By Gordon Hull
In a new paper in Big Data and Society, Jathan Sadowski argues for a shift in how we conceive data. Typically, it’s viewed as a commodity. Better, Sadowski argues, to view it as capital. Following Marx (who offers a basic formula for capital) and Bourdieu (who extends it to cultural and social capital), Sadowski proposes: “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. Like social and cultural capital, data capital is convertible, in certain conditions, to economic capital” (4) The importance of the formulation is that it allows us to understand why companies spend all their time collecting data even for which they have no planned use: data is subject to the logic of capital accumulation. Like money, data becomes something the accumulation of which is its own object. Sadowski: “the imperative, then, is to constantly collect and circulate data by producing commodities that create more data and building infrastructure to manage data. The stream of data must keep flowing and growing.” (4) That is, “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.” (4)
There is a lot worth thinking about in the paper; here I want to focus on one narrow point. Capital operates according to two logics, depending on one’s viewpoint. Commodity logic – the one that workers are stuck with – is a cycle of C-M-C, where commodities are traded for money, which is then used to buy more commodities. The capitalist inverts the formula, and uses the commodity as a means for more money: M-C-M’, where M’ represents a larger sum than M.
From the point of view of the capitalist, this system is not ideal because it requires a substantial inefficiency in the conversion of money and commodities back and forth. For example, if I buy a house to flip, there are not only sunk costs in maintaining and repairing the house (these can perhaps be viewed as part of the expense for the commodity) but also transaction costs involved in the purchase and sale. So too, if I spend my money on commodified wage labor, I have to spend a certain amount of extra money hiring and firing, as well as a certain amount on the upkeep of the worker. This is why wages are low, but a much better system would look like this: M-M’. In other words, money would effectively be self-valorizing. Hence the attraction of finance capital, which allows money loaned to directly turn into more money in the form of interest or other investment income.
Another way to try to move toward self-valorization would be to try to reduce the amount of capital that is lost to pure use value in the form of consumption. The trick is to have consumption appear as a form of production. As Foucault notes in Birth of Biopolitics, this is part of the genius of human capital theory’s description of homo economicus. As Foucault puts it of Becker:
“The man of consumption, insofar as he consumes, is a producer. What does he produce? Well, quite simply, he produces his own satisfaction. And we should think of consumption as an enterprise activity by which the individual, precisely on the basis of the capital he has at his disposal, will produce something that will be his own satisfaction” (BB 226).
In this way, pretty much all activity can be described as M-C-M’. For example, to follow Becker, consider education. I spend money (tuition) to get a degree (commodity) which then lets me earn more money. Hence both the demotion of education to a commodity and the near universal ability to render the circulation of money and commodities as M-C-M’ in addition to C-M-C.
This ability to always redescribe C-M-C as M-C-M’ is the key to avoiding loss in the system induced by consumption because it means that there is never any such thing as pure consumption. At the very least, such pure consumption becomes radically suspect. This is why taking classes that don’t lead to a job is considered bad. From the point of view of capital, it’s like burning money.
It seems to me that Sadowski has shown that the logic of data capital is an aspect of this process of turning consumption into production. One of his best examples is the datafication of refrigerators:
“The regular refrigerator is a passive object: it just keeps food cold. The smart refrigerator is an active object: it keeps food cold, but it also keeps track of things like your favourite brands, what foods you eat at what times, and when your food is almost out or expired. The smart refrigerator can then take that data and use it, for example, to send targeted advertisements, recommend sponsored recipes, monitor your dietary intake, and purchase replacement food from the grocery store.” (6-7; I’m omitting the part about state interest in the data for today)
Call if fridge capital: in being used/consumed, the fridge is producing data. Thus, “rather than existing only as a commodity to be sold, a smart device becomes (perhaps primarily) a means of producing data “ (7). In other words, the commodity becomes a source of data production. Since data production is itself a form of capital, commodity use is no longer pure consumption. It’s an investment that generates future value – more data, which is convertible into more money. In that sense, datafication and data as capital serve to pry apart the black box that is the intervening ‘C’ in M-C-M’, enabling it to increasingly disappear as a commodity with use value, and instead appear as a self-valorizing bit of exchange value.
There’s at least three implications. First, the datafication of workers follows automatically. It’s not just that the workers ought to be controlled to maximize productivity; it’s that workers can generate data, which means that they generate not just surplus value but surplus data. Second, this helps to explain the complete subsumption of society by capital (as the autonomists would have it), the emergence of a social order where all social relations are determined by capital. Here, since all acts of consumption can be redescribed as M-C-M’, literally all of life can be viewed as the circulation and valorization of capital. You don’t need a commodity; you just need to be doing something. Finally, Sadowski is right to emphasize that data capital is continuous with, and not disruptive of, the logic of financialization. This is because both of them work to move M-C-M’ to M-M’ by making the commodity directly self-valorizing.
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