Data Colonialism: Rethinking Big Data’s Relation to the Contemporary Subject

tags

Datafication Capitalism

Notes

Data colonialism combines the predatory extractive practices of historical colonial- ism with the abstract quantification methods of computing.

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data colonialism will provide the preconditions for a new stage of capitalism that as yet we can barely imagine

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social life all over the globe becomes an “open” resource for extraction that is somehow “just there” for capital.

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our argument is not concerned here specifically with the exploi- tation of labor. Nor are we claiming that everyday life is now governed and managed as if it was labor.

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see what is going on with data as a form of fundamental appropriation or extraction of resources

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not simply a matter of harvesting

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life needs to be configured so as to generate such a resource

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data about one individual’s actions or properties at one moment needs to be combined

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generate valuable relations between data points

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gives us no grip at all on data colonialism, which appropriates life as raw material whether or not it is actually labor

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parallels with historic colonialism’s function within the development of economies

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normalization of resource appropriation

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dispossession came to seem natural

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Natural resources were and are not cheap per se, but legal and philosophical frameworks were established to rationalize them as such

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common idea that data are “merely” the “exhaust” exuded by people’s lives

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appro- priation for capital of the whole domain of social life, and much of individual life too, an appropriation that constitutes the colonial moment of contemporary capitalism

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It is the minimal integrity of human life that must be protected. This reality, which each subject can recognize in each other, cannot be traded away without endangering the basic conditions of human autonomy.

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A continuously trackable life is a dispossessed life

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The [better, alternative] idea of social totality, then, not only does not deny, but depends on the historical diversity and heterogeneity of society, of every society. In other words, it not only does not deny, but it requires the idea of an “other”

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