Data Colonialism Through Accumulation by Dispossession: New Metaphors for Daily Data

tags

Datafication Capitalism

Common to think of the Web as a frontier being colonized. But the Web is not innocent: we can think of the production of big data as a project of colonization of the life-world.

Notes

critiques have tended to focus on the limitations or failures of ‘big data’ to produce the promised results (Glanz, 2013; Marcus and Davis, 2014) or on the limitations of both current theory and statistics to interpret data

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critiques have emphasized a variety of questions including its role in surveillance (Crampton et al., 2014), its epistemologies (boyd and Crawford, 2012), and its paradigms

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asymmetries of the relations between data producers and owners - end-users and app developers - that have become a focal point of value generation in the technology industry

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‘big data’ as a current instantiation of processes of accumulation by dispossession and colonization of the life-world

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emergence of ‘big data’ as part of a market-orientation towards continual growth

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processes by which data are created and exchanged are processes of capitalist accumulation by dispossession

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the asymmetrical extraction of value is shown to presume both quantification and surveillance of the life-world, of lived experience, as a natural, desired outcome of modern life

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Against this digital frontierism, we suggest the metaphor of data colonialism

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shifted ‘data’ from an engineering problem to an epistemological orientation

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‘big data’ encapsulates an epistemological orientation in which cutting-edge technical feats are performed as a key means of making better decisions in the world. The belief in this myth (boyd and Crawford, 2012) constitutes a certain kind of positivism (Wyly, 2014) which enshrines data as an austere, predictive truth

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spurious correlation is fine, so long as it is profitable spurious correlation

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speculation as to big data’s future value, through future data assimilation, new analysis algorithms, or other as yet unknown technologies drives the obsessive need for further ‘big data’ accumulation

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if the generation of data can be seen as the production of value, then “the object of study would not necessarily be the content of geotagged information (e.g., maps of Tweets and geographies of the internet) but for example how subjects are constituted as laborers in an exploitative economic system”

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accumulation based upon “predation, fraud, and violence” occur in a variety of ways that are haphazard and contingent, but also continual

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As users of technology enter into tacit data license agreements with the firms that create and control the technology, they are dispossessed of the right to control those data

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commodification involves a fundamental shift in production towards the explicit motivation for market exchange (rather than use)

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how the production of an individual data point by an individual user of technology becomes a commodity

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firms must assert the rights to the data generated by millions of users of everyday technologies

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occurs primarily through End-User-License-Agreements (EULAs)

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rarely read

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application creators regularly claim ownership over wide swathes of data not readily apparent to end-users

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critical moment in the commodification of individual data into ‘big data.’

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‘big data’ functions as a techno-social achievement that obscures the very processes of alienation it engenders

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the actual exchange of it from the generator to the collector, from the user to the firm, is obscured through the promise and necessity of technology use in everyday life.

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users are seen to voluntarily and willingly adopt technologies, and agree to any associated EULAs

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the only viable option other than boycotting a company in general, which is getting harder to do

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The alienation, exclusion and decontextualization processes are necessary to make the data legible to other market-oriented rational systems that will consume the aggregated data

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‘big data’ adds the promise of ever-greater segmentation and targeting in order to shape and control consumptions patterns with ever more precise targeting – an epistemic break that leaps from the area to the individual

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the linked data about the individual comes to stand for the individual who created it. This is the individual that capital can see

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explicitly make use of a pioneer mythos

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essentially positive, optimistic assumption of the comingling of data, technology, and body

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telecom corporations play the role of the “big power and big money” from which the internet must be defended, with the “open” Internet as an internet better for individuals as consumers and users of technology

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‘Big data,’ as part of its mythology, promises an idealized market, but it is one of predictable, modeled consumption

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The asymmetry of the value of ‘big data’, emerging only in aggregate, ensures that only “big money and big power” are able to reap its purported benefits

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If the processes by which ‘big data’ comingle with everyday life are understood not as a ‘frontier’ to be colonized, but as processes by which everyday life is colonized by ‘big money and big power,’ then a new theoretical terrain for understanding ‘big data’ is opened.

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the specific definition of ‘big data’ as overdetermined by algorithms developed under profit-imperatives highlights the recursive means by which such data attempt to colonize and therefore control everyday life

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