  The increasing use of data in various parts of the economic and social
systems is creating a new form of monopoly: data monopolies. We illustrate that
the companies using these strategies, Datalists, are challenging the existing
definitions used within Monopoly Capital Theory (MCT). Datalists are pursuing a
different type of monopoly control than traditional multinational corporations.
They are pursuing monopolistic control over data to feed their productive
processes, increasingly controlled by algorithms and Artificial Intelligence
(AI). These productive processes use information about humans and the creative
outputs of humans as the inputs but do not classify those humans as employees,
so they are not paid or credited for their labour. This paper provides an
overview of this evolution and its impact on monopoly theory. It concludes with
an outline for a research agenda for economics in this space.
