In a nutshell: Nick Couldry on Data colonialism

something big is going on with data data is not just big in terms of volume as reflected in the phrase big data something transformative is happening with data now we've known this since at least the revelations that Edward Snowden in summer 2013 the real story of those revelations was not the one emphasized in the media about the surveillance by NSA and GCHQ of ordinary and sometimes as in the case of President Merkel less ordinary citizens the real story was how much data corporations were already collecting from us from which governments simply sought to benefit a story about the public private surveillance partnership as US security expert Bruce Schneier calls it and in this lecture I want to look deeper into what's going on with data and I'll be drawing on my forthcoming book with a Mexican US scholar Ulysses Matias called the costs of connection now the core point of our book is that what's happening today in digital societies where data harvesting seems such a natural such a basic feature of everyday life is not just a development or even a new phase of capitalism as many writers have claimed it's something even bigger it's a genuinely new phase of colonialism that will in time provide the fuel for a later stage of capitalism whose full shape we cannot predict yet and this is what we start to see if we shift the time scale from the past 30 to 40 years in which for sure capitalism has become embedded into evermore sectors of daily life to the past 500 years over which the relations of capitalism to colonialism have played out we're thinking about colonialism here in terms of its fundamental historical function as the appropriation of resources on a vast scale in 1500 and for the next 400 years it was territory that was acquired it was the resources of the land and of course the bodies for a long time those of slaves needed to extract value from those resources today the resources being appropriated are us human life in all its depth extracted as value through the medium of data but Ulysses and I when we talk about data colonialism we do not mean it as a metaphor we are claiming instead that what is going on with data today represents potentially as far-reaching an appropriation of resources as the conquest of gold and territory in historic colonialism a land grab in digital territory that is likely to have as far-reaching implications as historical colonialism did a colonial reality not a metaphor which we are living and which to which we need to wake up think of the terms of service to which we sign up every time we install an app every time we join a platform that's my firm by the way in normal times I don't mean the few days after the Cambridge analytical scandal broke in normal times no one reads the terms we just click accept because we want to get on and use the app or the platform sometimes our acceptance is just assumed no questions asked though the gdpr has tried to disrupt that assumption sometimes our employer encourages us to use a Fitbit to monitor our health which requires us to accept fitbit's terms and conditions whether we like them or not or we may be required to accept terms and conditions of data extraction by an insurer or by the supplier of a smart appliance in our home but by that act of acceptance actual or implied we enter into a whole set of what Ulysses and I call data relations that unfold in ways we understand only very partly it sometimes seems a mystery how we can accept so much with so little resistance but let's think historically through a colonial lens let's think back to a document used in the early days of the Spanish conquest of Latin America called the recurring mental or Demand almost exactly 500 years ago the document was drafted in 1513 at the Spanish court conquistadors were right up to a mile or two outside a village whose gold they wanted and read out this document in the middle of the night in Spanish a language they knew the locals did not understand here's a little of it but if you do not submit I accept I certify to you that with the help of God we shall powerfully enter into your country and shall make war against you in all ways and manners that we can and so subject you to the yoke and obedience of the church and of their Highnesses we shall take away your goods and shall do you all the mischief and damage that we can the next morning they will ride into the village and take the gold that they wanted using whatever violence they needed to do so and usually more now you'll notice immediately a difference that we really do click accept and so no violence is needed to take our gold as we use the platform or app whose terms appear to us I'll come back to why that is in a moment but first let's try to map more precisely the key features of historic colonialism onto data colonialism today the fundamental moves and historic function of original colonialism can be understood in terms of four levels the appropriation of resource the creation of new social relations to stabilize that appropriation the extreme concentration of wealth that flowed from that appropriation and finally the ideologies that we use to tell a different story of what was going on most notoriously the ideology of civilization and we see exactly these same four levels at work with data colonialism first there is the appropriation of resources I've said human life itself human experience and action become a direct input to capital this is often told to us as a cliche the idea that it's just worthless human exhaust that is taken something just naturally there anyway for the taking which conveniently forgets all the mechanisms that are needed to gather format extract and process this supposedly natural resource second social relations are being colonized by data processes as all social relations increasingly take the form of data relations that maximize data extraction for value third the economic value that's extracted is it hugely concentrated in the vast wealth of new colonial corporations what Ulysses and I call the social quantification sector Facebook Google Amazon and so on and finally there are new colonial ideologies that seek to disguise what is going on not the idea of civilization exactly yet but the idea that we must always stay connected that everything must be put into data form so that for example we can get more personalized messages and products and the idea that all of this including the tracking is somehow inevitable so we can see all four dimensions of historic colonialism at work in our life with data today but there's one crucial difference and like in 1500 when colonialism emerged without the background of two or three centuries of capitalism today's new colonialism builds on top of the already existing social order of capitalism which is why it does not generally need violence to be effective let's not suppose however that this massive transformation of social knowledge will play out equally for everyone as important research by Virginia Eubanks and others has shown it is populations who are already vulnerable and poor that are most likely to be harmed by hidden data-driven judgments made against them by government departments service suppliers credit raters insurers and so on by the same token these same people are the least likely to be able to resist and cost money to mount a legal claim and when they look for work the low paid work that they can get is likely to come with the compulsion to accept still more surveillance than is normal in higher status world a social world than is emerging where vulnerability to forced acceptance of continuous surveillance is likely to become a leading dimension of inequality is there a risk but in this critique we are idealizing the past quietly when of course populations were victimized stereotyped excluded silently from resources I don't think so provided we are precise about what is in danger of dropping out of our picture of the social world as this new form of social knowledge installs itself and there are at least three answers to that question first and most directly we are in danger of losing hold of those older models of social knowledge and the categories that they generated for example the idea of poverty as a socially caused phenomenon that can only be understood by attention to all the socio-economic factors that are statistically correlated with it as Miriam for card an earlier speaker in this lecture series wrote all the rationales for giving the poor more favorable terms because they were poor that is socially disadvantaged in ways we understood have now in America largely been replaced with the idea that the terms of credit ought to depend solely on ones prior credit related behavior that is on the risks those people posed within commercial risk systems as tract of course by impersonal algorithms second we risk losing hold of older forms of expertise and judgment that are not respected by the new model of social knowledge so American legal theorists who studied algorithmic processes in local governments and the courts conclude that opaque algorithms risk as they put it hollowing out the decision-making capacity of public servants why by creating a distance between their decisions and the evidence gathering on which those decisions still have to rely third perhaps most dangerous of all we risk all of us losing the habit of expecting that our knowledge of the world around us should be grounded in what people say in how people not machines actually interpret the world that is it should be grounded in our voices and because it is only that view of the social world that makes it rational to think democracy is worth striving for we may lose touch with the value of democracy itself at least as an everyday reality something we know there's no accident therefore that in a country which is not a democracy China huge emphasis is being placed on gaining global leadership of artificial intelligence by 2030 so perhaps we should take seriously Zhu Bo a member of China's Academy of military science when he proposed in the Financial Times this September that quotes the Road to prosperity no longer runs only through liberal democracy it may also be no accident that there are links reported by some journalists between leading US figures associated with the exploitation of artificial intelligence such as Peter Thiel the founder of Palantir and extreme right-wing thinkers who've abandoned or loyalty to democracy there may be counter examples to of course such as estonia's much cited vision for a digital society where it's the state that guarantees this management of personal data whose ownership but perhaps not control remains with the individual but the Estonian vision only covers the individuals relations with the state it doesn't cover the wider market for data which is a feature of the corporate sector in Estonia as in most other places and finally as an academic I must acknowledge the Social Sciences strange complicity today in these developments I mean the new research from behavioral economics to cultural theory which is often more interested in challenging even mocking the idea of the rational human subject than defending it not many steps from this to the frequent claim of marketers through artificial intelligence to know their customers better than they know themselves so the message that I want to leave you with tonight is this that the digital social world is being reconstructed all around us not through an evil conspiracy but through a practical combination on the ground of a new corporate rationality and the changes that this rationality encourages and often compels in how we live our daily lives we are complicit in this transformation until we choose not to be is this the future for digital society that we had imagined and that we actually want if not then we must start to imagine a different future and this is not easy I agree with historian Yuval Harare who wrote recently that opposing opposing the ideology of data ISM is quotes not only the greatest scientific challenge of the 21st century but also the most urgent political and economic project the challenge in fact is even greater because the social transformation as I brought out that's going on that's driving it is largely hidden it risks to quote one of my favorite German authors WG is a bold it risks becoming a silent catastrophe that occurs almost unperceived so now is the time for our eyes to be wide open about what is going on with data and that is why Ulysses and I have written our book building on much great work by many other writers it is indeed a time to work and think together to face these profound challenges but time is short thank you for listening [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Alexander von Humboldt Institut für Internet und Gesellschaft

Views: 12,799

Keywords: digital society, Nick Couldry, Data

Id: 5tcK-XIMQqE

Length: 16min 46sec (1006 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 04 2019