When data is capital: Datafication, accumulation, and extraction

tags

Value of Data

Notes

Data collection is driven by the perpetual cycle of capital accumulation, which in turn drives capital to construct and rely upon a universe in which everything is made of data

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many common practices of data accumulation should actually be understood in terms of data extraction

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Until recently, companies simply deleted data or chose not to collect it because paying for storage did not seem like a good investment

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Now, though, companies are clamouring to collect data – as much as they can, wherever they can

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This article contributes to the study of data within contemporary capitalism by analysing data as a form of capital. The existing literature on the social, political and economic dimensions of data treats data as a com- modity

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What does it mean to see the world in a way that asserts everything is data? This is not just a neutral observation about the nature or substance of the world. Such statements do not merely reveal or reflect the world. They order and construct the world

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data- fication takes shape as a political economic regime driven by the logic of perpetual (data) capital accumu- lation and circulation

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Data mining is a misleading name; a more apt term would be data manufacturing. Data is not out there waiting to be discovered as if it already exists in the world like crude oil and raw ore (Gitelman, 2013). Data is a recorded abstraction of the world created and valorised by people using technology.

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(1) data is valuable and value-creating

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(2) data collection has a pervasive, powerful influence over how businesses and govern- ments behave

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(3) data systems are rife with relations of inequity, extraction, and exploitation

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The goal of transforming everything into data and the search for new sources of data echoes imperialist modes of accumulation

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Data capital is more than knowledge about the world, it is discrete bits of information that are digitally recorded, machine processable, easily agglomerated, and highly mobile

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The capitalist is not concerned with the immediate use of a data point or with any single collection, but rather the unceasing flow of data-creating. This point is illustrated by the fact that data is very often collected without specific uses in mind

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‘It does not matter that the amounts [of data] collected may vastly exceed a firm’s imaginative reach or analytic grasp. The assumption is that it will eventually be useful, i.e. valuable’

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The shift towards data capital takes advantage of the ideological and regulatory groundwork that has been laid since at least the 1980s to create a political eco- nomic landscape conducive to finance capitalism (Konczal and Abernathy, 2015). Under neoliberal gov- ernance, financial capital is treated as if it exists in transnational space beyond borders and governance (Major, 2012). The same attitudes are directly applied to data capital

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Political consultants analyse data to decide who is susceptible to certain kinds of messaging and influence.

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Far from being in compe- tition with each other, Wall Street and Silicon Valley are converging around data capital

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engineer overseeing the traffic patterns of a city so they can manage how millions of people move through space

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police depart- ments use ‘predictive’ systems to create ‘heat lists’ and ‘hot spots’

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‘Big Data, like Soylent Green, is made of people.’

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EULAs are designed to prevent even the most enterprising person from being informed of the binding terms and conditions. They are long, dense legal documents. One study concluded it would take 76 days, working for 8 hours a day, to read the privacy policies a person typically encounters in a year

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EULAs are the ideal-type of pro forma ‘consent,’ which may be better-termed acquiescence

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what is the difference between the compensation for data producers and the value obtained by data capitalists?

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