Core Post - Abstracted Economy of Data

Something I noticed about all of this week’s readings was the distinction between an abstracted economy of data and for lack of a better word right now, the truth. The focus on this difference reminded me of our earlier discussion of Chun and her appeal to consider the gap between source code and its execution. Although in many ways Chun’s essay lacked a legible political position, I think this week’s readings really speak to the way her approach might open up possibilities for a variety of political critiques.

Though I’m not the biggest fan of diagrams and maps, I was taken by Crawford and Joler’s essay on the Amazon Echo. The authors carefully lay out the material resources, extractive processes and labor relations involved in the functioning of a slick device. I thought it was compelling of Crawford and Joler to refer to their text as a work of anatomy. Such a gesture, from the beginning, binds the organism (artificial or not) to a living environmental, industrial and historical web, a web often obscured for the sake of a conceptual autonomy. This is exemplified in the authors’ discussion of the Salar in Bolivia, the world’s largest reserve of lithium: a nonrenewable resource essential in the production of batteries, batteries we consume as though independent from their conditions of production.

Cheney-Lippold thoroughly discusses how the logic of data relies on the production of measurable types. These types further depend on a constitution that is performative and intersectional. What’s remarkable about such a constitution is how it echoes the rhetorical strategies of late-twentieth century anti-essentialist critical work. As Cheney-Lippold argues, instead of a biological essentialism, what is of interest to data firms is an essentialism grounded in information. With regard to what is termed protocategorical intersectionality he writes, “this algorithmic approach produces a data object that flatly rejects that which cannot be datafied,” (Cheney-Lippold 85). The rejection of the difference between a measurable type and its target is also significant in Richardson, Schultz and Crawford’s selections on predictive policing and dirty data.

Finally, Couldry and Mejias write, “By installing automated surveillance into the space of the self, we risk losing the very thing that constitutes us as selves at all, that is, the open-ended space where we continuously transform over time. What needs defending is not individualistic self-rule, but rather the minimal, socially grounded integrity of the self without which we do not recognize ourselves and others as selves at all,” (345). It is ironic that potentially at stake in the abstracted fantasy of technological autonomy—criticized by all this week's authors in different capacities—are the conditions of autonomy for a self responsive to the world around it.