The Data Gaze

Capitalism, Power and Perception

David Beer

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781526436924, 9781526436917
• eBook ISBN: 9781526463197
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

A significant new way of understanding contemporary capitalism is to understand the intensification and spread of data analytics. This text is about the powerful promises and visions that have led to the expansion of data analytics and data-led forms of social ordering.

It is centrally concerned with examining the types of knowledge associated with data analytics and shows that how these analytics are envisioned is central to the emergence and prominence of data at various scales of social life.  This text aims to understand the powerful role of the data analytics industry and how this industry facilitates the spread and intensification of data-led processes. As such, The Data Gaze is concerned with understanding how data-led, data-driven and data-reliant forms of capitalism pervade organisational and everyday life.

Using a clear theoretical approach derived from Foucault and critical data studies, the text develops the concept of the data gaze and shows how powerful and persuasive it is. It's an essential and subversive guide to data analytics and data capitalism.

1 Introducing the Data Gaze

Standing at the centre of Jacques Derrida’s (1996) famous lecture on the archive is the shadowy figure of the ‘archon’. Displaying a strong sense of duty, ennobled by authority and carrying a whiff of the sinister, these archons not only controlled what was to be included within the walls of the archive they also dictated the means by which these documents were classified and rendered retrievable. Consequently, through their management of the ordering of these official spaces of accumulation, they had control over what that archive could be used to say. For Derrida, the power of the archive rested in the hands of these archons and was embodied in their practices, judgements and selections. Derrida’s point is that when data and metadata accumulate, it is those who oversee its storage and retrieval that have the real sway.

If we fast forward to the present, we might wonder who is saying what with the many and varied types of archived data that are now so central to the functioning of the social world. Ranging from the hyperbolic to the cynical, there are many competing and polarised perspectives on the role and social significance of data. We can cut through some of the fog by asking one direct question: with all these amassing data about people, places, organisations and nation states, who has the power to speak with those data? Or, perhaps more fittingly, who has the power to speak with our data? Crucial to answering such a question is an understanding of the new types of knowledge that are emerging along with an understanding of how that knowledge achieves authority, credibility and legitimacy. This question may seem straightforward but it is tough to answer. This book thinks about how we might begin to formulate some answers. The underpinning principle of the book is that we need to gain a greater understanding of the industry that has emerged around these new data and we need to explore how data-led processes spread, how data-informed knowledge is legitimated and how this industry approaches and frames data. In short, we need to examine these new forms of knowledge and emergent industry in order to appreciate the expansion of an inescapable gaze and its unending scrutiny. Understanding the changing nature of knowledge is a prerequisite for resisting, challenging and questioning the interventions and consequences that this data gaze affords.

In a detailed and compelling account of the emergence of what has been referred to as the ‘data revolution’, Rob Kitchin (2014) outlines exactly how new forms of data have come to reshape and implicate the social world in all sorts of ways. Kitchin (2014: 2–4) also helpfully describes what these data are, how they can be defined and what it is that they have changed. He notes, by way of a starting point, that data are ‘commonly understood to be the raw materials produced by abstracting the world into categories, measures and other representational forms – numbers, characters, symbols, images, sounds, electromagnetic waves, bits – that constitute the building blocks from which information and knowledge are created’ (Kitchin, 2014: 1). Kitchin proceeds by elaborating on this broader definition by adding detail and explicating different types of data. Of course, with a word that is being so widely appropriated, which is certainly the case for ‘data’, there are likely to be some issues with the definition. Data is a term that already has a long history of quite diverse use (Rosenberg, 2013), and this problem has escalated with all the talk of data and big data in recent years (as captured by Kitchin, 2014). However, rather than adding to or selecting only one of these definitions, this book will focus instead on the appropriation of the term and the various ways it is deployed. A fixed definition would hinder the explorations I provide, largely because I want to see how data are defined and made up by this industry. The way data is spoken of and defined reveals something of its materiality and the agendas that are at play. It is important, I would suggest, to see how data are spoken of, invented and put to work. We need to see how data are made up conceptually as a part of the advancement of data-led thinking and in response to these changing infrastructures, practices and forms of knowledge (Beer, 2016a).

Despite the agenda-setting work of writers like Kitchin and many of the others that I will draw upon in this book, there remains something to be said about those organisations, software packages and individuals who are working to mediate data and facilitate their integration into how we live. Understanding our data-rich environment requires an understanding of the visions, infrastructures and practices that facilitate what is said with our data. We need to understand how those data are deployed and what is enunciated with and through them. We need to understand how data-rich processes spread, how they take root, what systems unfold and how they demarcate new practices and forms of knowledge. In response, this book reflects on the visions, infrastructures and practices of what have been referred to as ‘data intermediaries’ (Schrock and Shaffer, 2017). Centrally it asks how we can understand the data analytics industry and its growing power. To do this, and to explore how data are seen and spoken of, it develops the central concept of the data gaze.

It is now over a decade since Nigel Thrift (2005) wrote of the developments that he labelled ‘knowing capitalism’. In that book Thrift (2005: 12) suggested that he was observing the beginning of something. Much has changed in that time, not least the presence of mobile devices, social media, embedded sensors, tracking and global positioning technologies, smartphones, on-demand consumption and the many other developments that bring new possibilities for capturing and using data. Thrift’s book was published around two years before the launch of the iPhone and the rise of social media. We could conclude simply that capitalism has become more knowing in the interim – the enhancement of data collation means that organisations can know us in much greater depth than in the period when Thrift was writing his book. Perhaps this is the case; I think though that there is more to be said than this cursory observation might at first suggest.

More recently attempts at understanding the role of data within capitalism have turned to the notion of the ‘platform’. At around the same time that Nick Srnicek (2017) was working on his book Platform Capitalism, Paul Langley and Andrew Leyshon (2017) were collaborating on a detailed journal article with the same title. Both take data as being central to capitalism and note the importance of understanding the different platforms that facilitate the extraction and circulation of data. Srnicek (2017: 6) argues that:

… capitalism has turned to data as one way to maintain economic growth and vitality in the face of a sluggish production sector. In the twenty-first century, on the basis of changes in digital technologies, data have become increasingly central to firms and their relations with workers, customers, and other capitalists. The platform has emerged as a new business model, capable of extracting and controlling immense amounts of data.

The platform, in this vision, acts as the foundation upon which data are utilised. These platforms manage the circulation of data (Langley and Leyshon, 2017: 25), with business models built around these features for lending, exchange, service provision, and so on. This is a form of capitalism in which, Srnicek (2017: 41) claims, ‘data increasingly became a central resource’. Langley and Leyshon (2017: 19) use the concept of ‘platform capitalism’ to foreground the connection of the ‘infrastructural and intermediary qualities of the platform’. Platforms, in this account, intermediate the flows of data.

The aim in this introductory chapter is not to explore all of the possible ways that we can conceptualise the relations between capitalism and data, yet concepts such as ‘platform capitalism’ illustrate just how central data have become to the functioning of contemporary capitalism and capitalist society. As I will illustrate, notions of value are often woven into the uses and understandings of data as well as the visions and promises that are attached to them. This makes data a routine and structurally significant part of the ordering of the social world, and it suggests that it might stretch far into our lives – perhaps beyond even the reach of capitalism. Focusing upon the role of analytics, as I do in this book, inevitably reveals something of these platforms and the use of data within such advancing modes of capitalism.

Of course, all of this is not to say that we need a totalising vision of a homogeneous capitalism in which the role and spread of data are the same everywhere. We know that this would be a mistake, as is made clear, for instance, in Kalyan Sanyal’s (2007: 45) accounts of ‘post-colonial capitalism’. The relations between data and capitalism are inevitably uneven and reveal underpinning regional and national variations, variegated political economies and geographical inequalities. I start instead from the perspective that, as with capitalism more generally (Peck and Theodore, 2007), the use of data is likely to have uneven geographies and be variegated in its deployment. I have discussed the role of data and metrics in the political economy in much more detail in my previous book, Metric Power; here I wish to deal much more directly with the implied question of the intermediary and the industry that facilitates the circulation of data. One way to avoid the problems associated with a more general understanding of data is to begin to unpick the systems through which those data circulate.

However we might conceptualise the relations between data and capitalism, the accumulation and analysis of data does not happen by accident. We are not simply gliding on rails through predetermined forms of an advancing capitalism. There is work being done to make this happen. A key thing to remember, I would suggest, is that the claims being made about the possibilities and potentials of data represent a kind of boundary work. As I will discuss in Chapters 2 and 3, these claims are concerned with crossing thresholds and pushing back frontiers. These claims are wrapped up with a veneer of knowing that aims to draw people into a data rationality. The promises of making us better people, healthier, more efficient, better at connecting, interacting and choosing are coupled with ideas about what can be done to us with data, shaping who we vote for, our performance levels, our credit worthiness, our desirability as customers, and so on. These are instances of this boundary work aimed at intensifying and expanding the reach of data analytics. Data-led processes are actively being spread and a space has opened up in which the data analytics industry has stepped and grown. As data amass, the pressure grows to do something with those data. As the volume of data expands, opportunities are created for those who can locate value in those data. Under-standing data-intensive capitalism requires an exploration of the way that data have been embraced, the rationalities that underpin them and the intensity of their application. Thrift’s focus was upon ‘what happened when capitalism began to intervene in, and make a business out of, thinking the everyday’ (Thrift, 2005: 1). This book is about how those interventions are made possible, how they advance, how they are created and afforded, how they are legitimised and rendered desirable. In short, it is concerned with understanding the industry of intervention that is now active in shaping the social world in so many different ways.

It is a well-rehearsed point that data have infiltrated many aspects of our lives, that they produce actions and then circulate back into various processes, decisions and outcomes (Beer, 2013). The depth of these data circulations, as I have discussed before, is hard to fathom. This makes it difficult to track and hard for its social implications to be identified, studied and fully explored. How can we detach ourselves from this in order to really see what is happening? Data have come to implicate nearly all aspects of social life, from the workplace and employee performance (Moore, 2018), to quantified-self movements and self-tracking (Lupton, 2016; Neff and Nafus, 2016), the tracking of health (Sharon, 2017) and emotions (Davies, 2017a), to social media profiles, targeted advertising, customer monitoring, through to financial transactions and trading, as well as the governance of nation states (Karppi and Crawford, 2016), transportation systems and utilities (Dodge and Kitchin, 2009), how borders are managed and risk is assessed (Amoore, 2011) and even to the way that political campaigns are fought (Davies, 2017b). Helen Kennedy (2016: 232), in her crucial study of data mining within organisations, has argued that in this context we need to gain an appreciation of the ‘new data relations’. These new data relations, Kennedy (2016: 232) points out, are ‘increasingly integral to everyday social relations’. With this rise of data, the social world is being reordered in some surprising and sometimes telling ways. Such data are, of course, never raw (Gitelman and Jackson, 2013): they still need to be interpreted, to be made sense of and to be made comprehensible. Understandably we tend to turn our focus to the outcomes of these processes, the things that data make happen. This is especially the case when the consequences pop up in very visible or emotive ways in our lives – the injustices, the mistreatments, the insensitivities of data are where we are most likely, momentarily, to feel their presence. We also notice the incongruities – the misplaced advert, the strange recommendation or the moments when we are struck by the depth of the surveillance of our everyday lives.

With this social expansion of the ordering role of data there have also come new ways of knowing. More is known about populations and individuals because of the escalating data infrastructures. Out of the shadows have emerged new types of knowledge and expertise – along with this have emerged new experts, consultants and gurus, or what Nicole Aschoff (2015) has described as the ‘new prophets of capital’. We can ask what this knowledge is used for, who is using it and how. We might also ask how this knowledge is connected into power dynamics and social structures, what the agendas are that reside in these new forms of knowledge and how they are tied into the expansion of the processes themselves. In this book I veer towards questions concerning the powerful notions and conceptualisations of data that have enabled or afforded the very expansion of these data-harvesting infrastructures and which have enabled data analysis to take on such a prominent role in our lives. As such, it asks how these data are understood, framed and approached. It reflects on what these reveal about claims to knowledge and how power is reinforced and deployed through data. The way in which data are seen is crucial to the power that they afford and the possibilities that are available for the expansion of data-led thinking, judgement, ordering and governance. The way that data are seen is also central to the scale of the material infrastructures as well as the hopes, promises and possibilities that are attached to those data. Being data informed is often presented as an inevitable force to yield to (as I will discuss in Chapter 2).

Overall, data are seen to provide powerful forms of knowledge and insight into the social world. Seeing into this power and understanding its machinations requires us to think about how this knowledge is framed, how it is presented, what type of expertise it evokes and authenticates, and what notions of truth and worth are bound up in these forms of knowledge. We need to see how these data are understood as well as what they can do, because it is here that the outcomes are being pre-set, where agendas are being articulated and embedded and where claims to know-how and expertise are being made.

Of course, it is important to explore how the data see us, how we are judged by data, how we are evaluated and treated, and so on. There are those who are working on such questions and who are developing fantastic, detailed and revealing accounts of data mining and data judgements in operation (see for example Amoore, 2013; Kennedy, 2016; Moore, 2018). As I will show here, we also need to explore how the data themselves are seen, how they are looked upon, how they are regarded and how that then shapes the forms of perception that are at play once the data are utilised in various analytic outcomes. An understanding of how data are seen is required before we can fully understand how they are used to see us. That is what this book aims to do. It aims to see the implicit limits and parameters that are being set into data before or whilst they are utilised. What is the underlying mode of thinking that resides in data use? What rationalities and ways of thinking are part of how data-led processes find their way into our lives? These are the types of questions that I hope to answer here. This is a book that is about the formation and spread of data-informed knowledge. It is about the notions of value and ideals of living that are coded into the very agendas and social programmes within which data are involved. It is about the formation of analytical spaces and technologies that structure how data are used and what can be said with them. When we think about how data are used in the social world, to order and govern, this book suggests that we should also think about the way that those data are imagined, the possibilities that they have been ascribed, to whom they lend the power to speak and what they allow to be said. This is about how authenticity and accuracy are ascribed and engraved into the materiality of the data. It is here, in this focus, that we can reveal much about what is going on, about how data-led processes spread and intensify, about how the analytics themselves play to certain composed tunes and arrangements, about how knowledge forms from certain circumscribe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• About the Author
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introducing the Data Gaze
• 2 Envisioning the Power of Data Analytics: The Data Imaginary
• 3 Perpetuating and Deploying a Rationality of Speed: The Temporality of the Data Gaze
• 4 The Infrastructural Dimensions of the Data Gaze: The Analytical Spaces of the Codified Clinic
• 5 The Diagnostic Eye: The Professional Gaze of the Data Analyst and the Data Engineer
• 6 Conclusion
• Appendix: The Sample of Data Analytics Companies Used in Chapters 2 and 3
• References
• Index