Introduction

Summary

We are rapidly moving toward a datafied world where our social activities are routinely transformed into machine-readable data.¹ Indeed, digital platforms today are capable of datafying more and more “subjects, objects, and practices”² – converting not only Facebook “likes” into social relationship profiles and shopping patterns into marketable records, but also other real-life events that were formerly unstorable into data. Increasingly, the term “datafication” is associated with platformization, which has been framed in the context of the penetration and influence of digital platforms.³ Taken as a whole, nearly every aspect of our daily actions is being constantly and systematically harvested, turned into digital data, scaled and analyzed in real time, stored for the long term, aggregated, and sold. This is the phenomenon we are facing; it is growing, and we do not really know where it will lead us next.