One of the standard talking points about data gets summed up in the “data imperative:” that the drive to accumulate data seems insatiable, and that firms will pursue accumulating it well beyond and definable economic end. There’s a lot of literature on why this might be; I’ve tended to approach the question with the resources of Marx in hand: data is amenable to commodification, and tends to function as a form of primitive accumulation. One might also argue that data functions as a form of capital. Undoubtedly there is a case of overdetermination here, and trying to disentangle the reasons why the universe of data (broadly conceived) so readily interacts with capital is worth further reflection.
In that regard, I’ve been reading David Beer’s excellent new Data Gaze, which looks to develop an understanding of “how data are seen,” with attention to “the implicit limits and parameters that are being set into data before or whilst they are utilized” (6). In other words, we need to think about what data is, which is to say (following the same sort of path as the Leonelli paper I discussed, but from a different angle), we need to know what data does. And what data is/does is heavily influenced by how it’s presented in the marketing and other apparatuses of the data industry. “Data analytics are almost always part of the operation of capitalism and should be seen through the lens of political economy” (14). Following Foucault’s lead about the “clinical gaze” and how it developed institutionally, Beer proposes of the “data gaze” that:
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