That inequality lies at the heart of what we call “data colonialism”

May 7, 2024 1:26 AM

"The term might be unsettling, but we believe it is appropriate. Pick up any business textbook and you will never see the history of the past thirty years described this way. A title like Thomas Davenport’s Big Data at Work spends more than two hundred pages celebrating the continuous extraction of data from every aspect of the contemporary workplace, without once mentioning the implications for those workers. EdTech platforms and the tech giants like Microsoft that service them talk endlessly about the personalisation of the educational experience, without ever noting the huge informational power that accrues to them in the process." (Today’s colonial “data grab” is deepening global inequalities, LSE)

The book: Data Grab - The new Colonialism of Big Tech and how to fight back (Penguin)

Interview with the authors: Q and A with Nick Couldry and Ulises A Mejias on Data Grab

posted by kmt (25 comments total)

Digital privacy is a real issue, but I'm not sure I'm convinced on the framing here after reading the article. Our data is not a finite resource that either we own or someone else owns; if it's land at all, it's a complicated multidimensional realm that multiple people have layered claims over.

Abuse of data not being colonialism is the flipside to the argument for piracy - piracy isn't as bad as theft, ethically, because piracy doesn't prevent someone from selling the original or physically displace an object.

Things can be bad without being directly linked to hot button issues!
posted by LSK at 1:45 AM on May 7 [14 favorites]

It's a metaphor/analogy that might break if you pull too hard, but even still, thinking of mass data collection and its abuses as a form of colonialism might help repersonalize the issue, and recenter it on the people who provide the raw material, rather than the (alleged) benefits that will (supposedly) trickle back down
posted by chavenet at 2:28 AM on May 7 [5 favorites]

As I touched on here, ownership is a terrible analogy for data, largely because copying data costs little.

We've all these "self sovereign identity" fools who think everything is fine because they could deploy or use a non-standard identity provider, via OIDC or some DID scheme. Ignoring internal users like stackexchange, when did you last see an OIDC login other than Google, Apple, Facebook, or Github?

We've a worse technical problem here too: they'd still track you using your OIDC or whartever, even if they respected it.

As Byran Ford says we need logins that prove uniqueness within some context, including the domain name being visited, so that they permit blacklisting, but remain unlinkable across contexts, certianly accross domain names. I optimized the relevant cryptography btw. Byran Ford envisioned these anonymous logins being authorized by some parallel anarchist meetings that perform little cryptographic ceremonies. It's easier if governments simply issue the identities though.
posted by jeffburdges at 3:28 AM on May 7 [5 favorites]

I’m not sure that colonialism as a metaphor is so far off the mark. What’s to stop an entity from encircling data, transforming it in some way, then erecting barriers to its use by others? Isn’t this one of the things that’s terrible about LLMs? Hoover up a bunch of data, refuse to give any kind of detail about what it was, serve back a bunch of informational Soylent, presumably eventually charge a lot of money for the privilege?
posted by eirias at 4:55 AM on May 7 [9 favorites]

because piracy doesn't prevent someone from selling the original or physically displace an object.

this is not actually the main reason why piracy is not bad. piracy is sometimes non-bad because of who is doing it and in what context. kind of like how actual piracy is bad in certain respects (some of the violence committed by actual pirates at sea was/is bad, and many pirates were basically just the erik prince/yevgeny prigozhins of the age of sail, whose position in the relevant power structures did not change the moral calculus in a way that justifies armed robbery on the high seas) but not necessarily in others. similarly, "IP" piracy is non-bad in many situations where it would be bad if committed by differently-positioned actors, the same way that looting and theft by an army is correctly considered a war crime, while plenty of other instances of looting and theft are ethically justified, or even ethically obligatory, even though they prevent commerce and physically displace objects.
posted by busted_crayons at 5:00 AM on May 7 [6 favorites]

also i feel like enclosure (as in enclosure of the commons) has appeared plenty of times as a metaphor in this sort of context, so exploitation colonialism doesn't seem to me to be that strange as a metaphor, either; an analogy to settler colonialism seems like more of a reach but i am not sure that's being made (i am still reading TFAs).

also when it comes to edtech platforms specifically, i'm not too bothered if we take our cues from uncle ho or ned ludd whilst destroying them.
posted by busted_crayons at 5:09 AM on May 7 [4 favorites]

Things can be bad without being directly linked to hot button issues!

First day on the Internet, is it?
posted by star gentle uterus at 6:42 AM on May 7 [3 favorites]

Goddamn I hate “everything is colonialism” claim. Who is the metropole? Who is the colony? Who are the settlers? Who are the co-opted elites? Where is the VIOLENCE? Nice way to market an argument but I can’t take it seriously.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 7:14 AM on May 7 [6 favorites]

Ctrl-F’ing “Henrietta Lacks” and HeLa brings up zero. I get that this is just a short piece about their book; I'd hope Lacks is at least mentioned in the book itself, as “land grab” is a metaphor that might apply to her too—tech elites making use of something extracted without consent, etc. (Ruha Benjamin, one of the writers they cite here, has been a keynote speaker at the Henrietta Lacks Memorial Lecture series.)
posted by miles per flower at 7:20 AM on May 7 [7 favorites]

IMO, data collection is more like a uranium mine in 1939 or so. Everybody knows that having access to it is good - but they are not not quite sure for what yet.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:39 AM on May 7 [2 favorites]

Uh, no? We do know what good it is for. I’ve worked on a variety of projects using data collected by companies for all sorts of purposes. There’s a lot of people in a lot of companies whose whole purpose is to use data for business purposes.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 8:45 AM on May 7 [2 favorites]

it's not particularly useful to quibble about the pedantics of utilizing 'colonialism' as an idiom. biopower, the idea of institutional control of our very body functions, is already something that has historically been both described as and utilized as a framework to describe colonialism

the control, manipulation, and extraction of data is an extension of this that's already in use to both enact colonial policies while also being used by propaganda/cultural arms of Israel to shape American viewpoints and culture

the book itself explicitly uses post-colonial concepts laid out by the likes of Edward Said like coloniality. the article itself notes

"We try to make sense of the parallels between the earlier stages of colonialism and today’s digital world. Doing so also helps us understand the ways in which the racial inequalities that are the legacy of earlier stages of colonialism go on being reproduced in the supposedly scientific guise of algorithmic data and AI processing today. [...] Indeed, as earlier in history, the first step towards resisting this vast and all-encompassing social order is to name it for what is. Not just the latest improvement in capitalist techniques, but a new stage of colonialism’s ongoing appropriation of the world’s resources for the benefit of a few."

this is a good project with a good name worth exploring more about. it's a shame we're still stuck on pedantics
posted by paimapi at 9:21 AM on May 7 [7 favorites]

I did not realize the framing was in any way controversial

This framing existed well over 30 years ago, when I first started coming across it

the colonization project absolutely requires a level of acquiescence and they can't brutally force everyone (yet) so it's quite handy to convince a percentage of people to either not pay attention, or buy into it. the rest is just proximity
posted by elkevelvet at 9:30 AM on May 7 [3 favorites]

Said’s entire work on colonialism was famously—-and intentionally—-not about the colonized but about how the colonizer’s view of the colonized basically mirrored the fears and anxieties and structures of knowledge of metropolitan culture.

Also the idea that in order to resist colonialism in order to name it “as earlier in history” is a weird assertion—-colonialism was resisted and contested initially as any political unit would resist another that threatens its interests. Potentially colonized subjects would resist or co opt or aid colonialism whenever they saw fit

Also can someone enlighten me to what “algorithmic data” is?
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 9:31 AM on May 7 [3 favorites]

Uh, no? We do know what good it is for. I’ve worked on a variety of projects using data collected by companies for all sorts of purposes. There’s a lot of people in a lot of companies whose whole purpose is to use data for business purposes.

Sure people collect it, but any actual assessment of personal data constantly finds it's currently worthless. Generic marketing plans and extremely aggregated data work just as well as extremely personalized data. If it was worth anything, then some company would have literally broken advertising using it.

Also 'use data' is far too generic. People have 'used data' for business since math was created.
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:49 AM on May 7

There are so many other use cases aside from advertising.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 9:51 AM on May 7

Until you understand how your data is used, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
posted by 1024 at 11:08 AM on May 7 [2 favorites]

I expect to be policed by the trail my activities leave in the data -- when it's convenient for law to "bind but not protect" me.
posted by k3ninho at 11:10 AM on May 7 [4 favorites]

Sure people collect it, but any actual assessment of personal data constantly finds it's currently worthless. Generic marketing plans and extremely aggregated data work just as well as extremely personalized data. If it was worth anything, then some company would have literally broken advertising using it.

This is extremely confusing logic. Can you explain how this isn't a tautology?
posted by RonButNotStupid at 11:20 AM on May 7

It’s also completely false. Personal data is much more useful, and can be fairer, than data aggregated to a much higher level.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 11:58 AM on May 7 [1 favorite]

enclosure

This is the word I was looking for in this discussion, seems like a decent enough metaphor for when information that always existed in some sense but belonged to nobody becomes data that belongs to somebody. Although it’s true that per LSK the originator of the data is not always denied its use (though in some cases platforms do try).
posted by atoxyl at 12:15 PM on May 7 [3 favorites]

I've always like the pollution analogy: If google, facebook, etc have your data then they'll screw more people like you.
posted by jeffburdges at 3:12 PM on May 7 [1 favorite]

So, looks like Nick Couldry also wrote the intro to a book I recently found and got a physical copy of just yesterday:

Resisting Data Colonialism – A Practical Intervention.
posted by ursus_comiter at 9:58 PM on May 7 [1 favorite]

Copied from book, "Sam Altman ceo of open AI, believes that the opportunity to solve humanity's problems with Artificial Intelligence is so appealing that it is worth the risk of destroying the world as we know it. In other words, if AI ends up massively disrupting social values and institutions, as many experts claim could happen, Altman thinks it will be worth paying this price because of the problems AI will solve in the process. But others are not so sure this is a good bargain, which is why they are asking questions about where Big Techs new power to determine what is relevant, normal, acceptable or true is heading."
Hohum
posted by Narrative_Historian at 3:44 AM on May 8 [1 favorite]

We've little evidence for AI solving major problems yet. It's helped solve minor problems, like in drug discovery.

Advertising AIs could maybe become so good they could be flipped to turn people against meat, cars, buying shit, etc, but more likely they'd make everything else.

AI spam & deception could maybe destroy our trust in all media, thus accelerating our civilization's collapse. Arguably this helps humanity survive, but I want roughly our current level of techniology to survive.

Ais managing fusion reactors made headlines recently, but increased energy would worsen humanty's real problems, not solve them.
posted by jeffburdges at 9:25 AM on May 8