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:
“The data analytics industry emphasizes a particular vision of the social world so as to present data analytics as the only real solution. The power of data might well be located in what those data are used to reveal, but behind this power is an industry of activity working to spread those analytics and the optic horizons of the data gaze” (15)
In short, to understand the social life of data, we need to understand the social construction of data as a technique of value extraction. To that end, Beer takes a look at how analytics companies market themselves. He then produces a set of attributes of what he calls the “data imaginary.” These are how analytics are presented: it is (1) speedy, in the sense that faster data is better, in line with “broader cultural notions of cultural speed-up and acceleration” (23); (2) accessible such that “knowledge can be gleaned without any real technical know-how” (23); (3) revealing of some sort of untapped potential and hidden features; (4) panoramic in the sense of all-seeing; (5) prophetic in the sense data analytics are said to “open up a world in which it is possible to anticipate what will happen, and respond accordingly” (27); and (6) smart: “analytics are not passive, rather they are presented as being intelligent and active devices that are able to learn” (29).
The taxonomy is productive and helpful (and I’m not anywhere near finished with the book), but I’d like to dwell a little on (3) and (4), the ones around visibility, because here I think there’s a meaningful thread to be teased out about the amenability of data to proprietization.
Citing Foucault on the clinical gaze as “discover[ing] the secrets” of the visible, Beer proposes that:
“This data gaze is similarly about creating or extracting the hidden features. In the case of the data gaze, the focus is on locating the secrets of value. The images are masses of wasted unused data that could be potentially lucrative. The analytics packages and solutions are said to provide opportunities to salvage this unused data waste” (25).
I will say more about visibility in a later post, but for now, note the amenability of this to a Lockean framing – which helps with a narrative of deserved property. For Locke, as is well-known, a property claim arises when someone “mixes” their labor into a raw material. There’s huge debates about what that means, but the outcome is that he says that people who work to make stuff deserve, in a natural law sense, property rights over whatever it is that they’ve made. Doing this is quite literally why you were put here on this earth: God gave the earth for “the use of the industrious and rational – and labor was to be his title to it – not to the fancy or covetousness of the quarrelsome and contentious” (II, 34). Lockean labor is a popular non-utilitarian justification for intellectual property, suggesting its potential applicability to contexts other than 17th century land (my thoughts on that topic are here, as well as a long argument about why you can apply Locke to intangible property; I also claim that the Lockean provisos have more force than commonly believed).
An immediate problem for the Lockean narrative is of course that it construes whatever is out there as unowned, available for claiming. This required, in Locke’s case, coming up with a strategy to pretend that Native Americans had no legitimate claim to the land they’d been living on. He did it by claiming that they wasted that land:
“There cannot be a clearer demonstration of any thing, than several nations of the Americans are of this, who are rich in land, and poor in all the comforts of life; whom nature having furnished as liberally as any other people, with the materials of plenty, i. e. a fruitful soil, apt to produce in abundance, what might serve for food, raiment, and delight; yet for want of improving it by labour, have not one hundredth part of the conveniencies we enjoy: and a king of a large and fruitful territory there, feeds, lodges, and is clad worse than a day-labourer in England” (II, 41).
The next part is worse, where he notes that unimproved land is called “waste” (II,43) and underlines that labor eliminates waste:
“An acre of land, that bears here twenty bushels of wheat, and another in America, which, with the same husbandry, would do the like, are, without doubt, of the same natural intrinsic value: but yet the benefit mankind receives from the one in a year, is worth 5 l. and from the other possibly not worth a penny, if all the profit an Indian received from it were to be valued, and sold here; at least, I may truly say, not one thousandth. It is labour then which puts the greatest part of value upon land, without which it would scarcely be worth any thing: it is to that we owe the greatest part of all its useful products; for all that the straw, bran, bread, of that acre of wheat, is more worth than the product of an acre of as good land, which lies waste, is all the effect of labour (II, 43)
The language of waste, when applied to the data context, suggests two things: first, you aren’t doing anything with your data, which means that you lose title to it if somebody else comes along who will. Second, it suggests that whoever makes something of value out of raw data deserves to own that value. And this is precisely the rhetorical strategy used by the data industry to explain why we don’t deserve privacy, and why we should pay lots of money for their products. And what does their analytic software do? Why it works in just the sort of purposive , value-creating way that Locke endorses. For Locke, human knowledge might be increased if humanity might “employ all that industry and labour of thought, in improving the means of discovering truth” that had been expended on production of falsehood (Essay 4.3.6).
For data? Again, Beer: “the analytics are not passive, rather they are presented as being intelligent and active devices that are able to learn, adapt and develop in the insights that they produce” (29) and “these thinking technologies are seen to find and locate value in a way that the human alone is unable to do” (30). Curating and processing data is like farming, or mining, as it is literally referred to. That is, indeed, the process of reasoning, which is what we’ve invented these nifty machines to do with us: “all reasoning is search, and casting about, and requires pains and application” (Essay 1.1.10).
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