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Data Epistemologies, Coloniality of Power, and Resistance
Abstract
Data assemblages amplify historical forms of colonization through a complex arrangement of practices, materialities, territories, bodies, and subjectivities. Data-centric epistemologies should be understood as an expression of the coloniality of power manifested as the violent imposition of ways of being, thinking, and feeling that leads to the expulsion of human beings from the social order, denies the existence of alternative worlds and epistemologies, and threatens life on Earth. This article develops a theoretical model to analyze the coloniality of power through data and explores the multiple dimensions of coloniality as a framework for identifying ways of resisting data colonization. Finally, this article suggests possible alternative data epistemologies that are respectful of populations, cultural diversity, and environments.
... O colonialismo de dados envolve não apenas os "novos tipos de relações humanas que permitem a extração de dados para a mercantilização" (Couldry;Mejias, 2018:337), como também o universo de interações homem-objeto, objeto-objeto e humano-algoritmo, levando a novas formas de colonização por meio de dados, baseadas em infraestruturas materiais e construções simbólicas que reforçam práticas colonizatórias (Ricaurte, 2019). Este processo dá origem a novas formas de acumulação e valorização dos dados dos quais a fonte de autoridade e legitimidade é capaz de atravessar os limites da soberania dos Estados, produzindo efeitos internacionais. ...
... Governos passam a ser a principal clientela de empresas de serviços de IA para a tomada de decisões públicas com dados de propriedade empresarial e pública, a contratação de serviço empresarial e a aquisição de produtos para diversos fins como a ciberdefesa, vigilância, infraestrutura de telecomunicações e transportes, smart cities, servidores, além de atuarem em agendas para o desenvolvimento digital e da força de trabalho. (Ricaurte, 2019) A extração e acumulação massiva de dados envolve não apenas capital econômico, mas também capital cultural (Dratwa, 2017). Modificações intensas ocorrem no campo das forças produtivas de modo a afetar o conjunto da vida social. ...
... Tudo isto coloca o colonialismo de dados em um arranjo de processos que é parte da epistemologia dominante que se traduz na dominação de corpos, afetos e territórios (Ricaurte, 2019). Pois os dados não apenas capturam processos sociais, mas colonizam mentes, almas, corpos e espaços . ...
Este trabalho objetiva debater a relação entre dados, vigilância e capitalismo na atualidade, a partir das noções de capitalismo de dados, capitalismo de vigilância e colonialismo de dados. A abordagem metodológica é a revisão não sistemática de literatura. Apesar de não ser um fenômeno novo, a vigilância tem crescido como componente fundamental da lógica de acumulação capitalista na contemporaneidade, percebendo seres humanos como fonte para a extração massiva de dados. Conclui-se que a vigilância que ocorre por meio da extração, tratamento e armazenamento de dados incorre em problema para a mobilização política. Faz-se necessário, então, compreender tal fenômeno a partir de lentes emancipatórias.
... data annotation and evaluation) to the environmental consequences of AI associated with the water, energy and rare minerals required to power compute and produce the hardware underpinning AI development and its downstream applications Crawford, 2021;Dauvergne, 2022;Robbins & Wynsberghe, 2022). Third, burgeoning scholarship argues that the economic and political power wielded by Western, often American, technology companies have disproportionate impacts on majority world economies that mirror and extend the extractive dynamics of historical colonialism (Adams, 2021;Birhane, 2020;Kwet, 2019a, b;Ricaurte, 2019). 1 This article adds to the emerging intersection of AI harms and theories of data and digital colonialism by drawing theoretical links between Aníbal Quijano's "colonial matrix of power" within the modernity/coloniality research program and literature on the political economy of AI production (Quijano, 2007). We locate the extractive dynamics of AI in the colonial matrix of power on two levels considering both material harms manifested through the deployment of AI technologies and the discursive harms perpetuated by the imaginaries of AI developers and the broader AI industry. ...
... However, the extractive dimensions of global digital capital, enabled by AI technologies, extend beyond the material and territorial (Mezzadro & Nielson, 2017;Gago & Mezzadra, 2017). For example, Ricaurte (2019) argues that AI technologies rely on the extraction of data, on which information and knowledge are created. Colonial hierarchies are perpetuated through asymmetric flows of data extractivism which concentrate data and therefore value in wealthy Western countries (Thatcher et al., 2016). ...
... Firstly, the framework of modernity/coloniality has its own tradition from which it has emerged in the American Subaltern Studies group, drawing from world systems theory, underdevelopment theory and the critical theory of the Frankfurt School (Bhambra, 2014). While the colonial matrix of power is a powerful theoretical framework from which to understand how AI perpetuates coloniality, it should also be situated within the broader developments in decolonial and postcolonial theory and other critical perspectives on technology and AI (Bhambra, 2014;Ricaurte, 2019). The interpretive frameworks of modernity/coloniality should also not be reduced to a series of over-simplified binaries which portray everything "Western" as bad and everything coming from the majority world as an emancipatory force for good. ...
Drawing on the analytic of the “colonial matrix of power” developed by Aníbal Quijano within the Latin American modernity/coloniality research program, this article theorises how a system of coloniality underpins the structuring logic of artificial intelligence (AI) systems. We develop a framework for critiquing the regimes of global labour exploitation and knowledge extraction that are rendered invisible through discourses of the purported universality and objectivity of AI. Through bringing the political economy literature on AI production into conversation with scholarly work on decolonial AI and the modernity/coloniality research program, we advance three main arguments. First, the global economic and political power imbalances in AI production are inextricably linked to the continuities of historical colonialism, constituting the colonial supply chain of AI. Second, this is produced through an international division of digital labour that extracts value from majority world labour for the benefit of Western technology companies. Third, this perpetuates hegemonic knowledge production through Western values and knowledge that marginalises non-Western alternatives within AI’s production and limits the possibilities for decolonising AI. By locating the production of AI systems within the colonial matrix of power, we contribute to critical and decolonial literature on the legacies of colonialism in AI and the hierarchies of power and extraction that shape the development of AI today.
... Esta premissa tende a minimizar as diferenças culturais, históricas e materiais, favorecendo a análise de como os algoritmos levaram ao surgimento de novas formas de dominação capitalista. No entanto, uma vasta literatura tem mostrado que a hegemonia epistêmica é um local chave de disputa (Ricaurte, 2019). Esta premissa também corre o risco de naturalizar disparidades na produção global de conhecimento, pois prioriza pesquisas sobre e a partir do Norte epistêmico e, ao fazê-lo, pode contribuir para tornar invisíveis as epistemes não ocidentais (Ganter & Ortega, 2019;Silva, 2019 (2000), ou seja, como uma oportunidade para desenvolver a consciência crítica de novas possibilidades de pensamento e ação. ...
... A imaginação como parte intrínseca do conhecimento popular é uma maneira produtiva de examinar as mediações algorítmicas. A imaginação e a formação do conhecimento podem ser vislumbradas como tentativas mutuamente dependentes de reverter a ordem epistêmica de dominação baseada na dataficação e no que pode ser considerado uma "vontade de saber" algorítmica: a base epistêmica para a produção de "verdades algorítmicas" (Ricaurte, 2019). A imaginação também permite compreender como as pessoas experienciam os algoritmos: faz parte de como as pessoas se relacionam com eles (encontrando lugares para eles em seu cotidiano), mas também em como as pessoas antecipam sua chegada em suas vidas "antes" de realmente usá-los e como concebem suas implicações para as relações sociais com os outros "depois" de usá-las (Siles, 2023). ...
his paper establishes dialogs between theories on the popular and critical studies on algorithms and datafication. In doing so, it contributes to reversing the analytical tendency to assume that algorithms have universal effects and that conclusions about “algorithmic power” in the Global North apply unproblematically every-where else. We begin by clarifying how Latin American scholars and other research traditions have theorized the popular (“lo popular”). We then develop four dimensions of lo popular to implement these ideas in the case of algorithms: playful cultural practices, imagination, resistance, and “in-betweenness.” We argue that this dialogue can generate different ways of thinking about the problems inherent to algorithmic mediation by drawing attention to the remixes of cultural practices, imaginative solutions to everyday problems, “cyborg” forms of resistance, and ambiguous forms of agency that are central to the operations of algorithmic assemblages nowadays.
... This perspective is innovative, given the longstanding focus of digital colonialism scholars on the extraction of data from Global South populations by Global North platforms (Couldry and Mejias, 2019;Ricaurte, 2019;Silveira et al., 2021;Van Doorn and Badger, 2020) and Western state surveillance Mannion, 2020), the primary perspective of data imperialism studies. In these studies concerned with North-South power relations, when Big data initiatives from the South are addressed, the focus is on activist projects (Milan and Treré, 2019;Ricaurte, 2019). ...
... This perspective is innovative, given the longstanding focus of digital colonialism scholars on the extraction of data from Global South populations by Global North platforms (Couldry and Mejias, 2019;Ricaurte, 2019;Silveira et al., 2021;Van Doorn and Badger, 2020) and Western state surveillance Mannion, 2020), the primary perspective of data imperialism studies. In these studies concerned with North-South power relations, when Big data initiatives from the South are addressed, the focus is on activist projects (Milan and Treré, 2019;Ricaurte, 2019). While acknowledging their contribution, we believe that significant gaps remain in these critical studies: The power relations between Southern nations through digital technologies and the role of platforms from the Global South, especially those based in Latin America, in this process. ...
This commentary explores Brazil's role in Latin American platform capitalism, integrating Ruy Mauro Marini's theoretical framework with contemporary studies of platform capitalism. It examines the connections between Latin American platforms, overexploitation, and data accumulation, leading to the concept of platform sub-imperialism: The emergence of certain Southern countries as platform sub-imperialist powers, acting as regional centers of data and capital accumulation through the expansion of their platforms into neighboring countries. This positioning constitutes an intermediate state between hegemonic nations and “digital colonies” in the international division of platform labor, data accumulation, and technological dependency.
... However, research suggests that some of our prehistoric ancestors had levels of social capital and institutional creativity that would benefit most societies today, Northern European or otherwise (Graeber and Wengrow, 2021). This confirms that the evolutionary pretensions of many contemporary European people are in fact the result of poor cognitive habits inculcated in our cultures since colonial times (Bauder and Mueller, 2023;Quijano, 2007;Ricaurte, 2019;Sandercock, 2004). ...
... Our advocates for thorough open-source action may attract more Chinese LLM researchers or relevant firms to fully disclose their models because thorough transparent open-source models can bring them sizable benefits from more constructive feedback and criticism. Those might make their models better and eventually accelerate the iterations of Chinese LLMs and empower the local community [81]. Overall, open innovation practices like disclosing the MAP-Neo model might alleviate the dominance of English LLMs and improve the inclusivity of the international LLMs community. ...
Large Language Models (LLMs) have made great strides in recent years to achieve unprecedented performance across different tasks. However, due to commercial interest, the most competitive models like GPT, Gemini, and Claude have been gated behind proprietary interfaces without disclosing the training details. Recently, many institutions have open-sourced several strong LLMs like LLaMA-3, comparable to existing closed-source LLMs. However, only the model's weights are provided with most details (e.g., intermediate checkpoints, pre-training corpus, and training code, etc.) being undisclosed. To improve the transparency of LLMs, the research community has formed to open-source truly open LLMs (e.g., Pythia, Amber, OLMo), where more details (e.g., pre-training corpus and training code) are being provided. These models have greatly advanced the scientific study of these large models including their strengths, weaknesses, biases and risks. However, we observe that the existing truly open LLMs on reasoning, knowledge, and coding tasks are still inferior to existing state-of-the-art LLMs with similar model sizes. To this end, we open-source MAP-Neo, a highly capable and transparent bilingual language model with 7B parameters trained from scratch on 4.5T high-quality tokens. Our MAP-Neo is the first fully open-sourced bilingual LLM with comparable performance compared to existing state-of-the-art LLMs. Moreover, we open-source all details to reproduce our MAP-Neo, where the cleaned pre-training corpus, data cleaning pipeline, checkpoints, and well-optimized training/evaluation framework are provided. Finally, we hope our MAP-Neo will enhance and strengthen the open research community and inspire more innovations and creativities to facilitate the further improvements of LLMs.
... Nesse sentido, a condição de ser do Sul Global tem implicações na forma como os usuários interagem com as plataformas. A gestão do código-fonte dos softwares, dos quais as sociedades do Sul Global passaram a depender, encontra-se nas mãos de países do Norte Global(Ricaurte, 2019), que não precisam considerar os potenciais impactos negativos que a presença de suas plataformas pode ter em outras sociedades. Enquanto a presença das plataformas desestabiliza o funcionamento de determinadas comunidades e as torna dependentes de corporações multinacionais, uma considerável parcela dos ganhos financeiros gerados por essa atuação local retorna para os investidores presentes no Norte Global. ...
Resumo O presente artigo discute como um grupo de desenvolvedores independentes de RPGs analógicos articula o ambiente digital para distribuir seus produtos. A observação participante foi usada na pesquisa para entender as práticas de um grupo de criadores independentes da América Latina, o RPGLatam. Cientes de que operam nas redes digitais em uma posição marginalizada — a de habitantes do Sul Global —, esses criadores articulam uma série de práticas para tentar minimizar os impactos possivelmente negativos que tal marginalização teria sobre eles e seus produtos. Algumas dessas práticas incluem a utilização de sistemas digitais de formas diferentes daquelas para as quais eles foram originalmente projetados. Quatro práticas serão discutidas neste artigo, contextualizadas com base na conjuntura do capitalismo de plataforma: 1) a utilização da língua inglesa; 2) uma rede de apoio mútuo; 3) distribuição de cópias comunitárias e 4) o itchfunding.
... This is where a critical studies approach to AI comes in. This approach draws on some of the ideas propounded by Chaka (2022), Couldry and Mejias (2019), Lindgren (2023), Mohamed et al. (2020), Ricaurte (2019), who adopt a critically driven approach to dealing with and studying technology, algorithms, data, and datafication. Importantly, it draws on Lindgren's (2023) notion of critical studies of AI. ...
This study set out to evaluate the accuracy of 30 AI detectors in identifying generative artificial intelligence (GenAI)-generated and human-written content in university English L1 and English L2 student essays. 40 student essays were divided into four essay sets of English L1 and English L2 and two undergraduate modules: a second-year module and a third-year module. There are ten essays in each essay set. The 30 AI detectors comprised freely available detectors and non-premium versions of online AI detectors. Employing a critical studies approach to artificial intelligence, the study had three research questions. It focused on and calculated the accuracy, false positive rates (FPRs), and true negative rates (TNRs) of all 30 AI detectors for all essays in each of the four sets to determine the accuracy of each AI detector to identify the GenAI content of each essay. It also used confusion matrices to determine the specificity of best- and worst-performing AI detectors. Some of the results of this study are worth mentioning. Firstly, only two AI detectors, Copyleaks and Undetectable AI, managed to correctly detect all of the essay sets of the two English language categories (English L1 and English L2) as human written. As a result, these two AI detectors jointly shared the first spot in terms of the GenAI detection accuracy ranking. Secondly, nine of the 30 AI detectors completely misidentified all the essays in each of the four essay sets of the two language categories in both modules. Thus, they collectively shared the last spot. Thirdly, the remaining 19 AI detectors both correctly and incorrectly classified the four essay sets in varying degrees without any bias to any essay set of the two English language categories. Fourthly, none of the 30 AI detectors tended to have a bias toward a specific English language category in classifying the four essay sets. Lastly, the results of the current study suggest that the bulk of the currently available AI detectors, especially the currently available free-to-use AI detectors, are not fit for purpose.
... Among these are electronics-based digital extractivisms, the most prominent of which is data extractivism. A growing number of studies (Ricaurte, 2019) show that digital platforms are "now a defining feature of contemporary capitalism" (Sadowski, 2020, 562). If an extractivist lens intends to provide a holistic understanding of the contemporary world, then it must address the "virtual" sphere and recognize that digital extractivisms are connected to a "web of extractivisms," driving and exacerbating also natural resource extractivisms (Chagnon et al., 2021). ...
... Previous research has identified a range of beliefs people have about data and AI, such as "dataism" (van Dijck, 2014) and "data-centric relationality (Ricaurte, 2019), values around emergent tech practices e.g. 'human' values such as liberal values, human-centric values (Pasquale, 2020), or emotional responses to data and machine learning systems (Eubanks, 2018;Kennedy & Hill, 2018). ...
Internet entrepreneurs, EdTech companies, AI enthusiasts, and other powerful stakeholders around the world have promoted the idea that big data and learning analytics (LA) have the potential to revolutionise education. LA, defined as the continuous measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data about learners and their context (Gašević et al., 2015, p. 1), is increasingly being used to track and evaluate what students do in internet-mediated environments. A growing body of literature has questioned the benefits attributed to the use of AI-based solutions and raised a number of concerns about the current developments in the education sector. Despite this growing interest among researchers, we know little about how the beliefs, values and feelings of different groups of educational practitioners shape how they engage with AI-driven learning analytics technologies and influence the evolution of the cultures of practice shaping the adoption of learning analytics. In this paper, we report on research that asks: how do culturally situated beliefs, values and emotions shape practitioners’ engagements with narrow AI in different contexts of practice? The research project as a whole examines these cultures of practice across three contrasting contexts. Here we will discuss early findings from one of these contexts – learning analytics in higher education. With insights from this research, we aim to contribute to empower practitioners in higher education and relevant stakeholders to foster the development of critical and reflective data cultures that are able to exploit the possibilities of learning analytics while being critically responsive to their societal implications and limitations.
... Por cierto, los datos personales y de navegación de los ciudadanos de estos países son recopilados, procesados y vendidos por las Big Tech a compañías de publicidad y consultoría, que utilizan sistemas de perfilamiento algorítmico para dirigirse a diferentes grupos de usuarios con mensajes altamente personalizados y destinados a aumentar las utilidades de empresas extranjeras, aunque también de compañías, organizaciones y partidos políticos locales que buscan imponer sus diferentes agendas en cada país (Kwet 2019;Coleman 2019). En este contexto, tal como subraya Paola Ricaurte (2019), los gobiernos estatales del sur global se han transformado en clientes de las grandes empresas tecnológicas, implementando en sus distintos territorios sistemas automatizados de toma de decisiones públicas con datos de propiedad corporativa, contratando diversos productos de inteligencia artificial (para ciberdefensa, vigilancia, servidores, internet de las cosas, etc.), adoptando sus agendas digitales (en materias de conectividad, hardware y software) y adquiriendo sus programas educativos o de capacitación digital para la fuerza laboral de cada país (Ricaurte 2019). Así, las corporaciones tecnológicas no solo desarrollan un nuevo tipo de soberanía sobre los territorios digitales, sino que además se "infiltran" en los Estados tradicionales "a través de convenios, cuya legitimación solo es posible por la ausencia de un debate profundo con relación al rol que las plataformas están adquiriendo en las nuevas formas del capitalismo" (Sandrone y Rodríguez 2020: 40). ...
This article proposes to analyze some of the main theoretical discussions about the “planetary-scale computation” that have multiplied in the field of humanities and social sciences during the last decade. One of the main theses at stake in these debates is the consideration of artificial intelligence as an extractive industry that operates globally, mainly exploiting natural resources, big data, and workforce. After reviewing the main elements and perspectives on this thesis, we establish different links between large-scale computing and the configuration of a new colonial regime that crosses the political, economic and cultural dynamics of contemporary societies. Faced with this, we propose that a theoretical counterpoint to computational colonialism can be found in the “planetary turn” that the humanities and social sciences have experienced. Embracing “planetarity” thinking will then allow us to critically address the role of large-scale computation in the midst of the Anthropocene crisis. Finally, the review of these debates will allow us to propose some keys to think about the decolonization of planetary-scale computation as a fundamental practice to face the ongoing climate crisis.
... This can facilitate the reproduction of the 'hierarchies of race, gender and geopolitics' that served to actuate colonial control (Maldonado-Torres, 2007). Data-centric epistemologies can therefore marginalize human beings from the social order and deny the 'existence of alternative worlds and epistemologies' (Ricaurte, 2019). ...
... The research on New Media Literacy and its orientation towards developing transmedia and augmented literacies (Ferrarelli, 2021a) confirmed the negative influence of datafication. Consequently, additional critical social research on the topic revealed the implications of algorithmic manipulation and surveillance for identity and privacy concerns (Pangrazio & Selwyn, 2019); for the inequities of digital colonialism (Ricaurte, 2019) and economic development (Scasserra & Sai, 2020); for gender concerns (D'Ignazio & Klein, 2020); and for social justice (Dencik et al., 2019). ...
Despite progress in data literacy frameworks associated with a critical discussion of datafication, educators are still perplexed when it comes to working with these issues in their everyday teaching practice. In part, this is due to the complexity of the data infrastructures that permeate educational practice itself. In this context, it seems particularly appropriate to understand the discursive phenomena, the construction of professional practise and therefore the educators’ positionings around the issues of datafication in general, and the development of critical data literacy, namely, “postdigital positinings”. This paper proposes a collaborative autoethnographic analysis of the professional experiences of the three authors, as educators. As women with complex migrant identities, with roots in the Global South and at the same time, bearers of European métisages, our pathways meet at the crossover of an international project in which we develop materials and design educational activities. Our history lies on an intersectional basis that allows us to express rich positionalities, full of examples and resources that can be resounding notes for the construction of agentic educational practices in this field of post-digital forces.
... This social and spatial sorting results in those that are already marginalized in society experiencing a double form of data colonialism (Mann and Daly, 2019). As well as experiencing new forms of data power, data colonialism amplifies historical forms of colonization and practices of social and economic exclusion (Ricaurte, 2019). This is particularly evident with respect to race, where people of colour are subjected to new algorithmic forms of violence, which build on and extend traditional forms of structural violence (Benjamin, 2019). ...
... This social and spatial sorting results in those that are already marginalized in society experiencing a double form of data colonialism (Mann and Daly, 2019). As well as experiencing new forms of data power, data colonialism amplifies historical forms of colonization and practices of social and economic exclusion (Ricaurte, 2019). This is particularly evident with respect to race, where people of colour are subjected to new algorithmic forms of violence, which build on and extend traditional forms of structural violence (Benjamin, 2019). ...
... Our paper links these observations to decolonial arguments. As others contend, techno-solutionism contributes to new digital colonial practices (Kwet 2019;Madianou 2019;Ricaurte 2019;Couldry and Mejias 2019). What these critiques sometimes miss, however, is how such narratives reflect what Santos (2014) describes as an 'abyssal line' of thinking, which fails to appreciate the diverse ways of knowing and living across the Global South. ...
The violence towards the Rohingya people in Myanmar has been well documented, with Facebook serving as a key site for the proliferation of anti-Muslim hate speech in the country. There are differing explanations as to the extent and significance of its role in contributing to this conflict. Some analyses have cited Myanmar’s internal deficiencies, framing the country as a bad adopter of technologies. These depictions rarely consider the broader conditions of technological adoption that extend beyond Myanmar’s borders. In this paper, we connect science, technology, and innovation (STI) work and decolonial analysis to highlight how Facebook’s activities in Myanmar are better understood as inextricably linked to the utopian and ‘techno-solutionist’ narratives mobilised by companies, particularly when deploying their technology in lower-income countries. The case study of Facebook’s role in Myanmar exemplifies how developing states can become understood as scapegoats when the promises behind new technologies are not realised. These practices obscure the role that Big Tech proponents of technology can play in generating internal crises in the Global South. They illustrate how certain ways of thinking about and promoting technology can play a role in reinscribing hegemonic colonial dynamics, something that is not unique to Myanmar and can produce broader material harm.
... Thirdly, creative approaches emphasised the need engaging in activism about data injustices relating to race or gender, particularly at representational levels Lee et al., 2022). Data sovereignty was less easy to deal with, but there were collectives claiming to embrace alternative technologies and discussing diversified pathways to step aside from data monetisation and the domination of Big Tech companies in education (European Parliament and Levi, 2022;Ricaurte, 2019). Such a relational idea of data, though, is also difficult to connect to the students' daily lives, and they might remain at the level of abstraction, far away from the immediate learners' needs and understandings (Bowler et al., 2017;Kuhn, 2023;Pangrazio and Cardozo-Gaibisso, 2021). ...
Purpose
It has been demonstrated that AI-powered, data-driven tools’ usage is not universal, but deeply linked to socio-cultural contexts. The purpose of this paper is to display the need of adopting situated lenses, relating to specific personal and professional learning about data protection and privacy.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors introduce the results of a case study based on a large educational intervention at a fully online university. The views of the participants from degrees representing different knowledge areas and contexts of technology adoption (work, education and leisure) were explored after engaging in the analysis of the terms and conditions of use about privacy and data usage. After consultation, 27 course instructors (CIs) integrated the activity and worked with 823 students (702 of whom were complete and correct for analytical purposes).
Findings
The results of this study indicated that the intervention increased privacy-conscious online behaviour among most participants. Results were more contradictory when looking at the tools’ daily usage, with overall positive considerations around the tools being mostly needed or “indispensable”.
Research limitations/implications
Though appliable only to the authors’ case study and not generalisable, the authors’ results show both the complexity of privacy views and the presence of forms of renunciation in the trade-off between data protection and the need of using a specific software into a personal and professional context.
Practical implications
This study provides an example of teaching and learning activities that supports the development of data literacy, with a focus on data privacy. Therefore, beyond the research findings, any educator can build over the authors’ proposal to produce materials and interventions aimed at developing awareness on data privacy issues.
Social implications
Developing awareness, understanding and skills relating to data privacy is crucial to live in a society where digital technologies are used in any area of our personal and professional life. Well-informed citizens will be able to obscure, resist or claim for their rights whenever a violation of their privacy takes place. Also, they will be able to support (through adoption) better quality apps and platforms, instead of passively accepting what is evident or easy to use.
Originality/value
The authors specifically spot how students and educators, as part of a specific learning and cultural ecosystem, need tailored opportunities to keep on reflecting on their degrees of freedom and their possibilities to act regarding evolving data systems and their alternatives.
... For example, scholarly work has considered how technology corporations' power is embedded within continuing (Aouragh and Chakravartty 2016;Au 2022;Madianou 2019) or new (Kwet 2019; Oyedemi 2021) forms of colonialism, or whether new communications infrastructure and technology such as platforms have created a kind of informational imperialism (Fuchs 2010;Jin 2013;Winseck 2017). Other works on contemporary data practices have used colonialism as a framing device with which to consider the role of data in the evolution of capitalism (Couldry and Mejias 2019;Thatcher, O'Sullivan, and Mahmoudi 2016) or considered how data colonialism interacts with other forms of coloniality (Lehuedé 2023;Ricaurte 2019). There have also been some compelling critiques of the data colonialism framework, which historicize how data practices are entangled within existing colonial relationships (Calzati 2021;Gray 2023). ...
Although space colonization appears to belong to the world of science fiction, private corporations owned by Silicon Valley billionaires—and supported by the US state—have spent billions making it a reality. Analyses of space colonialism have sometimes viewed these projects as distinct from earthly histories of colonialism, instead locating them within traditions of libertarianism, neoliberalism, or techno-utopianism. By reconstructing technology elites’ political visions for celestial settlements within the literature on colonial-era corporations and property, this study argues that the idea of outer space as an empty frontier relies on the same logic of territorialization that was used to justify terrestrial colonialism and indigenous dispossession. It further traces how the idea of “engineering territory” has inspired wider Silicon Valley political exit projects such as cyberspace, seasteading, and network states, which, rather than creating spaces of anarchical freedom, are attempting to recreate the territorial state in new spaces.
... In combining the fields of artificial intelligence and decolonial theories, a new type of historical hindsight analysis can be developed. For example, we can develop analytical algorithms that utilize AI data and predictions (AI as an object), and the structures that support AI such as data, networks, and policies (AI as a subject) as new expressions of the colonial power (Quijano 2000;Mignolo 2007;Maldonado-Torres 2007;Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2015) and of technological power (Ricaurte 2019;Couldry and Mejias 2019;Ali 2016) that is involved in creating virtual universities. This type of historical analysis can help dismantle harmful power asymmetries and concepts of knowledge and allow creation of a "pluriversal epistemology of the future" (Mignolo 2012) that acknowledges and supports a wider radius of socio-political, ecological, cultural, and economic needs of dynamically created VUs. ...
... In parallel, there has been a major rethinking of the digital ecosystem as one that is different and shaped by local idiosyncrasies. The Global South and Latin America have their specificities concerning the challenges of digitization and datafication processes from those emerging in Silicon Valley or the global North (Aguerre & Tarullo, 2021;Milan & Treré, 2019;Ricaurte, 2019). For example, notions of 'digital universalism' have been debunked by the experiences of appropriation of ICTs in countries such as Peru (Chan, 2014). ...
Digital technologies have a recognised potential to build more efficient, credible, and innovative public institutions in Latin America. Despite progress, digital transformation in Latin American governments remains limited. In this work, we explore a peculiar yet largely understudied opportunity in the region: pursuing digital government transformation as a collaborative process between the government and civil society organisations. To do so, we draw from information systems research on digital government and platforms for development, complemented with governance theory from political science and conduct an interpretive in‐depth case study of an urban reporting platform in Montevideo called ‘Por Mi Barrio’. The study reveals three mutually reinforced orders of governance in the trajectory of the project and explain how the collaboration unfolded over time: (i) a technical decision to use open platform architectures; (ii) the negotiation of formal and informal rules to make the project thrive and (iii) a shared, long‐term ideology around the value of open technologies and technical sovereignty grounded in years of political history. Using a contextual explanation approach, our study helps to improve our understanding on the governance of collaborative digital government platforms in Latin America, with specific contributions to practice.
... After engaging partners from around the world, Mozilla researchers found that 'alternative data governance' initiatives generally emanate from North America and Western Europe (Baack & Maxwell, 2020). Explaining this geographic bias, and accounting for nonwestern epistemologies of data deserves further scholarly attention (see Arora, 2016;Ricaurte, 2019) but is outside the scope of this study. Further, Indigenousled efforts to govern data according to culturally relevant principles are not in- Toronto's waterfront region involved creating a 'Civic Data Trust' to manage the 'urban data' they hoped to collect from public spaces (Artyushina, 2020;Scassa, 2020). ...
O ciberespaço tem sido repaginado, repovoado com imagens sintéticas, isto é, imagens produzidas por inteligências artificiais (IA) sintetizadoras de mídias digitais. Esse fenômeno tecnológico e comunicacional produz impactos e repercussões no imaginário social, uma vez que muda o volume e a proporção de imagens produzidas pela criatividade humana com e sem a engenhosidade maquínica das IA. Temos desde uma pletora de novas imagens com estética fotorrealista, que nem sequer são oriundas de máquinas fotográficas, até a representação fotográfica de pessoas que nunca nasceram, nem vivem, muito menos morrerão, assim como a de paisagens terráqueas inexistentes e, num primeiro momento, indiscerníveis de uma paisagem factual, tal é seu poder de convencimento simbólico.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the most spoken-about topics in the media, academia, government and other platforms. One of the aspects that is often discussed is the ethical implications of AI and approaches to mitigate the risks. Artificial intelligence has an undeniable impact on industries as well as socio-economic structures; however, this article focusses on the impact of AI on three concerns mainly, humanity, spirituality and the environment. This article is an interdisciplinary study of African theological ethics and the philosophy of technology. It discusses the theological implications (doctrinal issues) of emerging technologies, particularly AI. It discusses technology as power which has impacted Africa since the first industrial revolution and emphasises the importance of African ethics in the context of AI in Africa. This article critically discusses ubuntu ethics and its critique. It focuses on AI and its impact on humanity, spirituality and the environment, and proposes a holistic ubuntu AI ethics approach in South Africa.
The use of learning analytics (LA), defined as personalized learning environments through the continuous measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of data about learners and their context, is rapidly expanding. A growing body of literature has questioned the benefits attributed to LA solutions and raised a number of concerns about the current developments in the education sector. However, we know little about how the beliefs, values, and emotions of different groups of educational practitioners shape how they engage with learning analytics technologies and influence the evolution of the cultures of practice shaping the adoption of learning analytics. Here we report on research that asks: how do culturally situated beliefs, values, and emotions shape UK-based higher education practitioners’ engagements with learning analytics? We conducted 34 semi-structured interviews and four focus groups with staff from a provider of digital services for UK higher education and staff from UK universities. With insights from this research, we aim to contribute to empower practitioners in higher education and relevant stakeholders to foster the development of critical and reflective data cultures that are able to exploit the possibilities of learning analytics while being critically responsive to their societal implications and limitations.
This article investigates the metaphor of the “black box” in artificial intelligence, a representation that often suggests that AI is an unfathomable power, politically uncontrollable and shrouded in an aura of opacity. While the concept of the “black box” is legitimate and applicable in deep neural networks due to the in- herent complexity of the process, it has also become a generic pretext for the perception, which we seek to critically analyze, that AI systems are inscrutable and out of control, as well as supposedly endowed with intel- ligence and creativity. To challenge these ideas, we will address what we call the supremacy of patterns and the two significant phenomena that result from it: enchanted determinism and the dictatorship of the past.
The efforts to regulate artificial intelligence (AI) are becoming more pronounced, predominantly steered by the Global North (GN) as seen in initiatives like the EU AI Act. While a burgeoning sentiment in AI governance suggests that the technology and its repercussions do not confine themselves within national borders, this demands a globally harmonised approach. However, such narratives often gloss over the rich tapestry of socio-cultural, legal, and economic variations across countries. These disparities are essential because AI does not uniformly affect societies; its risks and repercussions vary. Despite this, post-colonial Global South (GS) nations tend to unreflectively adopt AI regulations modelled on their Global North counterparts, raising concerns about perpetuating colonial mindsets. Using Nigeria as a case study, this chapter critically explores the 'coloniality' underpinning the legislative frameworks of AI. It challenges the overarching narratives presented by rationalist, and functionalist legal theories, especially concerning post-colonial Global South nations like Nigeria. By employing a decolonial perspective, the chapter illuminates how the emerging AI governance structures bear the unmistakable imprints of past colonialism and how the conflict theory provides insights into reforming the approaches to AI governance.
The development and deployment of machine learning and artificial intelli-gence (AI) engender “AI colonialism”, a term that conceptually overlaps with“data colonialism”, as a form of injustice. AI colonialism is in need of decolonization for three reasons. Politically, because it enforces digital capitalism’shegemony. Ecologically, as it negatively impacts the environment and intensifies the extraction of natural resources and consumption of energy. Epistemically, since the social systems within which AI is embedded reinforce Western universalism by imposing Western colonial values on the global South when these manifest in the digital realm is a form of digital capitalism. These reasons require a new conceptualization of AI decolonization. First this paper draws from the historical debates on the concepts of colonialism anddecolonization. Secondly it retrieves Achille Mbembe’s notion of decolonization as disenclosure to argue that the decolonization of AI will have to be theabolishment of political, ecological and epistemic borders erected and reinforced in the phases of its design, production, development of AI in the West and drawing from the knowledge from the global South. In conclusion, it is discussed how conceiving of decolonial AI as form of disenclosure opens up new ways to think about and intervene in colonial instantiations of AI development and deployment, in order to empower “the wretched of AI”, re-ecologise the unsustainable ecologies AI depends on and to counter the colonial power structures unreflective AI deployment risks to reinforce.
This article draws upon a desk-based review and expert interviews with practitioners in the Global South to understand the diverse forms of data mediation that have become increasingly visible in the wake of the global coronavirus disease-19 pandemic. In contrast to accounts that frame the Global South solely as a site for the extraction of data and cheap, unskilled digital labor, we explore alternative accounts of the ways in which individuals and organizations in the Global South are asserting their role as active mediators of data who carve out spaces for value creation that are meaningful in their local and national contexts. From data collection and “refining” to the analysis of data for local needs and markets, these forms of data mediation demonstrate some of the changing dynamics of data practices globally and reflect the necessity of more nuanced analyses of value and power within and across regions.
The aim of S&T&I For 2050 is the identification and mapping of future scientific and technological developments that can radically improve ecosystem performance. This shall provide reflections towards the 2nd strategic plan of Horizon Europe, in its broad direction to support the Sustainable Development Goals.
The frameworks of cyber, technology and data sovereignty have become some of the most influential alternative technological imaginaries. Developed by states and civil society groups, such frameworks are seducing a broad range of actors seeking to reassert their autonomy and self-determination in relation to digital technology and infrastructure. Against this backdrop, this article interrogates the alleged transformative character of digital sovereignty. Do these frameworks support alternative planetary futures, or do they involve a mere change in the actors who are privileging from the technological status quo? To answer this question, I examine the rhetoric and realisation of digital sovereignty frameworks by the Chinese state, the European Union (EU) and Latin American civil society in light of Walter Mignolo's decolonial option. The decolonial option gets inspiration from decolonial praxis and aims at enabling polycentric, noncapitalist and nonanthropocentric planetary futures. As I show, there is some degree of alignment between digital sovereignty frameworks and the decolonial option in the sphere of international politics, but less so in the world economy and the environment. While in some areas the formulations by the Chinese state and the EU can exacerbate coloniality, the Latin American civil society one constitutes a promising attempt at appropriating digital sovereignty from below and promoting peaceful forms of coexistence with the environment although needs further development.
Bu makale, son yıllarda veri sömürgeciliği (data colonialism) üzerine gelişmekte olan literatüre eleştirel bir bakış sunmaya çalışacaktır. Siyaset felsefesi ve siyaset kuramı eleştirilerine zayıf bir şekilde yer verildiği gözleminden hareketle bu literatürü inceleyen bu makalenin dikkat çektiği sorular şudur: Bir yeni-sömürgecilik biçimi olarak küresel bir veri sömürgeciliğinden söz edilebilir mi? Böylesi bir sömürgecilik karşısında verinin sömürgesizleştirilmesi mümkün müdür? Bu sorulara yanıt verebilmek için makalenin birinci bölümü verilerin sömürgeleştirilmesine odaklanmaktadır. Bu bölümde veri, veri kapitalizmi ve veri eşitsizliği kavramlarına bakılarak veri sömürgeciliklerinin tanımları sunulacaktır. Bunu takiben bu bölümde veri sömürgeciliklerinin temel iki içeriği de izah edilecektir: (i) Yaşamın teknik bilgiler tarafından yönetilebileceğine dair bir çokluk ve siyaset reddi olarak sömürgeci platform teknikçiliği; (ii) Bir yeniden sömürgeci ortaklığı olarak özel şirketlerin devlet iştiraklarıyla aşırı güçlenmesine yol açan veri kapitalizmi. Böylece veri sömürgeciliklerinin ana tezleri, temel kavramları ve onun sömürgecilikle farklı yahut ortak olan yanları işlenecektir. Makalenin ikinci bölümü verinin sömürgesizleştirilmesi meselesine dikkat çekmektedir. Bu bölüm alternatif bir verinin tahayyül edilip edilemeyeceği sorusuna odaklanacaktır. Mevcut veri sömürgeciliği literatüründe oldukça zayıf bir şekilde bulunan siyaset felsefesi bu sorgu için ana izlek olacaktır. Verinin epistemolojik eleştirisini takiben doğrudan siyasal eleştirisine geçilecektir. Burada veri sömürgeciliklerini zayıflatabilmek için kurgulanabilecek karşı-verilerden söz edilecektir. Verinin egemen diller dışında dillerde temsil edilebilmesi, somut dünyadaki sömürülerden azade kılınan soyutlaştırılmasının reddedilmesi, tekrar kamusal bir tartışmaya konu edilmesi gibi eleştiriler sıralanacaktır. Bu verinin kamusallaştırılması, karasallaştırılması ve siyasileştirilmesidir. Makale, veri sömürgeciliği literatüründe zayıf bir şekilde bulunan siyaset felsefesi ve siyaset kuramının tartışmaya dahil edilmesi vasıtasıyla sömürülen verinin işlenişine dair bir bilgi, verinin temsiline dair ise bir varlık eleştirisi getirmeyi ummaktadır. Buna verinin madun eleştirisi de denilebilir.
ABSTRACT
This article aims to present an emerging perspective for analyzing digital technologies, centering around the concepts of pluriversality and communality, and drawing on the experiences of the Network of Communicators Boca de Polen, a civil organization that has been supporting community and indigenous radios in Chiapas, Mexico for over two decades. Using a Participatory Action Research framework, the study delves into the network's experiences and those of the radios it has accompanied, revealing a profound interplay of sociotechnical practices deeply rooted in communal experiences. It sheds light on a particular pathway of technology appropriation and resistance and, by shifting the place of enunciation, explores new dimensions of concerns and possibilities enabled by digital technologies. The experiential knowledge gained from Boca de Polen is presented as a tangible manifestation of a pluriversal vision of technology, vital for fostering inclusive critical reflections on the multifaceted implications of digital technologies.
RESUMEN
Este artículo tiene como objetivo presentar una perspectiva emergente para analizar las tecnologías digitales, centrada en los conceptos de pluriversalidad y comunalidad, y basándose en las experiencias de la Red de Comunicadores Boca de Polen, una organización civil que ha estado apoyando a radios comunitarias e indígenas en Chiapas, México, durante más de dos décadas. Utilizando un marco de Investigación-Acción Participativa, el estudio profundiza en las experiencias de la red y de las radios que ha acompañado, revelando una profunda interacción de prácticas sociotécnicas arraigadas en experiencias comunales. Centrándose en una experiencia particular de apropiación y resistencia y al cambiar el lugar de enunciación, explora nuevas dimensiones de preocupaciones y posibilidades habilitadas por las tecnologías digitales. El conocimiento experiencial obtenido de Boca de Polen se presenta como una manifestación tangible de una visión pluriversal de la tecnología, vital para fomentar reflexiones críticas inclusivas sobre las implicaciones multifacéticas de las tecnologías digitales.
Data has become a key format for activists to visibilizar (make visible/call attention to) and denounce social issues. Drawing on the concept of "artivism," we name as data artivism those works that visually intervene in the contestation around an issue by mobilizing art and craft as a form of resistance and as a method to visualize data. In this commentary, we share three examples of data artivism on the issue of feminicide. Our aim is to inspire the fields of critical data and data visu-alization studies to engage more deeply with art and find common language with artists, activists and advocacy groups (particularly those in Latin America), who are going beyond conventional visualization to reveal a range of alternative ways to mobilize data.
This article discusses two seemingly unrelated but homologous challenges to established sociological thinking, namely machine learning technologies and postcolonial critique. Both of these confront conventional human-centric sociological notions. Where the rise of machine learning should prompt sociologists to take the agency of nonhuman systems seriously, postcolonial critique challenges the idea of Eurocentric human agency. I discuss whether this dual agency challenge can be addressed through Latour’s actor-network theory and Luhmann’s sociological systems theory – both of which explicitly aim to transcend classical human-centric approaches. I argue that Latour’s work can align with postcolonial sociology. However, despite broadening the notion of agency, his actor-network concept remains strongly human-centric. It merely expands the range of actors with which humans engage rather than analysing interactions among nonhuman actants, such as machine learning systems. In contrast, such interactions can be understood through Luhmann’s theorisation, which, however, can be subjected to postcolonial critique.
Este trabalho analisa práticas discursivas digitais sobre Alejandra Pizarnik e Clarice Lispector no Twitter entre 2018 e 2022 utilizando a perspectiva teórica das Humanidades Digitais decoloniais e feministas na América Latina e do feminismo de dados. Emprega processamento computacional para captar, compor e processar grandes massas de tweets que referenciam as autoras. Partindo da Análise do Discurso Digital e do Estudo dos Afetos, considera as práticas de citação, nomeação e referenciação de Pizarnik e Lispector no Twitter como performances tecnodiscursivas capazes de construir laços afetivos, de compreensão e constituir comunidades no Twitter. Argumenta-se que essas performances possuem três funções fundamentais: criar coletividades feministas, genealogias e memória discursiva, formando sororidades e dororidades; explorar o afeto como forma de exploração da subjetividade marcada pela falta e pela possibilidade de afetar e ser afetado; e mobilizar sentidos políticos que repolitizam o afeto e a emoção, adquirindo força na vida pública.
The extractive logic of Big Data-driven technology and knowledge production has raised serious concerns. While most criticism initially focused on the impacts on Western societies, attention is now increasingly turning to the consequences for communities in the Global South. To date, debates have focused on private-sector activities. In this article, we start from the conviction that publicly funded knowledge and technology production must also be scrutinized for their potential neocolonial entanglements. To this end, we analyze the dynamics of collaboration in an European Union-funded research project that collects data for developing a social platform focused on diversity. The project includes pilot sites in China, Denmark, the United Kingdom, India, Italy, Mexico, Mongolia, and Paraguay. We present the experience at four field sites and reflect on the project’s initial conception, our collaboration, challenges, progress, and results. We then analyze the different experiences in comparison. We conclude that while we have succeeded in finding viable strategies to avoid contributing to the dynamics of unilateral data extraction as one side of the neocolonial circle, it has been infinitely more difficult to break through the much more subtle but no less powerful mechanisms of paternalism that we find to be prevalent in data-driven North–South relations. These mechanisms, however, can be identified as the other side of the neocolonial circle.
Using images from large-scale vision datasets (LSVDs), five practice-based studies – experimentations – were carried out to shed light on the visual content, replications of historical continuities, and precarious human labour behind computer vision. First, I focus my analysis on the dominant ideologies coming from a colonial mindset and modern taxonomy present in the visual content of the images. Then, in an exchange with microworkers, I highlight the decontextualized practices that these images undergo during their tagging and/or description, so that they become data for machine learning. Finally, using as reference two counterhegemonic initiatives from Latin America in the 1960s, I present a pedagogical experience constituting a dataset for computer vision based on works of art at a historical museum. The results offered by these experimentations serve to help speculate on more radical ways of seeing the world through machines.
p>Los big data representan nuevos retos y nuevas oportunidades para la ciudadanía. Las prácticas del “activismo de datos” surgen de la intersección de las dimensiones social y tecnológica de la acción humana, por la cual la ciudadanía adopta una postura crítica hacia los big data, que se apropia y manipula para hacer campaña y promover el cambio social. Este artículo teórico explora el surgimiento del activismo de datos como una realidad empírica y una herramienta heurística para estudiar cómo la gente se relaciona políticamente con los big data. Ponemos en contexto este concepto a través de una revisión de literatura académica y ofrecemos una definición del activismo de datos, así como una agenda tentativa para su estudio. Argumentamos que el activismo de datos representa una nueva forma de medio ciudadano que coloca en su mismo centro una aproximación crítica hacia los big data.</p
Varias corrientes de la literatura sobre compromiso social, medios digitales y big data conciben las plataformas digitales como un atajo hacia la ren-dición de cuentas gubernamental y el empoderamiento de la ciudadanía. Se-gún estas visiones, las redes sociales y las nuevas posibilidades brindadas por el análisis de grandes datos represen-tan la solución a las problemáticas de las democracias contemporáneas. A partir de un análisis crítico de diversos fenómenos sociales y políticos del Mé-xico actual, este artículo demuestra que distintos partidos políticos y Gobiernos han usado con éxito nuevas formas de represión algorítmica con la intención de fabricar el consentimiento, sabotear la disidencia, amenazar y vigilar a acti-vistas y apropiarse de los datos perso-nales de los ciudadanos. El artículo ar-gumenta que estas nuevas estrategias muestran claramente las limitaciones de las plataformas digitales —y de las redes sociales en particular— para la participación democrática, ya que los Several strands of literature on social engagement, digital media and big data conceive digital platforms as a shortcut to government accountability and citizen empowerment. According to these visions, social media and the new possibilities offered by the analysis of big data represent the solution to the issues of contemporary democracies. Based on a critical analysis of various social and political phenomena of contemporary Mexico, this article demonstrates that diverse political parties and governments have successfully used new forms of algorithmic repression to manufacture consent, sabotage dissent, threaten and monitor activists and obtain citizens' personal data. This paper argues that these new strategies clearly show the limitations of digital platforms —and of social media in particular— for democratic participation, as activists have to fight against refined techniques of control and oppression that efficiently adopt and manipulate new communication technologies. In the conclusions,
As datafication progressively invades all spheres of contemporary society, citizens grow increasingly aware of the critical role of information as the new fabric of social life. This awareness triggers new forms of civic engagement and political action that we term “data activism”. Data activism indicates the range of sociotechnical practices that interrogate the fundamental paradigm shift brought about by datafication. Combining Science and Technology Studies with Social Movement Studies, this theoretical article offers a foretaste of a research agenda on data activism. It foregrounds democratic agency vis-à-vis datafication, and unites under the same label ways of affirmative engagement with data (“proactive data activism”, e. g. databased advocacy) and tactics of resistance to massive data collection (“reactive data activism”, e. g. encryption practices), understood as a continuum along which activists position and reposition themselves and their tactics. The article argues that data activism supports the emergence of novel epistemic cultures within the realm of civil society, making sense of data as a way of knowing the world and turning it into a point of intervention and generation of data countercultures. It offers the notion of data activism as a heuristic tool for the study of new forms of political participation and civil engagement in the age of datafication, and explores data activism as an evolving theoretical construct susceptible to contestation and revision.
The Snowden leaks, first published in June 2013, provided unprecedented insights into the operations of state-corporate surveillance, highlighting the extent to which everyday communication is integrated into an extensive regime of control that relies on the ‘datafication’ of social life. Whilst such data-driven forms of governance have significant implications for citizenship and society, resistance to surveillance in the wake of the Snowden leaks has predominantly centred on techno-legal responses relating to the development and use of encryption and policy advocacy around privacy and data protection. Based on in-depth interviews with a range of social justice activists, we argue that there is a significant level of ambiguity around this kind of anti-surveillance resistance in relation to broader activist practices, and critical responses to the Snowden leaks have been confined within particular expert communities. Introducing the notion of ‘data justice’, we therefore go on to make the case that resistance to surveillance needs to be (re)conceptualized on terms that can address the implications of this data-driven form of governance in relation to broader social justice agendas. Such an approach is needed, we suggest, in light of a shift to surveillance capitalism in which the collection, use and analysis of our data increasingly comes to shape the opportunities and possibilities available to us and the kind of society we live in.
The era of Big Data has begun. Computer scientists, physicists, economists, mathematicians, political scientists, bio-informaticists, sociologists, and other scholars are clamouring for access to the massive quantities of information produced by and about people, things, and their interactions. Significant questions emerge. Will large-scale search data help us create better tools, services, and public goods? Or will it usher in a new wave of privacy incursions and invasive marketing? Will data analytics help us understand online communities and political movements? Or will it be used to track protesters and suppress speech? Will it transform how we study human communication and culture, or narrow the palette of research options and alter what 'research' means? Given the rise of Big Data as a socio-technical phenomenon, we argue that it is necessary to critically interrogate its assumptions and biases. In this article, we offer six provocations to spark conversations about the issues of Big Data: a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon that rests on the interplay of technology, analysis, and mythology that provokes extensive utopian and dystopian rhetoric.
A key contemporary trend emerging in big data science is the quantified self (QS)–individuals engaged in the self-tracking of any kind of biological, physical, behavioral, or environmental information as n=1 individuals or in groups. There are opportunities for big data scientists to develop new models to support QS data collection, integration, and analysis, and also to lead in defining open-access database resources and privacy standards for how personal data is used. Next-generation QS applications could include tools for rendering QS data meaningful in behavior change, establishing baselines and variability in objective metrics, applying new kinds of pattern recognition techniques, and aggregating multiple self-tracking data streams from wearable electronics, biosensors, mobile phones, genomic data, and cloud-based services. The long-term vision of QS activity is that of a systemic monitoring approach where an individual's continuous personal information climate provides real-time performance optimization suggestions. There are some potential limitations related to QS activity—barriers to widespread adoption and a critique regarding scientific soundness—but these may be overcome. One interesting aspect of QS activity is that it is fundamentally a quantitative and qualitative phenomenon since it includes both the collection of objective metrics data and the subjective experience of the impact of these data. Some of this dynamic is being explored as the quantified self is becoming the qualified self in two new ways: by applying QS methods to the tracking of qualitative phenomena such as mood, and by understanding that QS data collection is just the first step in creating qualitative feedback loops for behavior change. In the long-term future, the quantified self may become additionally transformed into the extended exoself as data quantification and self-tracking enable the development of new sense capabilities that are not possible with ordinary senses. The individual body becomes a more knowable, calculable, and administrable object through QS activity, and individuals have an increasingly intimate relationship with data as it mediates the experience of reality.
The number of devices on the Internet exceeded the number of people on the Internet in 2008, and is estimated to reach 50 billion in 2020. A wide-ranging Internet of Things (IOT) ecosystem is emerging to support the process of connecting real-world objects like buildings, roads, household appliances, and human bodies to the Internet via sensors and microprocessor chips that record and transmit data such as sound waves, temperature, movement, and other variables. The explosion in Internet-connected sensors means that new classes of technical capability and application are being created. More granular 24/7 quantified monitoring is leading to a deeper understanding of the internal and external worlds encountered by humans. New data literacy behaviors such as correlation assessment, anomaly detection, and high-frequency data processing are developing as humans adapt to the different kinds of data flows enabled by the IOT. The IOT ecosystem has four critical functional steps: data creation, information generation, meaning-making, and action-taking. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the current and rapidly emerging ecosystem of the Internet of Things (IOT).
Digital health technologies are playing an increasingly important role in healthcare, health education and voluntary self-surveillance, self-quantification and self-care practices. This paper presents a critical analysis of one digital health device: computer apps used to self-track features of users' sexual and reproductive activities and functions. After a review of the content of such apps available in the Apple App Store and Google play™ store, some of their sociocultural, ethical and political implications are discussed. These include the role played by these apps in participatory surveillance, their configuration of sexuality and reproduction, the valorising of the quantification of the body in the context of neoliberalism and self-responsibility, and issues concerning privacy, data security and the use of the data collected by these apps. It is suggested that such apps represent sexuality and reproduction in certain defined and limited ways that work to perpetuate normative stereotypes and assumptions about women and men as sexual and reproductive subjects. Furthermore there are significant ethical and privacy implications emerging from the use of these apps and the data they produce. The paper ends with suggestions concerning the 'queering' of such technologies in response to these issues.
The era of Big Data has begun. Computer scientists, physicists, economists, mathematicians, political scientists, bio-informaticists, sociologists, and other scholars are clamoring for access to the massive quantities of information produced by and about people, things, and their interactions. Diverse groups argue about the potential benefits and costs of analyzing genetic sequences, social media interactions, health records, phone logs, government records, and other digital traces left by people. Significant questions emerge. Will large-scale search data help us create better tools, services, and public goods? Or will it usher in a new wave of privacy incursions and invasive marketing? Will data analytics help us understand online communities and political movements? Or will it be used to track protesters and suppress speech? Will it transform how we study human communication and culture, or narrow the palette of research options and alter what ‘research’ means? Given the rise of Big Data as a socio-technical phenomenon, we argue that it is necessary to critically interrogate its assumptions and biases. In this article, we offer six provocations to spark conversations about the issues of Big Data: a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon that rests on the interplay of technology, analysis, and mythology that provokes extensive utopian and dystopian rhetoric.
An exploration of the diverse experiments in digital futures as they advance far from the celebrated centers of technological innovation and entrepreneurship.
In Networking Peripheries, Anita Chan shows how digital cultures flourish beyond Silicon Valley and other celebrated centers of technological innovation and entrepreneurship. The evolving digital cultures in the Global South vividly demonstrate that there are more ways than one to imagine what digital practice and global connection could look like. To explore these alternative developments, Chan investigates the diverse initiatives being undertaken to “network” the nation in contemporary Peru, from attempts to promote the intellectual property of indigenous artisans to the national distribution of digital education technologies to open technology activism in rural and urban zones.
Drawing on ethnographic accounts from government planners, regional free-software advocates, traditional artisans, rural educators, and others, Chan demonstrates how such developments unsettle dominant conceptions of information classes and innovations zones. Government efforts to turn rural artisans into a new creative class progress alongside technology activists' efforts to promote indigenous rights through information tactics; plans pressing for the state wide adoption of open source–based technologies advance while the One Laptop Per Child initiative aims to network rural classrooms by distributing laptops. As these cases show, the digital cultures and network politics emerging on the periphery do more than replicate the technological future imagined as universal from the center.
As seen in Wired and Time
A revealing look at how negative biases against women of color are embedded in search engine results and algorithms
Run a Google search for “black girls”—what will you find? “Big Booty” and other sexually explicit terms are likely to come up as top search terms. But, if you type in “white girls,” the results are radically different. The suggested porn sites and un-moderated discussions about “why black women are so sassy” or “why black women are so angry” presents a disturbing portrait of black womanhood in modern society.
In Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Umoja Noble challenges the idea that search engines like Google offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities. Data discrimination is a real social problem; Noble argues that the combination of private interests in promoting certain sites, along with the monopoly status of a relatively small number of Internet search engines, leads to a biased set of search algorithms that privilege whiteness and discriminate against people of color, specifically women of color.
Through an analysis of textual and media searches as well as extensive research on paid online advertising, Noble exposes a culture of racism and sexism in the way discoverability is created online. As search engines and their related companies grow in importance—operating as a source for email, a major vehicle for primary and secondary school learning, and beyond—understanding and reversing these disquieting trends and discriminatory practices is of utmost importance.
An original, surprising and, at times, disturbing account of bias on the internet, Algorithms of Oppression contributes to our understanding of how racism is created, maintained, and disseminated in the 21st century.
We are often told that data are the new oil. But unlike oil, data are not a substance found in nature. It must be appropriated. The capture and processing of social data unfolds through a process we call data relations, which ensures the “natural” conversion of daily life into a data stream. The result is nothing less than a new social order, based on continuous tracking, and offering unprecedented new opportunities for social discrimination and behavioral influence. We propose that this process is best understood through the history of colonialism. Thus, data relations enact a new form of data colonialism, normalizing the exploitation of human beings through data, just as historic colonialism appropriated territory and resources and ruled subjects for profit. Data colonialism paves the way for a new stage of capitalism whose outlines we only glimpse: the capitalization of life without limit.
In the digital economy, user data is typically treated as capital created by corporations observing willing individuals. This neglects users' roles in creating data, reducing incentives for users, distributing the gains from the data economy unequally, and stoking fears of automation. Instead, treating data (at least partially) as labor could help resolve these issues and restore a functioning market for user contributions, but may run against the near-term interests of dominant data monopsonists who have benefited from data being treated as "free." Countervailing power, in the form of competition, a data labor movement, and/or thoughtful regulation could help restore balance.
In Designs for the Pluriverse Arturo Escobar presents a new vision of design theory and practice aimed at channeling design's world-making capacity toward ways of being and doing that are deeply attuned to justice and the Earth. Noting that most design—from consumer goods and digital technologies to built environments—currently serves capitalist ends, Escobar argues for the development of an “autonomous design” that eschews commercial and modernizing aims in favor of more collaborative and placed-based approaches. Such design attends to questions of environment, experience, and politics while focusing on the production of human experience based on the radical interdependence of all beings. Mapping autonomous design’s principles to the history of decolonial efforts of indigenous and Afro-descended people in Latin America, Escobar shows how refiguring current design practices could lead to the creation of more just and sustainable social orders.
This article provides a history of private sector tracking technologies, examining how the advent of commercial surveillance centered around a logic of data capitalism. Data capitalism is a system in which the commoditization of our data enables an asymmetric redistribution of power that is weighted toward the actors who have access and the capability to make sense of information. It is enacted through capitalism and justified by the association of networked technologies with the political and social benefits of online community, drawing upon narratives that foreground the social and political benefits of networked technologies. I examine its origins in the wake of the dotcom bubble, when technology makers sought to develop a new business model to support online commerce. By leveraging user data for advertising purposes, they contributed to an information environment in which every action leaves behind traces collected by companies for commercial purposes. Through analysis of primary source materials produced by technology makers, journalists, and business analysts, I examine the emergence of data capitalism between the mid-1990s and mid-2000s and its central role in the contemporary information economy.
Models for understanding and holding systems accountable have long rested upon ideals and logics of transparency. Being able to see a system is sometimes equated with being able to know how it works and govern it—a pattern that recurs in recent work about transparency and computational systems. But can “black boxes’ ever be opened, and if so, would that ever be sufficient? In this article, we critically interrogate the ideal of transparency, trace some of its roots in scientific and sociotechnical epistemological cultures, and present 10 limitations to its application. We specifically focus on the inadequacy of transparency for understanding and governing algorithmic systems and sketch an alternative typology of algorithmic accountability grounded in constructive engagements with the limitations of transparency ideals.
Social theory needs to be radically rethought for a world of digital media and social media platforms driven by data processes. Fifty years after Berger and Luckmann published their classic text The Social Construction of Reality , two leading sociologists of media, Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp, revisit the question of how the social world, and our sense of everyday reality, are constructed – that is, made – by human beings.Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp ask: What difference does the deep involvement of digital media, and the data processes on which they rely, make to the type of social world we can inhabit? What difference do ‘media’ make to the types of social order that are possible? And how should we evaluate the consequences for our quality of life?Drawing on a range of theory, from Nobert Elias to Alfred Schütz and Luc Boltanski, and a wide selection of empirical studies, this book will be essential for students and scholars of media. It offers an authoritative account of how the digital world has historically emerged, and where it is now heading.
In recent years, much has been written on ‘big data’ in both the popular and academic press. After the hubristic declaration of the ‘end of theory’ more nuanced arguments have emerged, suggesting that increasingly pervasive data collection and quantification may have significant implications for the social sciences, even if the social, scientific, political, and economic agendas behind big data are less new than they are often portrayed. Compared to the boosterish tone of much of its press, academic critiques of big data have been relatively muted, often focusing on the continued importance of more traditional forms of domain knowledge and expertise. Indeed, many academic responses to big data enthusiastically celebrate the availability of new data sources and the potential for new insights and perspectives they may enable. Undermining many of these critiques is a lack of attention to the role of technology in society, particularly with respect to the labor process, the continued extension of labor relations into previously private times and places, and the commoditization of more and more aspects of everyday life. In this article, we parse a variety of big data definitions to argue that it is only when individual datums by the million, billion, or more are linked together algorithmically that ‘big data’ emerges as a commodity. Such decisions do not occur in a vacuum but as part of an asymmetric power relationship in which individuals are dispossessed of the data they generate in their day-to-day lives. We argue that the asymmetry of this data capture process is a means of capitalist ‘accumulation by dispossession’ that colonizes and commodifies everyday life in ways previously impossible. Situating the promises of ‘big data’ within the utopian imaginaries of digital frontierism, we suggest processes of data colonialism are actually unfolding behind these utopic promises. Amid private corporate and academic excitement over new forms of data analysis and visualization, situating big data as a form of capitalist expropriation and dispossession stresses the urgent need for critical, theoretical understandings of data and society.
EVERY FISCAL QUARTER, automated writing algorithms churn out thousands of corporate earnings articles for the Associated Press based on little more than structured data. Companies such as Automated Insights, which produces the articles for the AP, and Narrative Science can now write straight news articles in almost any domain that has clean and well-structured data: finance, sure, but also sports, weather, and education, among others. The articles are not cardboard either; they have variability, tone, and style, and in some cases readers even have difficulty distinguishing the machine-produced articles from human-written ones.4 It is difficult to argue with the scale, speed, and laborsaving cost advantage that such systems afford. But the trade-off for media organizations appears to be nuance and accuracy. A quick search on Google for "'generated by Automated Insights' correction'" yields results for thousands of articles that were automatically written, published, and then had to have corrections issued.
This article describes an emergent logic of accumulation in the networked sphere, ‘surveillance capitalism,’ and considers its implications for ‘information civilization.’ The institutionalizing practices and operational assumptions of Google Inc. are the primary lens for this analysis as they are rendered in two recent articles authored by Google Chief Economist Hal Varian. Varian asserts four uses that follow from computer-mediated transactions: ‘data extraction and analysis,’ ‘new contractual forms due to better monitoring,’ ‘personalization and customization,’ and ‘continuous experiments.’ An examination of the nature and consequences of these uses sheds light on the implicit logic of surveillance capitalism and the global architecture of computer mediation upon which it depends. This architecture produces a distributed and largely uncontested new expression of power that I christen: ‘Big Other.’ It is constituted by unexpected and often illegible mechanisms of extraction, commodification, and control that effectively exile persons from their own behavior while producing new markets of behavioral prediction and modification. Surveillance capitalism challenges democratic norms and departs in key ways from the centuries-long evolution of market capitalism.
Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui explores the possibilities for decolonization through an analysis of the "multicultural" state as an ongoing practice of coloniality that recognizes and incorporates indigenous people but only as static, archaic figures defined by a continuous relationship to an idealized past. As Cusicanqui demonstrates, this truncated recognition subordinates indigenous people, depriving them of their contemporaneity, complexity, and dynamism and, therefore, of their potential to challenge the given order. Coloniality and its relations of domination, she claims, are also reproduced in the knowledge production of academic scholars of decoloniality, primarily from the global North. These academics, she argues, appropriate the language and ideas of indigenous scholars without grappling with the relations of force that define their relationships to them, thus decontextualizing and depoliticizing these concepts and marginalizing indigenous scholars from their own debates. Counterposing the Aymara concept of ch'ixi - a parallel coexistence of difference - to multiculturalism and hybridity, which incorporates and flattens or distorts difference, Cusicanqui shows that decolonization must be not only a discourse but also an affirmative practice.
The globalization of the world is, in the first place, the culmination of a process that began with the constitution of America and world capitalism as a Euro-centered colonial/modern world power. One of the foundations of that pattern of power was the social classification of the world population upon the base of the idea of race, a mental construct that expresses colonial experience and that pervades the most important dimensions of world power, including its specific rationality: Eurocentrism. This article discusses some implications of that coloniality of power in Latin American history.
Relatives of victims and activists denounce errors in the official registry of missing persons
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Asesinatos en 2018 llegan a 22 mil víctimas y se registra el agosto más violento en 20 años
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Mexico can succeed in Artificial Intelligence
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Liquid surveillance: A conversation
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Of Data Cultures and Data F(r)ictions: Training, Transformation, and Decentering Data Futures from Latin American Startup Ecologies
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Crean banco genético operado por familiares de desaparecidos en México
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Sociology of exploitation
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”Control Societies: State surveillance and citizen resistance in Mexico.”
- Paola Ricaurte
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An epistemology of the South: the reinvention of knowledge and social emancipation
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Global manufacturing scorecard: How the US compares to 18 other nations
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Increase in the number of journalists killed since 2000
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Latin America Scores Poorly in New ‘Global Impunity Index.’”
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Indigenous communities and cloud-based Nations. Premises for building identity systems for Digital Citizenship
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Automating inequality: How high-tech tools profile, police, and punish the poor
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Europe-not the US or China-publishes the most AI research papers
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“La Serena, the house where activists take a break to recover from attacks for their work.”
- Icíar Gutiérrez
Peña and Calderón add up to 234 thousand deaths and 2017 is officially the most violent year in the recent history of Mexico
- Manuel Hernández
The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures and Their Consequences
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