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)
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