Everyone, can you hear me okay? It's great to see you all packed through important topic. Of course, Swiss get nervous because it's already past noon. So, but anyway, I'll catch up, I'm sure. Delighted to welcome you all to this special book talk. My name is Urs Katzger, I serve as the Executive Director of the Berlin Fine Center. And today, we're really pleased to have Mick Holdery and Mrs. Maria Sier who will talk about their new book. And the book talk is colonized by data, the costs of connection. It's promising to be a very interesting discussion. I had actually the pleasure to read the book.  And one of the good side effects of moderating book talks is actually you're forced to read the book and otherwise you embarrass yourself if you can try to ask questions later on. Mick is a sociologist of media and culture, professor at LSE. He's also a faculty associate at the Berlin Fine Center. So, had the pleasure to work together for a couple of years. I greatly benefited from many insights that I also now see here in the book.  Is that correct? So, particular warm welcome to you on a sunny day here in Cambridge. You are a professor of communications at the State University of New York. Is that correct? Great. And the co-author of the book. So, we will proceed in three steps. First, we'll have a book talk by the authors for about half an hour. We'll then open up for some comments by a few colleagues from the Berkman Klein Center who will share quick reactions about two minutes. So, one thought, maybe one reaction to what we hear. And then we will open up for discussion. I have lots of questions myself, but I'll save those, I guess, because I'm sure you will have many comments and thoughts too. Without further ado, or with you, I should say this is webcasted and recorded, so please keep that in mind when you introduce yourself and when you ask questions. Thanks for being here. Over to you. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you very much. Well, thank you very much. We're thrilled to be here. Obviously, I'm particularly thrilled to be here, knowing so many of you in the room and also having written and thought a lot of my half of the book right here at the Berkman Center. So, it's a special return in a way. What we're going to do, we're going to obviously give you a flavor of the bulk, which is outside if you're interested in buying it. There are many strands to our argument. We're going to try and condense some of them in half an hour. But all of them really center around a core question, which is a very, very simple question. What is going on with data across business and government, society, human life, all of our lives? Something big is going on. We know it. But what is it? Is it as many people have argued a new phase of capitalism? There are lots of options there, new phases of capitalism. Most famously, Shoshana Zuboff's book on surveillance capitalism, which inspired us in its early form of an article, continues to inspire us. We have a lot of common ground. There's a lot to those ideas. However, we want to ask in this book, is something potentially even larger going on? If you can imagine that. Not just a stage of the capitalism none of us know how to get out of, but something perhaps even bigger. A new phase in the relations between colonialism and capitalism. Relations, of course, to summarize a lot of history in a sentence, go back 500 years when we think about how 200 years of colonialism were necessary for capitalism even to get started. That's the question we ask. And we give a hint there might be something colonial going on from this business cliche. Data is the new oil front page of the Economist two or three years ago. We all know that cliche. We can deconstruct it. It has a colonial air about it. We know about oil. Is it just a harmless business metaphor? Or is it precisely, as we argue in the book, the ideological term that's needed to cover over a huge new appropriation of resource that parallels the original colonialism. The resource of human life itself. And that colonial possibility was hinted at in a scandal that I don't need to say anymore about to this audience, the Cambridge Analytica scandal 18 months ago. Christopher Wiley, who opened spilled the beans as it were 18 months ago, a week or two into the scandal was asked about Cambridge Analytica's nefarious plans to expand their operations into India. He said on Twitter, this is what modern colonialism looks like. The question is, what could that actually mean? So a central part of our argument is that what we're facing is really an emerging reality, not just a metaphor. The way we use the term data colonialism, it's not really metaphorical. What we're facing is a genuinely new phase of colonialism, which we call data colonialism, that in time we'll prepare the ground for a new mode of capitalist production. As Nick mentioned, in similar ways in which the original historical colonialism prepared the ground for industrial capitalism. And of course this will happen while coexisting with historical colonialism and it's neocolonial legacy. I'll come back to that in a little bit. But we do want to be very careful, of course, when we use this term because this is a steep term. Are we in fact suggesting that data colonialism matches the violence, matches the mayhem of historical colonialism? No, but there are continuities that should alarm us. And that's what we're going to be dealing with here. So let me just give you kind of like a basic definition of what we mean by data colonialism. We say it's an emerging order for the appropriation of human lives so that data can be continuously extracted from it for profit. And in order to make sense of this definition, we also need to sort of distinguish between colonialism and coloniality, a concept developed by the Peruvian sociologist Anipa Kihano. So we could argue that colonialism is over. Yes, nations got their independence. There are no more colonies per se. But Kihano argued that the legacy of colonialism continues. The heritage continues, of course. And that's what he called the coloniality of power. So if we think about economic relations, racial relations today, if we even think about terrorism, it's all kind of shaped by the heritage of colonialism. So what we're arguing is that while the modes and the intensities, the scales and the contexts of colonialism are different, the function remains the same. And that function is to dispossess. Now, why is this so persistent? Why is it so hard to resist? Part of the reason is because there are some rationalities which are a continuation of old ones that we've lived with for a while. So they're both new and old. Some of those rationalities include economically rationalities. So if you think about the progression from cheap nature to cheap labor to cheap data, the way the colonizers framed the world as being made up of natural resources that could be appropriated. And then human labor that could also be appropriated and used to exploit those resources. Similarly, we're seeing now a certain kind of framing of data as some sort of exhaust, as abundant, and therefore as free. There are technological rationalities as well, which basically tells us that more data is better, that smarter technology is always best. So if we think about the unidirectional notion of progress, we're being told that this is progress. This is for our own good. This is making society better. There are of course legal rationalities, the concept of terra nullius, which basically means no man's land. The idea that these resources are just there for the taking, colonizers can take them, exploit them, because they have the infrastructure to do so. And then there are epistemological rationalities. And to come back to Kehanno for a little bit, he offered basically a critique of Western universal rationality, which obliterates difference. And of course, we want to instead require the recovery of alternative rationalities which are based on respect for difference. Now, in our book, we want to challenge all of those rationalities. You all will assume that, and we can give you more in the Q&A if you want to know how we do that. But let's come clean. We realize that framing what's going on with data in the global north and the global south everywhere today as a new form of colonialism is pretty provocative. It's not a comfortable thing if we're even half right. It's provocative. So we want to anticipate our book's conclusion right here, assuming you do have doubts about this, and summarize what for us are the five main advantages we get from this new framing of what's going on, not just as about capitalism, which of course it still is, but as about colonialism too. The first advantage we've already hinted at, which is it gives us a totally new time scale on which to think about comparatively. We go back, as we said, not just the past four decades, let alone the past five years of Internet of Things, a blip in history, we go back the past 500 years to find a resource appropriation that's parallel to the scale of what's going on today. At one point it was taking all the world's gold, silver, minerals, land, bodies to mine it, now it's human life itself, an epochal change. But we also have to project into the future, because if it's that large scale, then we can't predict what the consequences are going to be entirely. We see some changes already, but remember that it was capitalism that was the main consequence of colonialism, and that took two centuries to emerge. So let's not assume we know exactly where this is going or where we'll end up rather. We can see the direction of travel. Then there's the question of scope, which has changed.  And today we talk mainly about social media platforms as if they are the main thing going on, they're not, we argue in the book. There are much broader and more important things going on. So for example, the normalization of surveillance in most workplaces, particularly if you're paid less and are more insecure in your job. That's a big trend. The gig economy, exploiting labor through totally new forms that do not involve any form of institutional trust, Uber, Lyft. These are radical changes. Logistics, 30, 40 years of changing the business model, so tracking every moment in space and time. Sounds good, you want your parcel to arrive on time, but at the same time tracking workers, and of course internal corporate data. IBM, normally regarded as irrelevant to these changes, pointed out in this annual report a few years ago. They didn't care about social media because 80% of the important data was internal corporate data. And of course the internet things turns what was just our life into internal corporate data, the smart fridge. So this is expanding too. For this complicated, as we recognize, there's an external and an internal colonialism going on here. There are profound global qualities which are rolling out between data supplying countries and data extracting countries. But at the same time, the extraction is going on within the colonizer societies too. So that's a complex dynamic and we can unpack that more if you want. Two further things are fundamental which relate to the long-term consequences of this new perspective. The first is, this will only happen just as colonialism only stabilizes and took root through a new social order. A new way of organizing everything that fits together. New forms of dependency, new forms of governance and rule, all of it offered as just convenient just what we have to do. And finally, echoing the point that Ulysses just made, the deeper trend that really took us to the end of the book that we see most clearly underlying the idea of big data as what must happen is simply a continuation of the West's claim to know how things should happen. To have a special claim on rationality from a particular point in the world. And this is a relationship between power and knowledge that decolonial theorists have been telling us has been unfolding throughout modernity, throughout colonialism, we don't see that if we only listen to the critics of capitalism. Now how is this social order unpacking? How is it happening? It's happening through something we call data relations which sounds a simple move but actually it involves quite a creative use of Marx's social theory. Orthodox Marxism says that capitalism, any big social order, is only reproduced through labor relations, transforming the stuff of activity into something that can be exchanged on the labor market. We want to be creative with Marx. Obviously he couldn't anticipate what's happening right now. That's absurd to pretend he couldn't. But he did have a radical theory of how big scale change happens and we need to pay attention to what that was. With the help of Moshe Postone who died last year who argues that underlying labor relations is something called commodification, making things into exchangeable commodities. And even underlying that is something even deeper which is abstraction. Abstraction from the flow of human life to something that is exchangeable. What is going on with data but abstracting, taking from the flow of our life into something exchangeable. This is the deep core of Marx's work that we can use on today to understand how capitalism now has two engines. Labor relations and data relations are often put together if you're working on the Amazon warehouse floor, both fused. But they're different. Ordinary life if this is true becomes a direct factor of capitalist production. We can never be outside the capitalist machine or put it more brutally, human life is the next to capitalism. Through of course continuous monitoring of everything we do. We'll come back to the implications for freedom later on and they're profound. So just to sum up in an image, every time we click on an app or rather put an app on our phone, join a platform or maybe get a new smart device installed in our home and obviously we want it to work, we have to accept the terms and conditions of data extraction. We enter, we re-enter the spiral of data relations. None of us in this room I suspect know a way out. Now when this remains a really even more important point which is a really big difference from historical colonialism which again may be troubling you. In the historical colonialism the resources were grabbed on the basis of no prior social relation. There was no way of negotiating seizing the gold or silver. There are only two options, violence and deception. Both were used in rather large amounts in early colonialism. What's different now? Well the difference is that we've had two centuries of getting used to social relations which only need to be tweaked a little bit to have a profound impact on the future of history. And that is what's going on, no violence necessary yet. So who is behind this process? In the book we wanted to come up with some term that allowed us to collect all of the players and so we use a term of social quantification sector. The SQS is basically the industry sector devoted to the development of this infrastructure required for extraction, right? And yes we wanted to talk about the big players, Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon, as well as their Chinese counterparts by Du Alibaba, Tencent and Xiaomi. And what's interesting about these big players is that they're sort of a combination of monopoly and monopsony, they're hybrids. So of course monopoly means single seller. A monopsony also term for economics means a single buyer. So we're all producers of media these days, we all generate videos and tweets and so on. But if you want that video of your cat doing something funny to be seen by a large public, where are you going to upload it? YouTube, right? There are other options, there are other platforms, but if you really wanted to be seen by many people and your friends, you would upload it to YouTube. So this monopsony hybrids acts as funnels, so to speak, that are single points of buying all of our content. And of course there are other players of different sizes. Just to give you an idea of the broad scope, of course hardware manufacturers, all the manufacturers of smart devices, software developers, platforms, data analytics, data brokerage companies, the people who collect the data, parse it in different ways and sell it to a third party. So all of them we're calling as the social quantification sector. All right, a bit of a change. So in the book we spent a long time talking about the coloniality of data relations. And so right now we only have time to give you one example of this kind of trans-historical comparison that we do in chapter three. So I want to start with this excerpt from the Google Chrome terms of service agreement. So as you can see there, this is a bit old. It's been revised since then. But it says that you give Google a perpetual irrevocable worldwide royalty free non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any content which you submit, post or display on or through the services. Pretty comprehensive, right? This is the language that none of us reads, understands, cares about. Most of us, I shouldn't say all of us in this room. And then we just click accept and install and move on. Now we have that app working. So I want to compare this to another document from the colonial era, the time of the Spanish conquistadors. At that time, the conquistadors would arrive at a village in what is now Latin America, sometimes in the middle of the night, and would stand outside of the village and proceed to read this document called the requerimiento. So I want to share with you a little bit about the history of the Spanish to a non-speaking Spanish audience, of course. Let me read you a little excerpt. If you do not submit, I certify to you that with the help of God, we shall powerfully enter into your country and shall make war against you in all ways and manners that we can. And shall subject you to the joke and obedience of the church and of their highnesses. And shall make slaves of them and as such shall sell and dispose of them as their highnesses may command. And we shall take away your goods and shall do all the mischief and damage that we can. Spanish requerimiento 1513, accept and install over there. So that's just one example of what we gain from the colonial frame and the historical comparisons. It makes permissible to make new sense of what we are all told we just have to accept what Kevin Kelly called the inevitable. But before we conclude, I just want to give you a flavor of one other aspect of the book because there's a philosophical dimension too. In chapter five of the book, we ask this new form of resource appropriation has, as we've explained, the means of constant surveilling or monitoring more politely of human subjects. And the question is what are the implications for human freedom, assuming we still care about that, which I think in this room we certainly do. Now we're not interested in a thin notion of freedom, consumer freedom. That's obviously rather helped by having lots of apps to choose from, lots of ways to falling into the spiral of data relations. Great. No, we're interested in more substantive notions of human freedom than that. We need to go back to philosophy to look at this. And one source, maybe surprisingly, is George Hegel, his philosophy of freedom written 200 years ago. He defined, and we could spend all afternoon on us trying to understand what lies behind this quote and another Hegel expert, he defined freedom as the freedom to be with oneself in the other. The in the other is his amazing discovery that freedom for you and me is relational. It comes from the social texture in which we live. That's how it emerges. But the key bit is the bit he rushes past to get to the in the other, to be with oneself. He didn't think that needed to be defended, except in the case of a footnote of slaves who'd lost this. To be with oneself is basically the possibility to know that when I'm thinking, did I do a good job? Am I happy with my life? Do I love this person? Or do I think about dying? Nothing else can come between me and that thought. No external system. Yes, I'm in the social, but no external system that is not part of my thinking. That's an interesting idea, but of course Hegel is very problematic. He was responsible for legitimizing colonialism in the early 19th century. So we need other sources for this thought, and we can find one from an amazing source, which is the Argentinian Mexican philosopher Enrique Ducelle, who in his philosophy of liberation, which was developed precisely to challenge the philosophy of the West, how does he define the core of freedom? It is the natural substantivity of the person, which basically is that material space, that boundedness that we know in the end is ours, unless we're existing under such profound violence when we know it is that that is being threatened by those imposing violence on us. So what are the implications of this? Well, we're saying, and there's a lot of evidence for this from marketing documents all over the place, that if the goal of marketing and business models today is overtime to continuously track human beings without limit, if that is the goal, then there is a real possibility that we will cease to have a hold on the idea of being selves at all. And if that's true, surveillance, self-tracking, which we do a lot of it to ourselves, the management of behavior through the gathering of data, all of this is leading gradually to an erosion of what we call in the book the minimal integrity of the self as a self, not the grand idea of the autonomous grand subject who could rule the universe. No, the very basis of any possible notion of freedom, boundedness. That is what is being interfered with. That's what we think we have to confront and be concerned about. Okay, I know we're almost out of time, so just to wrap it up. Sorry, I think you're not in order. But how do we resist this? Firstly, we should acknowledge that, yes, people, corporations and governments are having very different stakes in this new order. So one-track approaches are not going to work. Yes, we need to care about regulation. We need to care perhaps even about individual choices, about which platforms to opt in or out of. But by themselves, that's not going to be enough. We also know that individual subjects are very differently positioned, precisely because the earlier forms of racial, class and economic differences are being reproduced through data relations, perhaps even more opaquely and effectively than before. We do need to reject the universal rationality of data collection, perhaps care more about sinfulness, not so much about sinlessness. And lastly, we need to learn. We need to learn from past and present decolonization struggles. We need to learn from the people who have been doing this for a long time about reimagining forms of collectivity, about thinking of new ways of appropriating technologies, thinking of new ways of imagining common knowledge and solidarity. And with that, I think we will end to give you time for questions. Thank you. Thank you so much. Wonderful presentation. So we have now four respondents, but to make it more challenging for them, I will actually not just pass on the mic, but will ask questions to the respondents and hopefully get quick reactions also from the authors if that's okay. So the first respondent is actually Eletra Bietti, who's an SJD student here, and is also affiliated with the Berkman Klein Center. Eletra, I'm sure you're totally prepared for your comments, but let me ask a slightly different question based on the work that you're doing. In your work, you have looked very closely at all sorts of power asymmetries between individuals and platforms and systems, with a strong focus actually also on the data economy, the new world that is described in the presentation and also in the book. Throughout some sort of your research, you have also looked quite carefully at the different terminology and concepts that are used to some sort of describe the problem or the challenge that we are confronted with. And here, obviously, in a very thoughtful and careful way, a new frame, a new lens is introduced, the idea of data colonialism. And I was wondering, what's your some sort of initial response? How do you feel about this analogy or taking a previous concept some sort of to the next level? Does that resonate with you? Do you see some sort of difficulties with that language or that framing? Yes. Thank you, Ulurs, for this question. Yes, I think this terminology is extremely interesting and eye-opening in lots of ways. So I actually came across it last year when I started talking to Nick about his work and it was really a Eureka moment and I thought this parallel is very salient and uncovers a lot of what is at stake and helps us interpret many of the phenomena that we're observing through a different lens. One thing that actually I had a question about for the authors was whether this insistence that it is not a metaphor is fully persuasive and if it's not a metaphor, what might it be? It does not seem like we're in the presence of what we have been calling colonialism in the world we live in today. So maybe it's a transposition, it's a form of language that might help us understand things, but is it really colonialism or do we need to coin a different word? A lot of what I feel about the phenomenon of data is that it's a very sui generis, very specific thing. Shoshana Zuboff says it's unprecedented so I think somehow there is something very unprecedented and using the parallel is super illuminating but I wonder whether we want to go further than that and say it's a way of understanding a different phenomenon. Thank you, Eltra. I think that's a great question to elaborate on for maybe a minute or two. Yes, you've really hit the core there. This is what we have to get right in doing a serious and risky historical comparison. This book is taking a big risk with this item. We feel we have to. The way I dance through it is that we need to compare like with like so we're comparing the beginning of this new colonialism with the beginning of the original colonialism. We're not comparing the beginning of this colonialism with the end 500 years later of the old colonialism. So there must be differences which means we must abstract, if you pardon the phrase, from those differences to get to the core and that's why in the book we say the core, the historic colonialism, though this might be a very contested point, was not the violence or the cultures of racism that came to be the tools to enforce the colonialism. The core was the grabbing of resource, taking everything because it was just ours if you happen to live in Europe. That's the core. And it's that that we're saying is the... Therefore, it is dislocating to say this is like the colonialism. No, it is not. And we expect for those who say this just does not work for me. But we have to be able to go back to history and take what we need from it to understand the present. And that's what we're doing. It's not, therefore, a reality we're talking about is not the metaphorical take. We are looking at a different deep, if you like, core reality. And that's why we stress that point. Yeah, I would just add to go back to one of our main points. I think what is valuable is that we're focusing not on the form or the content, the definition of colonialism, but the function, right? That extractive function, the dispossession. And so, yes, it seems to us a missed opportunity if we just sort of call it a metaphor to kind of explain which is evocative and metaphors are great, nothing against metaphors. But we want it to be very specific about the dynamics that are unfolding. Thank you. So I was wondering whether Primavera, the Philippi who joins us from Europe, is also a faculty associate here at the Berke Line Center and is doing a lot of work more generally on governance. What your reflections are specifically on the problem description still. There is, you're doing a lot of work on blockchain technology, distributed architectures, how that shapes power relationships or as you call it, information relationships or data relationships in the book. And it, I was wondering while reading the book, right? What you described is very compelling, but at the same time, is there an alternative universe where technology could be used, the same technology could be used or similar technology could be used to actually level some of these power asymmetries as a matter of DNA of how we connect the things that you say are so costly. And so I was wondering how do you think about that, some sort of this alternative view on technology that is used to actually empower, to actually circumvent some of these big platforms. What comes to mind when you listen to this story here, which is a very different one? Yeah. So, I mean, there is a lot of developments that are happening today, whether it's with blockchain technologies, whether it's just like decentralized technology or personal data store and so forth. And the idea being can we actually use the technology in order to give more power to the individuals to actually control, trace, and somehow dictate the way in which those data can actually be used and spread by those operators. So, there is developments going on. My fear or my preoccupation with those solutions is that they rely on these basic premises that individuals giving the power of whether it is constant or whether it is like leading to technical propertization of data and so forth is actually going to solve the problem. As opposed to actually recognizing the fact that if users actually want to use those services, to some extent they will consent. No one agrees with those terms of services and yet they click on it because they want to use the service and the apparent cost of giving the data is somehow overwhelming inferior from the apparent benefit of using the service. And so, to me, there is this, you know, and if we go back to the metaphor of what is data, the new oil data as capital, data as labor, and like all those questions which really to some extent make data into something that is actually exploitable, all those metaphor are towards the exploitation of data. And so, to me actually, and that's because of my background of creative comments and all those questions, public domain, copyright, I'm actually very interested, especially when I hear about this colonization, it reminds me a lot about the, like at the time in which we were thinking about the exploitation of the public domain with people like James Boyle that were actually using the analogy of environment and like how do we preserve the public domain is by actually giving them a positive recognition so that it's no longer just seen as the negative of intellectual property right. And so, to me when I actually hear those things, I'm actually very curious like whether, on the one hand, yes, of course we can use technology or we can just focus on giving exclusionary rights to people in order to give them more power on the use of the data. But it seems to me that there is actually one of the fundamental problem of data colonization is that actually those operators which are collecting the data, eventually whatever is the correspondence you can pay user for collecting the data, but yet they're gonna collect this data, accumulate, aggregate and create those incredibly powerful data sets which enable them to then build more value by training their AI or whatever is it that they are doing with this data. So my question is can we actually look, instead of looking at how do we react against this colonization from a negative approach as in like what is it that we cannot do with the data, would that make sense to actually take a more positive approach as in given the fact that there is this colonization, that there is this like appropriation and exploitation of data, should there be some kind of rights to actually access for other people to access the value that is generated by those people that appropriated the data? And I think here we can actually think about the data as infrastructure and looking at like antitrust law where we have like this concept of for instance essential facilities where one there is a particular resource that becomes necessary in order to create added value, in order to create services on top or in order to train AI and so forth, then shouldn't there be some kind of obligation not necessarily to share the data and just spread like personal information around but actually to provide access to these information that has been the result of colonization so that other parties including the parties that have been expropriated of their data can actually benefit from this expropriation and can themselves have an opportunity to build resources, to build services on top of that. Thank you, Primavera. May I ask just to maybe focus a little bit more on the still the problem description? I want to segue into solutions as well in a minute but we heard a couple of things. Well, there are alternative architectures in there. You also mentioned them in the book that are more decentralized that try also alternative business models. So we discussed that. We also heard, you know, people actually may want to use, many of us want to use these services. How do we deal with some sort of these choices made by all of us? Briefly mentioned, we're also legislative frameworks and protections that are in place. Why is that not enough or even part of the problem if I read your book correctly before we go to the solution part which I want to go later. Well, I mean you've raised so many points and your work on blockchain is very provocative and I think it's also very disruptive of certain conceptions of blockchain so I see a lot in common between the way we're working here. There's so much to say. First of all, we are not saying data is bad, obviously. I got here using my new bus app on my phone.  So I'm happy with that as long as it's not gathering other data about me as I use it. So there can be good uses of data. We can imagine cities where information needs to be used well. We need to collect information on the environment and so on and so forth. We're not against that. We want there to be collective use of that data and so on and so forth. The difficult bit is where your work on blockchain pushes us to confront is the infrastructure and whether built into the current infrastructure we have where data is gathered by default it is used somewhere else by default by those we don't even know. How are we going to disrupt that default infrastructure? That is very, very different. Certain alternative proposals are great. They exist but they are not enough to challenge as we said the whole social order through which a different goal is being achieved and that's what we need to disrupt the goal. So that's all right. It's not neither yes nor no but there's more to say as it were. Yeah, I would just add I know we don't want to go into solutions just yet but I mean there's so much to unpack and I would just say that I think to me sometimes I think of data as a new kind of colonial language and colonized subjects sometimes had to use the colonizers language to describe their own position to think about their own identities. I think similarly, you know we can find productive uses of data so that we don't have to abandon our apps that help us get through the bus system so I think but there's a similar way in which we can appropriate just like colonized subjects appropriated the language we can also appropriate some of these uses. Great. Before I turn it to Sasha with a question I wanted to briefly follow up with an own question I have that I think can nicely connects with the discussion here. I was wondering in the book you make a very compelling argument that yes some sort of it starts with data in some sense the argument but it goes far beyond data and Prima mentioned the role of infrastructure and you also highlight the role of infrastructure. You go beyond infrastructure you say well the description of what's happening here has to do also with social norms and social ordering has to do of course with economic incentives. You point out that there is an entire governance system in place that supports the current trajectory that you're describing and so at some point I was wondering is this a fundamental critique not so much of the world of data, this brave new world but of society as such how do you draw the boundaries in this book? Is it really a story about data or is it a story about where we're headed as societies? Well that's again a great question so you could say the same about colonialism. There were critiques of colonialism in around 15, 20, 15, 30, 1540 in the Spanish court and they've made books about that. Many people were very uneasy about the grabbing of resource and the killing of bodies that could have become Christian souls and there's a lot of debate but anyway nonetheless in the end it was resolved in terms of justifying what was going on because a whole new society was being built so colonialism was both the grabbing of resource and the creating of a new type of colonial society which we now take for granted. So in this short presentation we couldn't touch on chapter four of the book which is a difficult chapter because we had to confront a very difficult analytic problem because if it's true that data is both value something from which value can come and knowledge is the same two together fused. That is again a new phase in human history because in the past knowledge has always been sellable valuable contributing to business but it's not literally been the same thing as economic value but with data it starts to be fused and that has an implication for society because even if we have critical views of society, we rethink it, we reinterpret it, we have to do it on the basis of a shared coinage of knowledge, common knowledge and what if that coinage is changing? That's the question we asked in chapter four. The coinage is changing because it's deriving more and more from private the access, privately processed data sources rather than public sources such as statistics censuses, public debates about the meaning of those and so on and that's the big change so society will change our very idea of social sciences in the course of changing and again protecting that is part of what we have to protect if we want to resist data colonialism. I think that's a great point and I think we need to think of colonialism as a partnership, a collaboration that involves all aspects of society it's not just the extractive processes done by corporations, the mining, etc it does involve all of society and in that respect we have been thinking lately after the book was finished about how for instance Franz Fanon defined the psychopathology of the colonized subject colonialism creates a particular kind of subjectivity neuroses and so we can equally start to think about the neuroses that colonialism is creating data colonialism is creating in terms of the anxiety, in terms of the depression in terms of the narcissism and the changing cognitive processes so obviously it's having wider precautions. Thank you. Let's assume we agree roughly on the problem description that there is a pretty fundamental problem I also feel there is a sense this is a helpful lens through which to analyze the problem using the concept of colonialism Now what are we going to do about it? This is chapter 6 in your book but before we give you a chance to share some of your ideas I want to turn over to Sasha Kostanza-Chok over at the MIT and Sasha this is a complex problem that's described here where data, capitalism governance structures incentives how we live our lives all together are in an interesting and complicated way part of the problem description and I was wondering you have deep insights into what seems to me necessary to make a change here which is movements where activists, designers thinkers, builders doers come together and really challenge the status quo and help to imagine an alternative future so I was wondering given your work and experience in studying movements but also taking action yourself if we want to create an alternative to the world that's described here as a trajectory that's a very simple question I confess but I'm sure you will have thoughts on it That's an easy one Before I get to that I did want to put a little parenthetical note in here I'm concerned by the framing of colonialism is over and I think we need to critique that a little bit so we could talk about the ongoing active forms of traditionally understood colonialism in places like Puerto Rico in places like Palestine with active settler colonialism displacement of indigenous peoples by force we could talk about standing rock where the resource extraction is directly tied to displacement of indigenous peoples from their lands to access the old oil not the new oil of the data and the Amazon right now as the Amazon is burning as part of the process of the increasingly fascist Bolsonaro state desire to support settlers and resource extractors against the claims of indigenous peoples to their lands so that old colonialism is still with us and so I think we need to that's a question what does that mean for this theory what's the relationship between the new form of data colonialism and the ongoing forms of both extractive and settler colonialism I think we also need to you know understand the ways that colonialism I agree with you you're framing historical and data colonialism as being primarily about extraction and commoditization but I think it's worth as we think about how to resist it we need to also consider some of the other larger forms of power inequality that were instantiated and globalized and reproduced through both historical colonialism and I would say data colonialism and so I'm thinking of the ways and you talk about this in the book but you didn't really get into it much here so I'm talking about the ways that race and gender are implicated in colonial processes so you know we could talk about the way that surveillance has always been a carceral technology Ruha Benjamin will be here next week to talk about her new book Race After Technology and so we want to think about the ways that surveillance has always been about marking other bodies marking black bodies marking native bodies for control exclusion limiting movement and so on and so forth and how that's re-instantiated in the new forms of data colonialism and also thinking about at the same time that they're reading these there's also this process by which the binary gender is being imposed upon native peoples throughout the Americas and other parts of the world where a particular vision of patriarchy and patriarchal power is being violently instantiated the third gender people are being massacred the same, not the same but we could talk about how that's happening with new data processes so binary gender classification is normalized throughout most of the computing systems that we're building and developing the sorting functions and so to resist all of that to me I'm always interested in what are people already doing what are the resistance strategies that are active and I think that you do a good job of talking about a number of those throughout the book everything from the ways that people might personally refuse to participate in particular systems taking part in the delete Facebook movement and so on and so forth but also you're saying that's not enough we need collective action and even that's not necessarily enough because if we just impose certain new forms of law or regulation if it's only mitigating the worst harms but it's allowing the underlying logic turning intact we're still screwed I think that's what you're saying and I agree with that and yet I'm worried about a I guess not sufficient we don't want to impose new binary logics on people's resistance strategies and say deleting Facebook is useless it's not useless it's a micro instantiation of I think people's resistance to these processes that you're describing so yes it's not enough but is it not what we need I wouldn't necessarily say so I think we want to recognize the ways that these different strategies might work together in the process of forming resistance subjectivity to the new forms of data colonialism and then finally design is crucial and there are emerging communities of practitioners who are thinking together about how do we redesign these systems including data sharing systems so that they're not extractives so that they are actually consentful we could look at the consentful technology initiative consentfultech.io we could talk about the design justice network the practitioners there and I'm part of that group we could talk about the decolonizing design group that's developing both theory and practice on how to do some of this stuff my last point on that would be we want to be careful of the emerging explosion of seemingly resistant groups organizations and discourses so there's there's a lot of talk right now about AI ethics there are industry groups that are being convened by these the big players themselves to talk about what they're you know how to how they are recognizing that the public is unhappy there's a tech lash and they want to create their own discourse about how to mitigate that so I'm curious about what you have to say about how are we going to move into this new moment of resistance and not let it be captured by the very same industry that we think is building the infrastructure for data colonialism yes well I think you're right a lot of this has to do with strict definitions so when we talked about colonialism being over yes we were thinking specifically about you know countries being defined as colonies and so you're correct that if we think about Puerto Rico Palestine we could similarly think about those in that way but that's why we introduce the concept of coloniality to suggest that the heritage and the legacy continues and it is particularly a heavy price that you're right minorities women you know different populations continue to pay for that cost as far as what to do about it I think it's very fruitful to think about to look back at the decolonization struggles and you're right maybe we are critical that maybe the individual choice to leave facebook fits into this model of the liberal subject as being able to act on a particular choice we are critical of that but at the same time we do have to remember that in many decolonial struggles sometimes people the only tool they had to resist was their mind so you know even with their bodies they could not resist and sometimes the colonial struggles happened by resisting with your mind so we do need to we want to keep open all of those different possibilities and just very briefly because I know we have another respond you made so many great points but the core of it is when we're saying dropping off facebook or twitter or whatever is not enough and I see a bad thing where you shouldn't do it we are saying let's not confuse the part with the whole facebook is a small part of the whole so if you're doing it knowing the whole is bigger that's a very different thing but that links to the other point that if the cost of this therefore it's inconvenient if I organize my kids parties through facebook it's a damn inconvenient to do it because I've been doing it for 10 years I don't want to stop that means we have to help each other have to be not acts of individuals but in a solidary form helping each other carry the cost of connection that's the beginnings of something but we don't claim to know what that something is going to become if we start acting that way that will be arrogant and we just want to light the touch paper and start to see what would happen if we thought about resistance differently great thank you so we have about 15 minutes left I know some people have to go and take classes but we will open up for Q&A in just a second but Juan Ortiz Froyler you're with the web foundation you're a policy fellow there we're also affiliated with Berkman Klein when I read this final chapter about solutions the first thought I had oh there is a new social contract that we need and the web foundation is actually making a tremendous effort and you're deeply involved in bringing together all these different stakeholders that you mentioned that are sort of part of the problem to also become part of the solution so I was wondering particularly also your own work and perspectives how do you think about that and if I looked back at the principles of the new social contract for the web actually re-emphasized we need more connectivity for everyone so it's some sort of an interesting tension it's a movement yes it's a social contract yes so similar spirit but with different principles how do you reconcile these two possible pathways forward great question so I think when the web was built it was built with this idea of the commons that perhaps Primavera was signaling it was built by academics that understood that they had control over knowledge and wanted that knowledge to be available to others I think in the years particularly perhaps 10 15 years things have radically changed and the way data is being processed has changed and the web perhaps hasn't accommodated those new spaces and those new spaces have been taken over by apps and actors that have other purposes which is perhaps the extraction of life and that's where I think that the book is super powerful that it provides language to speak about these things that didn't exist or weren't visible 15 20 years ago and when we have conversations within the contract for the web I see that the discourse has changed even when you sit down with a company the starting point perhaps now is GDPR a year ago GDPR was insane now you can say this is a starting point and we want you to do more on this and that and I see that these types of initiatives that provide language for us to move the discourse forward and to take control over of commons I think is fundamental and the question perhaps is also when we have colonialism or when we thought about capitalism it often created these dichotomies right the capital labor north south when we think that this is an expansive move and now the human body is part of the extraction what's on the other side I mean we need something around which to coordinate a rally and call to identify who our friends are and perhaps who should be called out but when everyone is part of the extraction who is on the other side or is it that the Silicon Valley leaders don't give their kids phones and so they're not part of it very good point we saw the other side well at no point in the book do we say there's a evil corporate capitalist conspiracy and we know the guys and let's get outside there is one but that's not our target in this book we're looking at because last week Meridith Whittig was outside Palantir's House and so on let's assume let's say that's a given that's going on that's bad but there's a much bigger thing that humanity has fallen into we're looking at profound side effects on many many levels interacting to create an order that no one exactly planned although now some people are claiming they planned it because they want credit for it so it's very difficult we're very inspired and we have a huge respect for what you're doing at the web foundation the early versions have been inspired our conclusion obviously we didn't know what you've done most recently because of the spirit in which you're doing it the collaborative spirit bringing people together thinking same we humanity has a problem that's exactly the sort of registering what we want to raise our concerns to I think we have two concerns with the proposal you have at the moment which I've shared with you privately one is going back to the infrastructure it's incredibly difficult to separate out my data my photos my tracks and so on from the all forms of other data related to me which are being used to exploit me or to discriminate against me there's a whole darker zone which I'm not convinced data portability can get to for structural reasons that's the main why but there's also a moral one that I didn't see in your proposal any if you like philosophical interruption I think there's some forms of data extraction going on today and on the Amazon factory floor for example constant tracking of human beings so they literally cannot move without being tracked I find that inhuman I think it should be stopped for a period regardless of the benefits similarly marketers dream that they're going to put implants into our bodies we didn't even give you the scarier quotes but there's a lot of serious marketing talk about how great it's going to be when we all have implants so feeling a bit thirsty well it's a great bottle of water which relates to the bottle of water you had yesterday around the corner again I think that's unacceptable there should be certain things which just should not be done and I think that moral sharpness I didn't see maybe it's because you're building a collaborative document at the beginning but I hope you will get there as the negotiations develop but that there's a point that I know Ulysses wanted to pick up on that well yes in the last chapter of the book we do have a section on tools for common knowledge because we do agree you know with the kind of work you're doing and others are doing that we need to collectively develop some tools to understand you know how this is going to unfold and so we do talk about the kind of research that needs to be done the kind of universal research so just beyond academia not just located within academia but the kind of research that needs to be done so that everybody who is affected can think through this problem and collect and become output solutions was that the point? Yeah that's the one so that's that's where we end up basically in the book yeah all right so we collect about three questions if you would be very concise with your questions and then you would respond we have one question right here how you doing? I'm Joshua Adams I'm an assistant professor at Salem State I'm writing a chapter on digital ethics Google search is digital colonialism so maybe I should change it to data colonialism but my question was where do you see search engines and search optimization in this process in the sense of search engine optimization incentivize a certain ownership over the digital representation of things Hi Dan Skarnikia humanitarian researcher at HHI I want to know how optimistic you are about that potential for positive social change coming out of this coming from the discipline I'm coming from I'm thinking about the laws of war which did have a lot of negotiation and going around the ending of colonialism and the implementation of some of that was only possible because the previously entrenched powers were extraordinarily weak after the Second World War which was just a global fracturing of power and do you have an optimistic view of the possibility of those solutions without that sort of disjointment Minerva Rivas a visiting fellow at the Petriplov Center from the University of Geneva and my question is also I really enjoy your talk and I'm looking forward to read the book and it's on the unintended consequence of colonialism like for example health wise half of the indigenous population in the Americas died because of the doom rather than violence and in that sense what are the unintended consequences that you can see now and how we can act upon them thank you very much well the ever order you would like to respond well I think you can probably tell us more than we can tell you about search engine optimization and how that's going to play out but I do think it's this notion of customization the idea that we are going to get the search results that we want that are very specific to us it sort of plays into this the development of this identity perhaps building a certain sense of dependence on these tools but certainly something to think about just very quickly about your point yes it's a big question who knows what's going to happen I am sort of encouraged for instance when we see in terms of big historical movements who can tell but it was surprising to see for instance what's happening in Hong Kong and the way for instance that activists are taking down the lamp posts with the surveillance cameras that they are appropriating different apps like Tinder to organize social movements when other apps are being blocked too early to tell but maybe those little movements will start to add up to something else yes starting with search engine optimization that's a very difficult area because we've developed habits under this system as it's evolved some of them are pleasurable and we're aware of it and we adapt so SEO is not necessarily a bad thing but the whole question of search engines is difficult I think now that we exist in a connected space and that's the one thing in the book we say is not reversible the connectability of the world cannot be reversed it's a fundamental change there's a precondition of everything that follows then how do we live in that something like a search engine is clearly necessary we want to know what is out there to be connected with how it can be funded could we imagine a publicly funded through those who weren't visible in its light and yet was not driven by the economic models so profoundly puzzling with Google that's a massive open question for policy makers who are we don't have those fields that's a massive collective problem for the next 10 years so it's a really difficult area but I just want to emphasize our book, the one area that we absolutely see as strong allies is critical data science the work being done on algorithmic ethics this we take as a given as an essential ally for this argument and we don't repeat it there for in the book but we take it as a given because this is part of the alliance that has to be built on the question of are we optimistic I think we would have to answer that individually because we're different people with different views of the world and that's been one of the amazingly exciting things about writing this book together and bridging that but I think I would start optimistic but probably imagine a future pessimism so I'm optimistic because we say in the book the most powerful tool that human beings have ever had we're talking about slave populations we're talking about people in Latin America resisting US imperialism 50 years ago is imagination reimagining the world you're in and naming it differently and saying no I want to build a different world I'm going to rename it from now on so that I can build a different world imagination we say at the end of the book and this is the policy point is the most practical tool it is the starting point for every policy proposal so I'm optimistic and we're genuinely optimistic about that book that's why we've written the book longer term though we've got to recognize that this is going to be playing out in a geopolitical space where there's not just one big imperial power Spain slash Portugal Poland slash Holland but two US and US's allies and China and China's allies with India in between unclear Russia maybe willing to switch sides get involved very unclear we're entering a hyper competitive space of data colonialism no longer just involving one part of Latin America the whole planet is going to be involved in this therefore how that's going to work out well I'm not full enough to be optimistic about that global solidarity has to be really clear and it has to reach across difference across countries and see it as a global struggle for humanity the point about deep side of yes that's a very interesting it was literally the bodies that happened to be there without them knowing it carried the diseases that wasn't beyond intention but you raise really the question of extermination which we do touch on in the book not in the slides maybe we should go back to that because it's in the book I think it's important if you don't hear what our answer is well I mean basically we say that what data colonialism exterminates is not so much bodies but alternative ways of thinking and alternative ways of being so I think who knows what the unintended consequences of that if he projected a couple of decades or more are going to be just to gloss on that the starting point of chapter 5 on freedom a quote that really shook me to the core was from a commentator on Hegel himself beyond agreed impossible however long you try unless you try commentators on Hegel are extremely good though and one phrase because they need to be and one phrase that I read really shook me to the core and it's where we start chapter 5 with it it's a philosopher saying what will be the greatest loss of freedom imaginable it will be to reach a state of being where you can no longer remember what freedom was that's what we think is beginning to go on that's why we need to start resisting now and help each other do so what a powerful way to end this session thanks for a great conversation to be continued thank you everyone thanks


got about in the blank spot sitting in the bed now I'm making up be visible to me the corrupted souls don't know got black moon behind a dry wall couldn't you see even when you bleed so now you


Hello and welcome to Newsclick. On April 11th, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was forcibly arrested from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Assange now faces extradition to the United States, where he may face a grand jury indictment on charges of espionage. To talk more about some of the developments in the case, we have with us Prabhuprabil. Prabhuprabil, so on the one hand this is initially of course a British police said that this was about jumping bail but later everyone involved accepted this was actually about the US expedition request and the US is clearly framing this as a case of espionage using the Computer Fraud Act and other instances. But I think one of the things that they're willing to ignore is the fact that this is also an issue of journalism and this is something that needs to be discussed in some way. First is let's look about where the legal case is. We have to see as we have discussed with Sudeh Vidranatha earlier that the case is not going to be that simple even if the US wants to get him back to the US, get him to the US in fact correctly or the UK wants to hand him over. There is going to be a legal issue over there, there's going to be proceedings. We'll see what is the extent or how it will actually happen, how what is going to take place. The second issue that you are raising that is it that apart from the issue of press freedom, the second issue that we are talking about is the what is the charge that has been framed and you are saying that it is a basically espionage versus computer fraud etc etc. Now it's linked really to the question that you're raising about press freedom. Did he conspire to hack into quote unquote US secret documents or did he accept what the whistleblower in this case Chelsea Manning was willing to hand over to WikiLeaks the documents which were there in the US government confidential repository whatever. Now all accounts it was Chelsea Manning who was the whistleblower, she was the one who had access and she is the one who handed over these documents to WikiLeaks for publication. Did the publication serve public good? Yes, it showed clear instances of war crimes, even clear videos which show how journalists were shot down on the ground, it shows civilians being killed and the wealth of documents, how different countries laws were violated and how war crimes were committed by US troops both in Iraq as well as in Afghanistan. So this were the nobody's questioning that this served a public purpose which was war crimes or crimes against the people of different parts of the world. So the question that arises should the what would be called the press freedoms be extended to WikiLeaks and there's been a whole argument saying that well you know it's really not press because it is not print, it is not television, we know that if that is an argument then a number of newspapers which have folded up today and are only have a digital presence would also be considered as not press that's not the argument anybody is giving. So digital platforms as press is now widely accepted there is no argument that if you are a media organization what form you practice your media presence whether it should be print television or it should be digital platforms that's really not the issue. The issue is are you really performing the traditional function of press of informing the people of what's the news and what's the wrong doing of those in power. And if we take that into account WikiLeaks certainly performed that role and therefore the argument that WikiLeaks is not press is a completely spurious one. So I think it's a new form of journalism which WikiLeaks is really brought about. It started with exposure of corruption in fact initial letter that Julian had written to different people in the world asking for the support talked about corruption in the developing countries because he didn't think that the problem was in the United States or in European Western European countries he thought this is a peculiarly third world problem the governments are corrupt they violate human rights and therefore they need to be exposed in fact it was his experience with what happened Iraq war particularly being an eye opener that forced him to rethink his politics and the understanding that the biggest violator of human rights is actually the United States and other NATO countries and the fact that a lot of this crimes happen in quote unquote third world countries or developing countries is because of the shall we say the direct interest of the US and the US big corporations or Western European big corporations therefore this is not a case of corruption of just simply third world dictators enriching themselves but it's a far bigger issue than that. And picking up on one of the points you said in terms of a new model of journalism so what Julian Assange and WikiLeaks actually brought was the possibility that information even raw information could actually be used as a weapon by people who either to have absolutely no access to it and that is actually in some senses created a revolution because after that Snowden came with his own bit of information and there have been many such instances across the world. It's not really a bit it's a huge cache of information out of which we don't know how much we have seen and how much we have still to see. You know there are I think two major issues or changes I would hesitate to use the word revolution because a much misused word which WikiLeaks really brings in. One is it makes the possibility of transmitting large amounts of information from the one who's a whistleblower to the one who is functioning as shall we say the press or the media to expose these documents to the public. Now this used to be as we know a very cloak and dagger operation. We have the Woodward and Bernstein case of the Watergate leaks with the deep throat Mark Felt who was associate director of FBI apparently communicating by Bernstein moving a flower pot in his balcony and Mark Felt then marking up the place they would meet on the copy of his New York Times the 20th page if I remember correctly. Now all of this was very very difficult and if you're going to supply bulk documents obviously this was not a very shall we say efficient use particularly with cell phones and all other means of surveillance today that we have this is increasingly a difficult way to operate. So what Julian did because he was a very high-end programming person he created a mechanism by which whistleblowers could transfer documents to WikiLeaks without actually WikiLeaks knowing about who the supplier of the information was. They of course had to do the due diligence was it true was it correct it's not every document which WikiLeaks got it published it didn't but after having done that they could say with confidence that we do not know who the person is who is center of these documents we've received the documents something that Bernstein always said that he didn't know who was the deep throat of course we know that he really did but he could have plausible deniability in this case you could have technological deniability because the secure dropbox kind of platforms the dropboxes that he engineered various other modes of communication that he really made popular at least the circuit made or as he puts it cryptography becoming democratic that others could use it it's just not just a state and you could also therefore communicate with the platforms like WikiLeaks without compromising who you are and of course if people are not careful then of course you still can get caught and surely if you take Chelsea Manning's case it was not the communication that became public and that of to said to WikiLeaks had made her that identified her but it was really her speaking to someone else who then acted as a snitch so it's also interesting because especially the Iraq and the Afghanistan cables were not a WikiLeaks operation alone it was the entire media ecosystem across continents even in India for that matter the cables that were released along with the mainstream media so we have also seen for instance the other papers paradise papers and various other things becoming used in a similar fashion so I think what has really happened is journalism has changed dramatically with WikiLeaks but this is something which you know is people are unwilling to admit because shall we say they don't like Julian Assange or what he was doing or if you're a Democrat in the United States you believe Assange helped Trump win and so on but the other thing was if you talk about the technological finesse that WikiLeaks showed it was an amazing one because they were sort of dropped from all the servers that are available commercially available money was stopped and so on and they may created huge number of instances through which WikiLeaks still was available to the people and therefore they're able to beat what people thought would be a very difficult exercise being able to function without the US stopping them so all the attempts that US made to stop them actually they could not help they could really stop it because of the technical finesse or the technical capability the WikiLeaks has it had or Julian had and so you would see for instance the attack on WikiLeaks as a fundamental attack on the freedom of press and the media expression across the world I have no doubt that it is because what we are talking about is something which is exposed by exposed by Chelsea Manning she served a sentence in jail for this if anybody can be accused by the United States of having breached their security to Chelsea Manning she was a whistleblower and she was punished for this and that could be argued was the only person the government can hold responsible can the press be held responsible for publishing it I think the answer is clear in that or so Washington Post New York Times Guardian all of them should also be put to jail why is it that only only WikiLeaks what's the specific crime that WikiLeaks has committed which Washington Post New York Times or a Guardian has it and Washington Post as you know was the Watergate case so why is it that we are saying well that was different but this is not after all you are talking of crimes committed by the US and Iraq and Afghanistan these are war crimes thank you that's all we have time for today keep watching