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

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Data Colonialism: rethinking Big Data’s relation to the contemporary subject

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

O artigo “Data Colonialism: rethinking big data’s relation to the contemporary subject” posiciona que o fenômeno do big data deve ser compreendido em um contexto social global, e que este contexto é o colonialismo de dados, tomado aqui não como metáfora ou como continuação do colonialismo territorial, mas como uma nova forma específica de colonialismo.

“For what is missing in the insightful recent accounts of Big Data is a wider frame to make sense of the whole social process under way. That frame is colonialism, used here not as a mere metaphor,1 nor as an echo or simple continuation of historic forms of territorial colonialism,2 but to refer to a new form of colonialism distinctive of the 21st century: data colonialism.”

Uma primeira conceituação do que seria o colonialismo de dados para os autores é:

“Data colonialism combines the predatory extractive practices of historical colonialism with the abstract quantification methods of computing.”

Os autores consideram que, assim como a extração colonial gerou as condições necessárias para a emergência do capitalismo industrial, a extração de dados por meio do colonialismo propiciará uma nova etapa do capitalismo. Porém, como comentam os autores, para eles é mais importante resistir ao colonialismo de dados do que tentar prever esta nova etapa.

Sobre os dois polos de poder colonial sobre os dados e sobre a insuficiência da nomenclatura do “Sul Global”, os autores afirmam:

“Data colonialism involves not one pole of colonial power (‘the West’), but at least two: the USA and China. This complicates our notion of the geography of the Global South, a concept which until now helped situate resistance and disidentification along geographic divisions between former colonizers and colonized. Instead, the new data colonialism works both externally — on a global scale — and internally on its own home populations. The elites of data colonialism (think of Facebook) benefit from colonization in both dimensions, and North-South, East-West divisions no longer matter in the same way.”

Para os autores, uma lente possível de análise sobre a big data é a da apropriação de recursos:

“More helpful are approaches which see what is going on with data as a form of fundamental appropriation of resource (Greene and Joseph 2015; Thatcher et al. 2016, drawing on Harvey 2004) or extraction (Mezzadra and Neilson 2017). This appropriation is certainly complex. It is not simply a matter of harvesting a natural resource: first, life needs to be configured so as to generate such a resource (we come to the contribution of platforms later); second, data about one individual’s actions or properties at one moment needs to be combined with data about other actions, moments, and properties to generate valuable relations between data points (Arvidsson 2016; Thatcher et al. 2016, 995).” “(…) data colonialism, (…) appropriates life as raw material whether or not it is actually labor, or even labor-like.”

Sobre a função das plataformas neste modelo:

“The platform, we argue, produces the social for capital, that is, a form of ‘social’ that is ready for appropriation and exploitation for value as data, when combined with other data similarly appropriated.”

“In deploying the concept of data colonialism, our goal is not to make loose analogies to the content or form, let alone the physical violence, of historical colonialism. Instead, as indicated earlier, we seek to explore the parallels with historic colonialism’s function within the development of economies on a global scale, its normalization of resource appropriation, and its redefinition of social relations so that dispossession came to seem natural.”

→ A naturalização da captura dos dados

“The apparent naturalness of data colonialism’s appropriations relies also on a large amount of ideological work, just as did historic colonialism.”

“The principal actors in data colonialism can collectively be called the social quantification sector, corporations involved in capturing everyday social acts and translating them into quantifiable data which is analyzed and used for the generation of profit”

→ Modos de extração

“The vast reorganization of human life implied by data colonialism could not happen without a broader shift in social relations.”

“Platforms are a key means whereby the general domain of everyday life, much of it until now outside the formal scope of economic relations, can be caught within the net of marketization”

“Even if, under data colonialism, we are all destined to become data subjects — that is, parties to regular data relations — what this means for one person may be very different from what it means for another.”

Os autores concluem o artigo buscando modos de resistência ao colonialismo de dados.

“At this point, we can learn much by recalling the vision of the late Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano. To Quijano, the point was not merely to move past the colonial through the ‘postcolonial,’ but to challenge fundamentally colonialism’s legitimacy through ‘decolonial’ ways of thinking.”

“The practical starting-point for resistance to data colonialism is a vision that, until 20 years ago, would have been indisputable, but now, strangely, appears counterintuitive to many. This vision rejects the idea that the continuous collection of data from human beings is natural, let alone rational; and so rejects the idea that the results of data processing are a naturally occurring form of social knowledge, rather than a commercially motivated form of extraction that advances particular economic and/or governance interests. Rejecting data colonialism does not mean rejecting data collection and use in all its forms. But it does mean rejecting the form of resource appropriation and accompanying social order that most contemporary data practice represents. A useful first step is to name such practice as the colonial process that it surely is.”

Referências Interessantes:

• Arora, Payal. “The Bottom of the Data Pyramid: Big Data and the Global South.” International Journal of Communication, 10 (2016): 1681-1699.

• Cohen, Julie E. “The Biopolitical Public Domain: The Legal Construction of the Surveillance Economy.” Philosophy & Technology (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-017-0258-2.

• Gillespie, Tarleton. “The Politics of “Platforms.” New Media & Society 12, no. 3 (2010): 347-364.

• Gitelman, Lisa, ed. “Raw Data” is an Oxymoron. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013

• Harvey, David. “The “New” Imperialism: Accumulation by Dispossession.” Socialist Register 40 (2004): 63-87.

• Kitchin, Rob and Martin Dodge. Code/Space. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011.

• Lazzarato, Maurizio. Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity. Translated by Joshua David Jordan. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014.

• Milan, Stefania and Emiliano Treré. “Beyond Data Universalism: Towards Big Data from the South.” Television & New Media

• Quijano, Aníbal. “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality.” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2-3 (2007): 168-178.

• Thatcher, Jim, David O’Sullivan and Dillon Mahmoudi. “Data Colonialism Through Accumulation by Dispossession: New Metaphors for Daily Data”. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34, no. 6 (2017): 990-1006