These abstractions can be powerful tools. They can help corporations identify patterns, make predictions, and coordinate complex systems.
The Devices That Know Us
Much of this data collection occurs through the devices and environments that now mediate our daily lives: smartphones, televisions, computers, smart speakers, wearable technologies, and even cars and household appliances. These devices function not merely as passive tools, but as active interfaces that continuously register, transmit, and interpret user behavior. Through sensors, location tracking, voice recognition, browsing histories, and patterns of use, they generate streams of data that are fed into algorithmic systems. These systems, in turn, analyze the data to refine predictions, personalize content, and shape future interactions. In this way, the very media through which we live our lives also become instruments for translating those lives into data.
Mistaking the Map for the Life
But the danger lies in forgetting the status of these data as abstractions. When data profiles are treated as if they were the reality of persons, we commit what Whitehead calls the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. The living individual—who feels joy and sorrow, who struggles, hopes, loves, and suffers—is reduced to a set of variables. What can be measured stands in for what is real. This reduction is not merely theoretical. It shapes how people are treated:
In this way, the data-fication of life flattens reality. It privileges what can be counted over what can be felt, what can be tracked over what can be valued.
When Experience Becomes a Commodity
The problem is compounded by the rise of surveillance capitalism, which thrives on big data. Our actions are monitored, our preferences inferred, and our future behavior predicted—not simply to understand us, but to shape us. The aim is not only knowledge, but influence; not only observation, but control. The more aspects of life that can be translated into data, the more they can be incorporated into systems of economic extraction.
The primary agents of surveillance capitalism are major technology corporations—led by Alphabet Inc. and Meta Platforms, followed by Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and Netflix—which harvest behavioral data in order to predict and modify human activity for profit. What began as a model within a handful of digital platforms has now expanded into a broader economic ecosystem. Increasingly, sectors such as insurance, automotive manufacturing, and finance participate in similar practices, using artificial intelligence and data analytics to convert personal experience into actionable—and marketable—information.
An Expanding Web of Extraction
This system is sustained by a wider network of enablers. Data brokers and advertisers aggregate and sell detailed consumer profiles. Automotive and industrial firms collect real-time behavioral data through connected devices and vehicles. Financial and insurance companies rely on data-driven models for credit scoring, pricing, and risk assessment. Surrounding all of this is a growing infrastructure of consultancies, marketing technology firms, and analytics companies that refine, interpret, and operationalize data. Together, these actors form an interconnected system in which ever more dimensions of human life are rendered into data for commercial gain.
A Culture That Measures Everything
The result of all of this is a global culture of data-drivenness and algorithmic attention control. What is measurable becomes what is valuable, because it is what can be monetized. What cannot be easily measured—depth of feeling, moral insight, spiritual awareness, genuine care—tends to be sidelined. The inner life is not denied, but it is rendered economically invisible or, worse, economically exploited.
We live and move and have our being in the context of big data. When corporations collect data about people—tracking their behavior, preferences, and interactions—they are collecting abstractions. These abstractions can be powerful tools. They can help corporations identify patterns, make predictions, and coordinate complex systems.
The Devices That Know Us
Much of this data collection occurs through the devices and environments that now mediate our daily lives: smartphones, televisions, computers, smart speakers, wearable technologies, and even cars and household appliances. These devices function not merely as passive tools, but as active interfaces that continuously register, transmit, and interpret user behavior. Through sensors, location tracking, voice recognition, browsing histories, and patterns of use, they generate streams of data that are fed into algorithmic systems. These systems, in turn, analyze the data to refine predictions, personalize content, and shape future interactions. In this way, the very media through which we live our lives also become instruments for translating those lives into data.
Mistaking the Map for the Life
But the danger lies in forgetting the status of these data as abstractions. When data profiles are treated as if they were the reality of persons, we commit what Whitehead calls the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. The living individual—who feels joy and sorrow, who struggles, hopes, loves, and suffers—is reduced to a set of variables. What can be measured stands in for what is real. This reduction is not merely theoretical. It shapes how people are treated:
- as users rather than persons,
- as data points rather than centers of experience,
- as predictable patterns rather than creative participants in life.
In this way, the data-fication of life flattens reality. It privileges what can be counted over what can be felt, what can be tracked over what can be valued.
When Experience Becomes a Commodity
The problem is compounded by the rise of surveillance capitalism, which thrives on big data. Our actions are monitored, our preferences inferred, and our future behavior predicted—not simply to understand us, but to shape us. The aim is not only knowledge, but influence; not only observation, but control. The more aspects of life that can be translated into data, the more they can be incorporated into systems of economic extraction.
The primary agents of surveillance capitalism are major technology corporations—led by Alphabet Inc. and Meta Platforms, followed by Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and Netflix—which harvest behavioral data in order to predict and modify human activity for profit. What began as a model within a handful of digital platforms has now expanded into a broader economic ecosystem. Increasingly, sectors such as insurance, automotive manufacturing, and finance participate in similar practices, using artificial intelligence and data analytics to convert personal experience into actionable—and marketable—information.
An Expanding Web of Extraction
This system is sustained by a wider network of enablers. Data brokers and advertisers aggregate and sell detailed consumer profiles. Automotive and industrial firms collect real-time behavioral data through connected devices and vehicles. Financial and insurance companies rely on data-driven models for credit scoring, pricing, and risk assessment. Surrounding all of this is a growing infrastructure of consultancies, marketing technology firms, and analytics companies that refine, interpret, and operationalize data. Together, these actors form an interconnected system in which ever more dimensions of human life are rendered into data for commercial gain.
A Culture That Measures Everything
The result of all of this is a global culture of data-drivenness and algorithmic attention control. What is measurable becomes what is valuable, because it is what can be monetized. What cannot be easily measured—depth of feeling, moral insight, spiritual awareness, genuine care—tends to be sidelined. The inner life is not denied, but it is rendered economically invisible or, worse, economically exploited.
Process Philosophy
A Different Way of Seeing
Four ideas in process philosophy challenge the assumptions of a data-defined world: (1) actual entities as moments of felt experience, (2) the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, (3) panexperientialism, and (4) the understanding of God as grounded in the primacy of the felt.
Actual Entities: Reality as Felt Experience
At the heart of process philosophy is the idea that reality is composed not of inert things but of events of experience—what Alfred North Whitehead calls actual entities. Each moment of existence is a moment of feeling, a way of taking the world into oneself and responding to it. Even at the most basic levels, reality involves responsiveness; at higher levels, it becomes conscious, reflective, and richly textured. For human beings, this means that we are not primarily objects to be measured, but subjects who feel, value, and aim toward what matters. Our lives unfold from within. Data, by contrast, capture only the outward traces of this inward process. They are abstractions from experience, not substitutes for it.
Misplaced Concreteness in a Data-Driven World
Whitehead’s critique of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness helps us name the error at the heart of data-centered culture. We take abstractions—data profiles, metrics, predictive models—and treat them as if they were the concrete reality of persons. But they are not. They are simplifications, useful in limited contexts but always partial. When they are mistaken for the whole, the richness of lived experience is eclipsed. The map replaces the life. To resist this fallacy is to remember that what is most real about a person cannot be captured in numbers: it must be felt, lived, and encountered.
Panexperientialism: A Living Universe
Process philosophy also affirms what is sometimes called panexperientialism: the idea that experience, in some form, is present throughout the natural world. This does not mean that everything is conscious in the way humans are, but that all actual entities involve some degree of feeling, responsiveness, or inwardness. The world is not made up of dead matter to which experience is later added; rather, experience goes “all the way down.” This vision challenges the assumption that reality is fundamentally composed of lifeless data points. Instead, it invites us to see the universe as a web of interrelated experiences, each with its own intrinsic value. In such a world, the reduction of reality to data is not just incomplete—it is a profound misunderstanding of the nature of things.
God and the Primacy of the Felt
Process philosophy also offers a distinctive vision of God—one that deepens this insight. God is not a distant observer who gathers information about the world, but a living presence who feels the world from within. Whitehead speaks of God as receiving every experience into the divine life. Every joy, every sorrow, every struggle is felt and held. In this sense, we are not data for God. We are experiences—valued, remembered, and woven into a larger whole. What is abstract for our systems is concrete for God. This vision invites us to align ourselves with a deeper truth: that reality, at its heart, is not measured but felt.
Felt, Not Measured
In a world increasingly organized around measurement, process philosophy offers a needed reminder: what is most real cannot be captured in data. It must be lived. We are not reducible to the information collected about us. Nor are we merely inputs in systems of prediction and control. We are participants in an ongoing process of experience—feeling, valuing, responding, and becoming.
To say that reality is “felt, not measured” is not to reject science or data. It is to place them in context. It is to remember that beneath every dataset lies a world of lived experience that no metric can fully capture—and that what matters most is not what can be counted, but what can be felt, lived, and loved.
Ten Steps to Take
- Reclaim Your Attention
Turn off unnecessary notifications. Focus on one thing at a time. - Spend Time Offline
Set aside parts of each day without screens—especially mornings or meals. - Return to Your Body
Walk, cook, sing, garden. Remember you are a living presence, not a data stream. - Create Quiet Spaces
Practice silence, prayer, or reflection. Let your inner life deepen. - Be Present with Others
Share face-to-face time—meals, music, conversation. - Use Technology Intentionally
Ask: Is this serving my life, or shaping it without my consent? - Protect Your Privacy
Limit what you share. Make small choices that preserve your autonomy. - Enjoy What Cannot Be Measured
Listen to music, sit in nature, laugh with friends—without recording or optimizing. - Break Predictable Patterns
Try new things. Take different paths. Stay open to surprise. - Build Communities of Care
Join or create spaces where people are known as persons, not profiles--
where, in the spirit of Whitehead, each life is honored as a center of experience.
Three Books
An exposé of the unprecedented form of power called “surveillance capitalism,” and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior
“Groundbreaking, magisterial, alarming.” – Financial Times
The heady optimism of the Internet’s early days has turned dark. Surveillance capitalism has deepened inequality, sown societal chaos, and undermined democracy.
The fight for a human future has never been more urgent. Shoshana Zuboff argues that we still have the power to decide what kind of world we want to live in: Will we allow surveillance capitalism to wrap us in its iron cage as it enriches the few and subjugates the many? Or will we demand the rights and laws that place this rogue power under the democratic rule of law? Only democracy can ensure that the vast new capabilities of the digital era are harnessed to the advancement of humanity. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is a deeply original, exquisitely reasoned, and spell binding examination of our emerging information civilization and the life and death choices we face.
“Groundbreaking, magisterial, alarming.” – Financial Times
The heady optimism of the Internet’s early days has turned dark. Surveillance capitalism has deepened inequality, sown societal chaos, and undermined democracy.
The fight for a human future has never been more urgent. Shoshana Zuboff argues that we still have the power to decide what kind of world we want to live in: Will we allow surveillance capitalism to wrap us in its iron cage as it enriches the few and subjugates the many? Or will we demand the rights and laws that place this rogue power under the democratic rule of law? Only democracy can ensure that the vast new capabilities of the digital era are harnessed to the advancement of humanity. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is a deeply original, exquisitely reasoned, and spell binding examination of our emerging information civilization and the life and death choices we face.
Key Takeaways from the Book:
- Definition: Surveillance capitalism is an economic system centered on the extraction, prediction, and sale of private human experience.
- Behavioral Surplus: Companies collect data far beyond what is needed for service improvement, using this "behavioral surplus" to create prediction products, such as targeted ads
- Behavioral Modification: The ultimate goal is not just to predict behavior, but to influence it—using nudges, AI, and digital architecture to drive specific actions (e.g., footfall into a store).
- "Big Other" vs. Big Brother: Rather than a state-run Big Brother, this is a digital "Big Other"—a ubiquitous infrastructure that monitors us, often with our unwitting consent, to shape our behavior.
- Economic Shift: Zuboff argues this system turns human experiences into free raw material for commercial exploitation, resulting in massive profits and unprecedented, unaccountable power.
- The Threat to Democracy: The system poses a threat to free will and societal agency, as "instrumentarian power" operates through digital manipulation rather than physical coercion
- Definition: Surveillance capitalism is an economic system centered on the extraction, prediction, and sale of private human experience.
- Behavioral Surplus: Companies collect data far beyond what is needed for service improvement, using this "behavioral surplus" to create prediction products, such as targeted ads
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The Private is Political: Identity and Democracy
in an age of Surveillance Capitalism
Interview with Ray Bresecsa, author of
The Profile is Political: Identity and Democracy
in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism
As Americans increasingly depend upon their phones, computers, and internet resources, their actions are less private than they believe. Data is routinely sold and shared with companies who want to sell something, political actors who want to analyze behavior, and law enforcement who seek to monitor and limit actions.
In The Private is Political: Identity and Democracy in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism (NYU Press, 2025), law professor Ray Brescia explores the failure of existing legal systems and institutions to protect people’s online presence and identities. Examining the ways in which the digital space is under threat from both governments and private actors, Brescia reveals how the rise of private surveillance prevents individuals from organizing with others who might help to catalyze change in their lives. Brescia argues that we are not far from a world where surveillance chills not just our speech, but our very identities. Surveillance, he suggests, will ultimately stifle our ability to live full lives, realize democracy, and shape the laws that affect our privacy itself.
Brescia writes that “The search for identity and communion with others who share it has never been easier in all of human history. At the same time, our individual and collective identity is also under threat by a surveillance state like none that has ever existed before. This surveillance can be weaponized, not just for profit but also to promote political ends, and undermine efforts to achieve individual and collective self-determination”
The book identifies the harms to individuals from privacy violations, provides an expansive definition of political privacy, and identifies the ‘integrity of identity’ as a central feature of democracy. The Private is Political lays out the features of Surveillance Capitalism and provides a roadmap for “muscular disclosure”: a comprehensive privacy regime to empower consumers to collectively safeguard privacy rights.
Professor Ray Brescia is the Associate Dean for Research & Intellectual Life and the Hon. Harold R. Tyler Professor in Law & Technology at Albany Law School. He is the author of many scholarly works including Lawyer Nation: The Past, Present, and Future of the American Legal Profession (from NYU Press) and The Future of Change: How Technology Shapes Social Revolutions (from Cornell UP). He is also the author of public facing work, most recently “Elon Musk’s DOGE is executing a historically dangerous data breach” on MSNBC. He started his legal career at the Legal Aid Society of New York where he was a Skadden Fellow, and then served as the Associate Director at the Urban Justice Center, also in New York City, where he represented grassroots groups like tenant associations and low-wage worker groups. Ray’s blog is “The Future of Change” and you can find him on LinkedIn.
In The Private is Political: Identity and Democracy in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism (NYU Press, 2025), law professor Ray Brescia explores the failure of existing legal systems and institutions to protect people’s online presence and identities. Examining the ways in which the digital space is under threat from both governments and private actors, Brescia reveals how the rise of private surveillance prevents individuals from organizing with others who might help to catalyze change in their lives. Brescia argues that we are not far from a world where surveillance chills not just our speech, but our very identities. Surveillance, he suggests, will ultimately stifle our ability to live full lives, realize democracy, and shape the laws that affect our privacy itself.
Brescia writes that “The search for identity and communion with others who share it has never been easier in all of human history. At the same time, our individual and collective identity is also under threat by a surveillance state like none that has ever existed before. This surveillance can be weaponized, not just for profit but also to promote political ends, and undermine efforts to achieve individual and collective self-determination”
The book identifies the harms to individuals from privacy violations, provides an expansive definition of political privacy, and identifies the ‘integrity of identity’ as a central feature of democracy. The Private is Political lays out the features of Surveillance Capitalism and provides a roadmap for “muscular disclosure”: a comprehensive privacy regime to empower consumers to collectively safeguard privacy rights.
Professor Ray Brescia is the Associate Dean for Research & Intellectual Life and the Hon. Harold R. Tyler Professor in Law & Technology at Albany Law School. He is the author of many scholarly works including Lawyer Nation: The Past, Present, and Future of the American Legal Profession (from NYU Press) and The Future of Change: How Technology Shapes Social Revolutions (from Cornell UP). He is also the author of public facing work, most recently “Elon Musk’s DOGE is executing a historically dangerous data breach” on MSNBC. He started his legal career at the Legal Aid Society of New York where he was a Skadden Fellow, and then served as the Associate Director at the Urban Justice Center, also in New York City, where he represented grassroots groups like tenant associations and low-wage worker groups. Ray’s blog is “The Future of Change” and you can find him on LinkedIn.
Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech
and How to Fight Back
Interview with Ulises Mejias and Nick Couldry, authors of
Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back
In the present day, Big Tech is extracting resources from us, transferring and centralizing resources from people to companies. These companies are grabbing our most basic natural resources--our data--exploiting our labor and connections, and repackaging our information to control our views, track our movements, record our conversations, and discriminate against us. These companies tell us this is for our own good, to build innovation and develop new technology. But in fact, every time we unthinkingly click "Accept" on a set of Terms and Conditions, we allow our most personal information to be kept indefinitely, repackaged by companies to control and exploit us for their own profit.
In Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back (The University of Chicago Press, 2024), Ulises Mejias and Nick Couldry explain why postindustrial capitalism cannot be understood without colonialism, and why race is a critical factor in who benefits from data colonialism, just as it was for historic colonialism. In this searing, cutting-edge guide, Mejias and Couldry explore the concept of data colonialism, revealing how history can help us understand the emerging future--and how we can fight back.
Mention in this episode: Tierra Comun (English Version)
Ulises A. Mejias is professor of communication studies at the State University of New York at Oswego.
Nick Couldry is professor of media, communications, and social theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science and faculty associate at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society.
Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College.
In Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back (The University of Chicago Press, 2024), Ulises Mejias and Nick Couldry explain why postindustrial capitalism cannot be understood without colonialism, and why race is a critical factor in who benefits from data colonialism, just as it was for historic colonialism. In this searing, cutting-edge guide, Mejias and Couldry explore the concept of data colonialism, revealing how history can help us understand the emerging future--and how we can fight back.
Mention in this episode: Tierra Comun (English Version)
Ulises A. Mejias is professor of communication studies at the State University of New York at Oswego.
Nick Couldry is professor of media, communications, and social theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science and faculty associate at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society.
Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College.