Data Politics

Worlds, Subjects, Rights

Didier Bigo, Engin Isin, Evelyn Ruppert, Didier Bigo, Engin Isin, Evelyn Ruppert

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138053250
• eBook ISBN: 9781351682572
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Data has become a social and political issue because of its capacity to reconfigure relationships between states, subjects, and citizens. This book explores how data has acquired such an important capacity and examines how critical interventions in its uses in both theory and practice are possible.

Data and politics are now inseparable: data is not only shaping our social relations, preferences and life chances but our very democracies. Expert international contributors consider political questions about data and the ways it provokes subjects to govern themselves by making rights claims. Concerned with the things (infrastructures of servers, devices, and cables) and language (code, programming, and algorithms) that make up cyberspace, this book demonstrates that without understanding these conditions of possibility it is impossible to intervene in or to shape data politics.

Aimed at academics and postgraduate students interested in political aspects of data, this volume will also be of interest to experts in the fields of internet studies, international studies, Big Data, digital social sciences and humanities. The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.routledge.com/Data-Politics-Worlds-Subjects-Rights/Bigo-Isin-Ruppert/p/book/9781138053267, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

1

DATA POLITICS¹

Didier Bigo, Engin Isin, and Evelyn Ruppert

Introduction

In 1983, Ian Hacking (2015) described the period between 1820 and 1840 as the “avalanche of printed numbers” in Europe and America. Hacking was reflecting on Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics that targeted “population” with its own characteristics as an object of government in the nineteenth century. This invention was related to developments not least the birth of a science – statistics, Hacking’s primary concern – but also associated sciences such as demography and probability, and data production practices such as the census and administrative registers. Hacking emphatically characterised that as the period when the “statistical study of populations comes to amass gigantic quantities of data” (2015, 280).

As Hacking was identifying “gigantic quantities of data” a new term was rapidly becoming popular in Euro-American languages: “personal computer”. The invention of large-scale data processing machines following the Second World War was giving way to the miniaturisation of both processors and components of a computer – storage, graphics, controllers, and cooling. By the late 1980s a personal computer could already store and process all the “gigantic data” collected about populations between 1820 and 1840. This would have been truly wondrous to William Farr (1807–1883), a compiler of abstracts for the newly-founded (1836) Office of the Registrar-General of England and Wales who remained in office for 40 years (2015, 284). Hacking recounts that it was Farr who pirated a Swedish computing machine with more than 5,000 moving parts for use in the Office of the Registrar-General (Hacking 2015, 291). Two centuries later, a hand-held device could store and process such gigantic data.

Although the contemporary period has been described as the era of data revolution (Kitchin 2014, Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier 2013), we insist that it be placed in a longer history. The personal computer of the 1980s morphed into a ubiquitous device of the twenty-first century, became connected with other devices through the Internet (a word born in 1980), converged storing and processing of data with sharing, led to the invention of protocols for collecting, representing, and sharing of data, and generated not only an Internet of people but also of things. Now, the amount of data generated and collected from these devices and the interests, authorities, and expertise required to render them useful make the data revolution of the 1820s appear rather miniscule but we need to understand the present as part of a broader historical transformation.

When Edward Snowden, a security operative working for the CIA, walked out of his office for the last time in 2013 (thereafter he became an exile), to reveal that national security organisations had been “harvesting” and “mining” gigantic masses of data generated by devices, he was carrying a small storage device capable of holding thousands times more data than was amassed between 1820 and 1840 (Bauman et al. 2014, Lyon 2014, Toxen 2014). His act revealed not only the truly enormous quantities of data that have been amassed from devices about those who use them and their interconnections and communications but also the varieties of analytical and algorithmic technologies invented to analyse and interpret them. The question now is how to place the 1980–2020 period within a broader historical transformation?

This book attempts to step back from these developments to position them within a broad historical-sociological perspective to articulate an international political sociology of data politics. We offer it not to express awe in contemporary technological developments but draw attention to social and political practices and arrangements that made them possible. Unlike many interpreters, Hacking understood Foucault’s work as involving different histories of life, labour, and language and argued that Foucault provides both short and long histories of life (Hacking 2015, 279). He saw Foucault’s distinction between body politics (discipline) and biopolitics (regulation) as different perspectives on the same series:

There is a longer and a shorter story of biopolitics. The longer story gradually assumes a definite form in the mid-eighteenth century, and it continues today. Whereas Foucault’s early books talked of sharp transformations, his research on sexuality directs itself not to mutation and revolution but to evolution in the longer term. There is no inconsistency in this: the world knows both revolution and evolution.

(Hacking 2015, 281)

The sharp change that Hacking detects in 1820–1840, he argued, belongs to the longer story of biopolitics. Moreover, he also admitted that 1820 and 1840 are arbitrary dates and more precisely these should be 1839 and 1848. Why? The gigantic accumulation of numbers actually bracketed two European political revolutions:

It represented an overt political response by the state. Find out more about your citizens, cried the conservative enthusiasts, and you will ameliorate their conditions, diminish their restlessness, and strengthen their character. Statistics, in that period, was called moral science: its aim was information about and control of the moral tenor of the population.

(2015, 281)

Hacking then goes on to illustrate how calculating machines originated from the need to collect, store, and analyse these numbers and how the longer history of biopolitics made the conditions of possibility of the invention of statistics as a moral science of the state and how this science has driven calculating machine technologies in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Although there have been various studies since Hacking’s article that explored the rise of census, survey, and statistical technologies as developments of biopolitics (Desrosières 1998, Porter 1986), we want to see recent developments within a similar series.

The purpose of this book is to think about recent transformations in data politics. In our introduction we position these in historical-sociological terms, especially of the kind that Foucault and Bourdieu initiated and Hacking and others expanded and modified. For there are fundamental differences between empire-states amassing gigantic amounts of data for governing metropole and colonial populations in the nineteenth century and the complex assemblage of public and private authorities and interests invested in the production of data in the twenty-first century. This book is certainly about these differences. But it is also about situating these differences in relation to social, economic, and political conditions when such a modern regime of government emerged and of which we are still subjects. As a contribution to international political sociology we want to consider the conditions of possibility of data politics as a field of power and knowledge (Bigo 2011, Bigo and Walker 2007, Bonditti, Bigo, and Gros 2017).

What is data politics?

If not for the rapid development of the Internet and its connected devices “data” would have probably remained a relatively obscure concept or term confined to these sciences. Yet, data has become a social and political issue not only because it concerns anyone who is connected to the Internet but also because it reconfigures relationships between states, subjects, and citizens. Just about every device is now connected to the Internet and generating vast quantities of digital traces about interactions, transactions, and movements whether users are aware or not. What started as an ostensibly liberated space rapidly became the space over and through which governments and corporations began collecting, storing, retrieving, analysing, and presenting data that records what people do and say on the Internet. This ranges from who communicates with whom, who goes where, and who says what – and much more besides. This is now being augmented with data that people collect about themselves, especially their relations, body movements, and measurements; the amount and range of data that has become available is, as everyone now knows, staggering. There has never been a state, monarchy, kingdom, empire, government, or corporation in history that has had command over such granular, immediate, varied, and detailed data about subjects and objects that concern them. What exactly governments, corporations, and a whole series of agencies and authorities collect, analyse, and deploy is complex but it is now generally understood that data has become a major object of economic, political, and social investment for governing subjects. This development has been captured by the term “big data” to mark a departure from conventional forms of data and statistical knowledge. While first coined by industry, big data has come to have different meanings and uses but significantly, and along with the increasing ubiquity of data in everyday life, the term has become less prominent. Notably, attention has started shift to a focus on computation and analytics such as algorithms, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of things. Yet, data remains a key matter of concern as both the product and condition of computation and analytics.

Scholarship on these developments has understandably focused on issues concerning surveillance, privacy, anonymity, and types of conduct that the Internet cultivates about always-connected, always-measured selves. Perhaps equal to the measure of the influence of the Internet there has been scholarship on data ranging from warnings about its consequences (surveillance, privacy, isolation) to types of conduct (racism, misogyny, bullyism). Along with this, numerous studies, reports, guidelines, regulations, and legislation concerning data protection and the rights of data subjects have proliferated.

Data Politics builds on this scholarship but it aims to make three distinct yet interrelated contributions to an international political sociology of data politics.

The first concerns a shift in focus from the politics of or in data to data as a force that is generative of politics. In this view, rather than settled in databases or archives, data is a force realised through its production, uptake and deployments. We want to draw the implications of thinking about data not as an inert representation but a language with performative force as Bourdieu (1993, 1973) and Butler (1997) have shown. That is, data politics is concerned with not only political struggles over data production and its deployments, but how data is generative of new forms of power relations and politics at different and interconnected scales. If indeed data enacts that which it represents, this signifies two things. To collect, store, retrieve, analyse, and present data through various methods means to bring those objects and subjects that data speaks of into being. Data sciences such as statistics, probability, and analytics have emerged not because they have merely quenched our curiosities but because these sciences have been useful for the objects and subjects they have brought into being for the purposes of governing and/or profit. And, to speak constantly about data as though it either represents or records subjects and objects and their movements, independent from the social and political struggles that govern them, is to mask such struggles.

That data is generative of new power relations and politics is evident in the recent struggles over how big data was allegedly used in the US election and UK referendum to create personalised political advertising to influence how people voted. Referring to these electoral uses, George Monbiot writing in The Guardian noted that we must act now to own these new political technologies before they own us. He was of course referring to the work of a company called Cambridge Analytica, which was partly owned by US billionaire Robert Mercer, who also happens to be a friend of former UKIP leader Nigel Farage. It was widely reported that the company allegedly influenced both the US election and the UK referendum by mining data from Facebook and using it to create profiles predicting people’s personalities and then tailoring advertising to their psychological profiles. While some of the claims that this happened were brought into question, including denials from Cambridge Analytica, the UK’s privacy watchdog – the Information Commissioner’s Office – deemed there was sufficient cause to launch an inquiry. These claims and denials were soon followed by the disclosure that the personal information of up to 87 million users was harvested without their permission by an app designed by a Cambridge academic. The seriousness of this breach intensified when Cambridge Analytica claimed that hundreds of companies harvest such data and that it is legal to do so. Or when the Cambridge academic at the centre of the controversy claimed that it was both legal and ethically acceptable to sell data to a third party. Or when CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted that Facebook took no action to ensure that the tens of thousands of apps it approved adhered to their terms of service.

So, in the wake of already uneven power and influence over electoral processes – such as campaign financing and media alliances – we now have misinformation, disinformation, and techniques such as bot-swarming whereby fake online accounts are created to give the impression that large numbers of people support a political position. For these reasons, Oscar Gandy recently argued that this calls for a shift of attention away from a focus on privacy or surveillance and the collection and processing of information to how information is being used and misused (Gandy and Tsui 2018).

What these examples illustrate is that data and politics are inseparable. Data is not only shaping our social relations, preferences, and life chances but our very democracies. And that is how we want to speak of data politics. However, a problem with these views on data politics is that the subjects who are constituted as the addressee are presumably the affected Internet subjects. This is the second intervention that has led us to articulate what we call data politics. It concerns atomism: often such pronouncements address atomised individuals who need to protect themselves from the dangers of the Internet and its manipulations. It is based on the ontological premise of “hyper-individualism” whereby persons, events and phenomena are treated as independent and “atomistic” entities (Lake 2017). Data politics that emerges from this reaction is one of urging people to protect themselves as individuals. It is almost as if the narrative says “yes, there is collective work that needs to be done but ultimately it is up to you to change your behaviour to protect yourself from the dark forces of the Internet”. The addressee in other words is the atomised subject whose data is individualised rather than understood as a product of collective relations with other subjects and technologies (Socialising Big Data Project 2015).

A third intervention concerns the immediacy that pervades these reactions or responses. They are predominantly exercised by the immediacy of a threat, danger, menace, risk, or peril or insecurity or unease that the Internet ostensibly engenders. Even those who have fought battles with governments and corporations to expose their data practices fall prey to a Messianic creep in articulating political problems by decrying their immediacy.

The obverse response to these reactions has been to extol the virtues of the Internet and illustrate that if it is not liberating it is at least making our lives better organised, measured, improved, whatever. Yes, there may be dangers and insecurities but this is a small price to pay for the benefits it brings. This response is still riddled with immediacy and atomism. Its calculative logic is from the point of view of the atomised subject weighing the pros and cons of the Internet against the threats of immediacy.

All this has led us to the conclusion that data politics is yet to find its subjects. This book attempts to step back from the inertness, atomism, and immediacy of the dominant points of view of the Internet and the data it generates and ask questions about data politics and position these within a broad historical-sociological perspective. What do we then mean by an international political sociology of data politics?

We start with the assumption that the will to knowledge and the will to power are two aspects of how we conduct ourselves and the conduct of others, and thus we approach data not as a representation (i.e., information collected, stored, and presented without interest) but as an object whose production interests those who exercise power. This was at least one of the lessons we have learned from Michel Foucault’s studies of the ways in which modern societies come to depend on governing subjects with data collected over not only their physical and social attributes (life, language, labour) but also about the conduct of their behaviour (Foucault 2007). Our second assumption is that the production of data is a social and often political practice that mobilises agents who are not only objects of data (about whom data is produced) but that they are also subjects of data (those whose engagement drives how data is produced). Our question thus shifts to social practices and agents. Just as the avalanche of numbers was an aspect of the birth of a modern regime of government, in our age data does not happen through unstructured social practices b...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Data Politics
• Part I Conditions of Possibility of Data Politics
• Part II Worlds
• Part III Subjects
• Part IV Rights
• Index