Review of The Cost of Connection: How Data Colonizes Human Life and Appropriates it for Capitalism (Stanford University Press) by Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Miejas
This is a book about a topic familiar to readers of Netopia: It’s about how the world’s tech giants (not limited to those in Silicon Valley) are amassing more and more power, and how they are doing this not only with means of fancy technology, but also good with old ideology. What’s new and exciting about The Cost of Connection is that it adds a new and overarching story to that familiar topic. More importantly, the book illustrates the merits and also the shortcomings of a Marx-inspired interpretation of the digital order.
It’s about how the world’s tech giants (not limited to those in Silicon Valley) are amassing more and more power, and how they are doing this not only with means of fancy technology, but also good with old ideology.
The story which Nick Couldry, Professor of Media, Communications and Social Theory at the London School of Economics, and Ulises A. Mejias, Professor of Communication Studies at Owego State University of New York, unfold is about the nexus between capitalism and colonialism. Yes: colonialism. Literally. Not “colonisation”. According to Couldry and Mejias, we are witnessing these very days the ultimate stage of what, in Marx’ terms, is known as “primitive accumulation” or, in more contemporary phrasing, “accumulation by dispossession”. “Primitive accumulation” describes how capitalists gain power and money. It’s not just by hard work, thus the claim, and by taking advantage of the law and the state’s institutions that are designed to protect the property of the wealthy, but by brute force and subjugation. People must be driven away from the land they cultivate in order to become willing to trade their autonomy for employment. Historically, “primitive accumulation” has been enacted by colonialism. This is why capitalism and colonialism really are just two sides of the same coin – “one side enacting dispossession in a brutal and rampant manner and the other normalizing this process by relegating it to the outside (outside the present, outside the civilized, outside the measurable, and so on).”
End users: Treated just like natives in the Americas by the Conquistadors
How does this relate to data? Here’s the bridge: The Conquistadors, the Spanish conquerors of the 16th and 17th centuries, read declarations in Spanish to the people whom they encountered as inhabitants of the Americas – asking the natives to subjugate themselves to the church. Nothing different, the authors of “The Cost of Connection” claim, happens when tech- and social media companies ask their users to sign lengthy end user agreements. Users as well as natives are not able to understand what they are asked to accept.
“The Cost of Connection” claim, happens when tech- and social media companies ask their users to sign lengthy end user agreements. Users as well as natives are not able to understand what they are asked to accept.
Thus, the act of presenting an agreement rather is a tool for the conquerors to make appear an act as legal (to themselves as well to a wider public) which in fact is a mere subjugation. The appropriation of data and the subjugation by means of physical force, the authors argue, should both be read as a chapter in the history of colonialism, because in both instances colonialism can be understood “as a process that allows one party to occupy the living space of another and appropriate his resources, overpowering him through a combination of ideological rationalizations and technological means.” It’s this “because” on which the book’s main claim is based. Let’s accept it, for the sake of the argument!
It’s quite impressive to read what the two communication professors come up with to describe what the appropriation of resources and the occupation of people’s living space in the digital realm amounts to. The price is one thing. Every Facebook user, Couldry and Mejias state, is worth more than 230 US-dollars to the company, every WeChat-user more than 540 dollars. For the companies, it’s money. To the users, it’s a total devaluation of social relations, which all of the sudden become market commodities. To turn social relations into cash, a whole empire of digital technologies has been constructed, reaching from users’ end devices to cables, IT-infrastructure and data. What one should not forget: Data from private end user, which are dealt with in the “social quantification sector”, are only the tip of the iceberg. The amount of date generated by businesses exceeds data by social quantification sector.
The knowledge which, in the old days was encoded into maps and was in the hand of scientific and geographical societies, is nowadays under control of a few large corporations:
[…] the appropriation of resources and the occupation of people’s living space in the digital realm amounts to. The price is one thing. Every Facebook user, Couldry and Mejias state, is worth more than 230 US-dollars to the company, every WeChat-user more than 540 dollars.
Institutions such as […] the Royal Geographical Society in London would function as information repositories and map production centers at which standardized survey data would be organized into […] reports on the natural an social history of colonized territories. Other institutions such as the Dutch East India Company maintained extensive botanical gardens to collect knowledge about plant species from the colonies. […] Today, data centers serve similar functions by storing data and ‘mining’ it – a pertinent colonial metaphor – to produce new knowledge for the benefit of corporations.
And, yes, there still are colonies in the more literal sense:
Raw materials for the electronic infrastructure […] still come from Africa, Asia, and Latin America […]. Massive energy usage translates into pollution that, along with the dumping of toxic waste from the electronics industry, continues to impact poor communities disproportionately (by 2007 80 % of electronic waste was exported to the developing world). […] Much of the labor […] is still located in places such as Asia, where it is abundant and cheap. In China, manufacturer Foxconn, responsible for about half of the world’s electronics production, employs a massive workforce of one million laborers who are managed under military-style conditions.
Call to action?
Seen against the larger background of the capitalist-colonialism-nexus-stories, issues like fake news, media regulation and digital surveillance appear like mere surface issues. Peanuts. Couldry and Mejias state very explicitly that, in their view, transparency, laws, media literacy or even digital activism will not do the job when it comes to resistance against today’s digital capitalism-colonalism. They express no hope that the state or the European Union could step to help. To the contrary. Although they do not go as far as to claim that the nation state (or the EU) is merely the colonial-capitalist’s fulfilment assistant (in line with their Marx-inspired interpretation), they are eager to point out that the public sector, too, is to be seen on the side of the offender, not the victim. When social services in the UK, in the US or in Alaska employ artificial intelligence for instance to predict areas of high crime or child injuries in families, public authorities have no access to the algorithms that generate the risk assessments. In the era of “datafication”, what used to be based on written or spoken arguments, is now solved relying on numbers only. Decision-making in the public is handed over to the control of algorithmic processes which in turn are controlled by private companies.
What I refuse to accept is that engaging in digital politics is as futile as Couldry and Mejias suggest. Putting things in a larger perspective is fine. Less fine it is if this perspective leads to paralysis when it comes to political action.
Not surprisingly, thus, Couldry and Mejias have little to say when it comes to recipes for action. “No default collection of data.” “No reuse without consent.” That’s about all they have to offer. If one takes a look at Mejias’ blog, one encounters many projects which rather follow the idea of building non-digital environments and networks than to engage in any form of digital politics.
For myself, I enjoyed reading The Cost of Connection as an introduction to contemporary anti-capitalist thinking. Also, the proposal to interpret the digital economy as a new phase or even a spike of old-fashioned- capitalism seems to me more appealing than regarding it just as a special kind of capitalism (as argued by Shoshana Zuboff) – be it only because it broadens the historical perspective. But what I refuse to accept is that engaging in digital politics is as futile as Couldry and Mejias suggest. Putting things in a larger perspective is fine. Less fine it is if this perspective leads to paralysis when it comes to political action. Delivering a Marx-inspired reading of the digital sphere that results in new kinds of actions that can be undertaken in terms of resistance is a job which still has to done.
