In this article, we characterise the digitisation of the lifeworld led by platform
companies as digital land grabbing and look at it in the mirror of the
(analogue) land grabbing described by Karl Marx as primitive accumulation.
While through analogue land grabbing, a situation was violently brought
about in which the workers were forced to enter into exploited wage employment
or die of starvation, through digital land grabbing, a situation emerged
in which one has to enter into exploited data employment (and produce data
for platform companies) or die social death. Just as Silvia Federici understands
analogue land grabbing as a counter-revolutionary reaction to late
medieval peasant uprisings, we want to interpret digital land grabbing and
the emergence of data labour as a counter-revolutionary reaction to the micropolitical
liberation movements that put pressure on Fordist and post-
Fordist capitalism in the 20th century.