New metaphors for daily data
Download PDFThatcher, Jim, David O’Sullivan, and Dillon Mahmoudi. 2016. “Data Colonialism through Accumulation by Dispossession: New metaphors for daily data.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34 (6): 990-1006. doi:10.1177/0263775816633195
Abstract
In recent years, much has been written on ‘big data’ in both the popular and academic press. After the hubristic declaration of the ‘end of theory’ more nuanced arguments have emerged, suggesting that increasingly pervasive data collection and quantification may have significant implications for the social sciences, even if the social, scientific, political, and economic agendas behind big data are less new than they are often portrayed. Compared to the boosterish tone of much of its press, academic critiques of big data have been relatively muted, often focusing on the continued importance of more traditional forms of domain knowledge and expertise. Indeed, many academic responses to big data enthusiastically celebrate the availability of new data sources and the potential for new insights and perspectives they may enable. Undermining many of these critiques is a lack of attention to the role of technology in society, particularly with respect to the labor process, the continued extension of labor relations into previously private times and places, and the commoditization of more and more aspects of everyday life. In this article, we parse a variety of big data definitions to argue that it is only when individual datums by the million, billion, or more are linked together algorithmically that ‘big data’ emerges as a commodity. Such decisions do not occur in a vacuum but as part of an asymmetric power relationship in which individuals are dispossessed of the data they generate in their day-to-day lives. We argue that the asymmetry of this data capture process is a means of capitalist ‘accumulation by dispossession’ that colonizes and commodifies everyday life in ways previously impossible. Situating the promises of ‘big data’ within the utopian imaginaries of digital frontierism, we suggest processes of data colonialism are actually unfolding behind these utopic promises. Amid private corporate and academic excitement over new forms of data analysis and visualization, situating big data as a form of capitalist expropriation and dispossession stresses the urgent need for critical, theoretical understandings of data and society.
Summary
Big data is a colonial policy, but it is one in which, rather than opening the idealized markets of digital frontierism’s problematic imaginary, we have become subject to them.
The paper ends by flipping the internet’s frontier myth on its head. Early boosters like Rheingold saw the digital as open territory for pioneers to settle, and they cast “big money and big power” as an outside threat to keep out. We argue it went the other way: the lifeworld is the territory being colonized, and the colonizers are sensors, devices, and EULAs (end-user license agreements). This drives two conclusions. First, accumulation by dispossession isn’t a leftover from primitive accumulation. It’s an ongoing way capital holds off overproduction. Second, it now works by “corkscrewing” into the body and mind instead of pushing outward across space.
Big data serves as a ‘fix’ for capitalism’s inherent tendencies toward overaccumulation, not through a spatial expansion outwards, but by a rendering smooth of the rough surfaces of individuals’ lives as they become knowable as commodified representations of self.
Because the people collecting the data also design the algorithms that define what counts as data, big data is “profit-laden” from the start. Data colonialism describes how capital is already organizing everyday life, not a future risk. The paper calls itself one small piece of a larger political economy of geospatial data. That bigger project would need to trace how wealth is split among VCs, owners, and tech workers, and to account for spatial unevenness.