"But this is just one small example of something much bigger: the systematic attempt to turn all human lives and relations into inputs for the generation of profit. Human experience, potentially every layer and aspect of it, is becoming the target of profitable extraction. We call this condition colonization by data, and it is a key dimension of how capitalism itself is evolving today." Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias, The Costs of Connection
In Cool Memories, the French cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard shares several Nietzsche-style aphorisms that probe the disillusioned side of reality in all its silences and brutalities. One probe in particular might haunt the way we think about conversations regarding the dangers of big data, social media presence, and digital identity.
"Colonialism is about appropriation; whereas historical colonialism appropriated land, resources, and bodies, today’s new colonialism appropriates human life through extracting value from data." The Costs of Connection, Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias
What haunts people is not that data convey information but that the information data conveys is growing increasingly more important than the bodies, actions, and emotions the data represents.
Simple economics teaches us that there is a trade off taking place. As the information increases in value, the human element decreases.
Baudrillard’s ideas on hyperreality are important here: hyperreality is an exploration of our contemporary cultural moment that regards the representation as more real than the real.
The data extracted from our lives, then, comes to re-present us in ways that constitute living. Similarly, the value extracted from data, according to Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias, is not just about information but life – and what represents life.
If humans choose to live uncolonized, they choose life disconnected – in Baudrillard’s terms, they choose disappearance. This disappearance is a kind of death, though, because we forfeit connection – forfeit the touch.
Couldry and Mejias suggest another path is possible, though what that looks like is uncertain.
"...we can see the road of data colonialism marked out ahead across the social landscape that data relations are steadily hollowing out. But the concept of the paranodal helps us grasp that there is also a space on the side of that road5—an unmarked space that is not yet a path (or anything), headed nowhere in particular except, we can imagine, away from data colonialism. This side-space is where we must start to affirm a new direction of travel based on a different rationality and based on different possibilities for order and security, for solidarity and human organization. A space in which we feel no reason to bind ourselves into relations that achieve only what capitalism wants (stable processes of data extraction). A space in which we can recover the idea that human beings might know themselves and choose the relations that organize their lives without delegating this choice and that knowledge to an algorithm."The Costs of Connection, Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias
"Another word complex, the verbal phrase: donner-avec, relays the concept of understanding into the world of Relation, translating, contesting, then reconstituting its elements in a new order. The French word for understanding, comprendre, like its English cognate, is formed on the basis of the Latin word, conprehendere, "to seize," which is formed from the roots: con- (with) and prendere (to take). Glissant contrasts this form of understanding - appropriative, almost rapacious-with the understanding upon which Relation must be based: donner-avec. Donner (to give) is meant as a generosity of perception. (In French donner can mean "to look out toward.") There is also the possible sense of yielding, as a tree might "give" in a storm in order to remain standing. Avec both reflects back on the com- of comprehendre and defines the underlying principle of Relation. Gives-on-and-with is unwieldy, but unfamiliar tools are always awkward." Betsy Wing
