DIGITAL OBJECTS DIGITAL SUBJECTS Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Capitalism, Labour and Politics in the Age of Big Data Edited by DAVID CHANDLER and CHRISTIAN FUCHS Digital Objects, Digital Subjects: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Capitalism, Labour and Politics in the Age of Big Data Edited by David Chandler and Christian Fuchs University of Westminster Press www.uwestminsterpress.co.uk Published by University of Westminster Press 101 Cavendish Street London W1W 6UW www.uwestminsterpress.co.uk Text ©the editors and several contributors 2019 First published 2019 Cover: Diana Jarvis Printed in the UK by Lightning Source Ltd. Print and digital versions typeset by Siliconchips Services Ltd. ISBN (Hardback): 978-1-912656-08-0 ISBN (PDF): 978-1-912656-09-7 ISBN (EPUB): 978-1-912656-10-3 ISBN (Kindle): 978-1-912656-11-0 ISBN (Paperback): 978-1-912656-20-2 DOI: https://doi.org/10.16997/book29 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA. This license allows for copying and distributing the work, providing author attribution is clearly stated, that you are not using the material for commercial purposes, and that modified versions are not distributed. The full text of this book has been peer-reviewed to ensure high academic standards. For full review policies, see: http://www.uwestminsterpress.co.uk/ site/publish. Competing Interests: the editors and contributors declare that they have no competing interests in publishing this book Suggested citation: Chandler, D. and Fuchs, C. (eds.) 2019. Digital Objects, Digital Subjects: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Capitalism, Labour and Politics in the Age of Big Data. London: University of Westminster Press. DOI: https://doi. org/10.16997/book29. License: CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 To read the free, open access version of this book online, visit http: https://www.uwestminsterpress. co.uk/site/books/10.16997/book29 or scan this QR code with your mobile device: Contents 1. Introduction: Big Data Capitalism – Politics, Activism, and Theory 1 Christian Fuchs and David Chandler Section I: Digital Capitalism and Big Data Capitalism 21 2. Digital Governance in the Anthropocene: The Rise of the Correlational Machine 23 David Chandler 3. Beyond Big Data Capitalism, Towards Dialectical Digital Modernity: Reflections on David Chandler’s Chapter 43 Christian Fuchs 4. Karl Marx in the Age of Big Data Capitalism 53 Christian Fuchs 5. What is at Stake in the Critique of Big Data? Reflections on Christian Fuchs’s Chapter 73 David Chandler 6. Seeing Like a Cyborg? The Innocence of Posthuman Knowledge 81 Paul Rekret 7. Posthumanism as a Spectrum: Reflections on Paul Rekret’s Chapter 95 Robert Cowley Section II: Digital Labour 101 8. Through the Reproductive Lens: Labour and Struggle at the Intersection of Culture and Economy 103 Kylie Jarrett 9. Contradictions in the Twitter Social Factory: Reflections on Kylie Jarrett’s Chapter 117 Joanna Boehnert iv Contents 10. E(a)ffective Precarity, Control and Resistance in the Digitalised Workplace 125 Phoebe V. Moore 11. Beyond Repression: Reflections on Phoebe Moore’s Chapter 145 Elisabetta Brighi 12. Goodbye iSlave: Making Alternative Subjects Through Digital Objects 151 Jack Linchuan Qiu 13. Wage-Workers, Not Slaves: Reflections on Jack Qiu’s Chapter 165 Peter Goodwin Section III: Digital Politics 169 14. Critique or Collectivity? Communicative Capitalism and the Subject of Politics 171 Jodi Dean 15. Subjects, Contexts and Modes of Critique: Reflections on Jodi Dean’s Chapter 183 Paulina Tambakaki 16. The Platform Party: The Transformation of Political Organisation in the Era of Big Data 187 Paolo Gerbaudo 17. The Movement Party – Winning Elections and Transforming Democracy in a Digital Era: Reflections on Paolo Gerbaudo’s Chapter 199 Anastasia Kavada 18. The Appropriation of Fixed Capital: A Metaphor? 205 Antonio Negri 19. Appropriation of Digital Machines and Appropriation of Fixed Capital as the Real Appropriation of Social Being: Reflections on Toni Negri’s Chapter 215 Christian Fuchs The Editors and the Contributors 223 Index 227 CHAPTER 1 Introduction Christian Fuchs and David Chandler 1. Introduction In May 2017, The Economist’s front cover headlined a feature on Big Data titled ‘The World’s Most Valuable Resource’. The feature argued that data is the world’s new oil. Data would drive development in the twenty-first century in the same way as oil transformed the world’s economy and society in the early twentieth century. Such popular discourses claim that Big Data enables new ways of gen- erating knowledge that will lead to innovative and creative possibilities. In the same month as The Economist ran this feature on Big Data, we organ- ised the interdisciplinary symposium ‘Digital Objects, Digital Subjects: Activ- ism, Research & Critique in the Age of Big Data Capitalism’ at the University of Westminster (May 20-21, 2017)1. The symposium was hosted by the Westmin- ster Institute for Advanced Studies and the Department of Politics and Interna- tional Relations. It featured ten presentations by leading international experts on the study of the digital in politics, the economy and society. This edited collection is a product of the conference, and provides further reflections on the presentations given. We especially thank Denise Rose Hansen from the Westminster Institute for Advanced Studies, who brilliantly managed the organisation of the conference and supported us in bringing this book to publication. We also thank Andrew Lockett from University of Westminster Press for his interest in publishing this How to cite this book chapter: Fuchs, C. and Chandler, D. 2019. Introduction Big Data Capitalism - Politics, Activism, and Theory. In: Chandler, D. and Fuchs, C. (eds.) D igital Objects, Digital Subjects: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Capitalism, Labour and Politics in the Age of Big Data. Pp. 1–20. London: University of Westminster Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16997/ book29.a. License: CC‐BY‐NC‐ND 4.0 2 Digital Objects, Digital Subjects book and his editorial help. We are also grateful to our colleagues from the Communication and Media Research Institute and the Centre for the Study of Democracy who have acted as chairs and respondents, as well as to the speakers, contributors, volunteers, interpreters, technicians and administrators whose work helped to make the conference a big success. Many claims have been made about the emergence of a ‘digital turn’ that is said to have radically transformed the possibilities for politics by undermining traditional modernist binaries of subject/object, state/society, politics/economics, public/ private, consumption/production, time/space, mind/body, labour/leisure, culture/ nature, human/posthuman. This turn has run through several phases, including cybernetics, automation technologies, mainframe computers, databases, artificial intelligence, personal computers, the World Wide Web, smart phones, geographical information systems, social media, targeted digital advertising, self-quantification, Big Data analytics, Cloud computing and the Internet of Things. This collected volume presents interdisciplinary assessments of the digital’s impact on society. The contributions interrogate the claims of both digital optimism and digital pessimism. Digital optimists assert that digital techno- logies have radically transformed the world, promising new forms of commu- nity, alternative ways of knowing and sensing, creative innovation, participatory culture, networked activism and distributed democracy. Digital pessimists ar- gue that digital technologies have not brought about positive change, but have rather deepened and extended domination through new forms of control. The pessimists speak of networked authoritarianism, digital dehumanisation, alienation 2.0, networked exploitation and the rise of the surveillance society. The chapters engage with questions of the digital in respect to activism, re- search and critique. They engage with the possibilities, potentials, pitfalls, limits and ideologies of digital activism. They reflect on whether computational social science, the digital humanities and ubiquitous datafication enable new research approaches or result in a digital positivism that threatens the independence of critical research and is likely to bring about about the death of the social sci- ences and humanities. The volume explores the futures, places and possibilities of critique in the age of digital subjects and digital objects. The main question this book asks is: what are the key implications of the digi- tal for subjects, objects and society? This question is examined through three lenses: digital capitalism/Big Data capitalism, digital labour, and digital politics. These three perspectives form three sections in the book. Each section consists of six chapters: three presentations each followed by a comment or response. The first section focuses on society in its totality as digital capitalism. Digital capitalism exists wherever capitalist society is shaped by computer technologies. In recent years, Big Data has become an important aspect of digital capitalism, leading to the emergence of a new dimension of Big Data capitalism. The three contributions by David Chandler, Christian Fuchs and Paul Rekret, as well as the three comments (Christian Fuchs’ comments on David Chandler, C handler’s on Fuchs, Robert Cowley’s on Paul Rekret) focus on digital capitalism in general, as Introduction 3 well as aspects of Big Data. Chandler discusses how Big Data capitalism brings about a new form of digital governmentality focused on correlation. Fuchs ar- gues that Karl Marx helps us to critically understand digital capitalism and Big Data capitalism. Paul Rekret criticises the posthumanist approaches of Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour in the context of digital c apitalism. When analysing capitalism critically, we are dealing – as the subtitle of Marx’s opus magnum Capital indicates – with the critique of political economy. Politi- cal economy has an economic side and a political dimension, and these inter- act. Sections II and III approach digital political economy. Section II focuses on digital labour and Section III gives attention to digital politics. The three chapters in Section II – by Kylie Jarrett, Phoebe Moore and Jack L. Qiu – focus on a range of issues concerning labour and class in the digital age: the digital houseworker (Jarrett), the digital worker’s quantified self (Moore), and slavery in the digital age (Qiu). Joanna Boehnert comments on Kylie Jarrett, Elisabetta Brighi on Phoebe Moore, and Peter Goodwin on Jack L. Qiu. The three chapters in Section III – by Jodi Dean, Paolo Gerbaudo and Toni Negri – discuss aspects of digital politics, namely social movements in the con- text of communicative capitalism (Dean), political parties in the digital age (Gerbaudo), and the question of how social struggles can advance digital alter- natives (Negri). Paulina Tambakaki comments on Jodi Dean, Anastasia Kavada on Paolo Gerbaudo, and Christian Fuchs on Toni Negri. Taken together, the three sections, with their nine presentations and accom- panying comments show that we face a contradiction of subjects and objects in contemporary digital capitalism, and that structures of domination and ex- ploitation threaten social cohesion and democracy. Digital domination and the exploitation of digital labour are the hegemonic structural forces shaping digi- tal capitalism. But the situation is not hopeless, because there are potentials for struggles that can establish alternatives. For example, potentials for establishing a society of the digital commons are emerging within digital capitalism. Toni Negri, in his contribution, therefore asks how we can politically appropriate digital machines. The interest in advancing the digital commons and establish- ing a society of the commons is a political perspective that holds together many of the contributions to this book. In the remainder of this introduction to the collected volume, we will discuss the relationship of digital subjects and digital objects (Section 2) and the notion of Big Data capitalism (Section 3), which form the background and context of the nine presentations and responses in this book. 2. Digital Subjects/Digital Objects This volume engages with the changes that objects and subjects are under going in digital society. It asks what are the key implications of Big Data and the digi- tal for subjects, objects and society. 4 Digital Objects, Digital Subjects Computing and digitality are not exclusively phenomena of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Digital logic has a much longer history. Already in 1703, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz suggested basing mathematics, not on the decimal system, but on binary logic: ‘But instead of the progression of tens, I have for many years used the simplest progression of all, which proceeds by twos, hav- ing found that it is useful for the perfection of the science of numbers. Thus I use no other characters in it bar 0 and 1, and when reaching two, I start again’ (Leibniz 1703, np). In the history of computing, pioneering work was done by Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace in the nineteenth century. Babbage and Lovelace were ahead of their time because the technological standards of the nineteenth century were focused on what Marx (1867/1976) termed large-scale industry, rather than building a computer. Computing devices as we know them today go back to Alan Turing’s concept of the Turing Machine that he invented in 1936. The digital logic of zeros and ones is a key feature of the way a Turing Machine operates. During the Second World War, Turing built computers for the British military in order to decipher the Nazis’ encoded messages. In this light, the Second World War was not merely a war of military might, but also the first computational and digital war. The example of the Turing Machine indicates that computing and the digital always stand in a broader social, political, economic and ideological context. Today, digital computing is ubiquitous and shapes all aspects of contemporary life, including capitalism, governance, everyday life, culture, education, welfare and science. Technologies have always impacted human capacities. We cannot, therefore, easily separate technological objects from human subjects. The computer, the digital machine, has from its beginning changed the way subjects act and in- teract in the world. In the history of warfare, we have gone from hand-to-hand combat to killing at a distance through computerised technologies that enable smart bombs, killer robots, drone assassinations and pre-emptive warfare. These technologies do not only make warfare more distanced in space and time, but they also distance it morally. The example of digital warfare shows us that digital machines change the way subjects and objects relate to each other and are constituted. This edited collection focuses on the latest stage of digital life and the digital transformation of society. We call this latest stage ‘Big Data capitalism’. Algo- rithms that generate Big Data have today become central to political and ethical concerns, but there is no clear consensus on the distinctiveness of algorithmic knowledge. The United Nations argues that Big Data analytics are central to solving the world’s most pressing problems, from food shortages to conflicts and en- vironmental crises. For example, the UN Global Pulse project developed a model of real-time food price changes by collecting and analysing more than 40,000 tweets about food prices in Jakarta, Indonesia. Less altruistically, Big Data is also crucial for Facebook and its users who share over 5 billion posts and Introduction 5 upload more than 300 million images per day. More than 500,000 c omments are posted per minute. Facebook’s 2016 advertising profits of US$ 10.2 billion were generated by targeting users based on the analysis of Big Data generated through users’ activities and content. ‘Smart cities’ like London and Barcelona deploy Big Data analytics to more efficiently administer these urban complexes. Transport for London (TfL) cap- tures and analyses 20 million Oyster travel card taps per day in order to manage traffic flows and innovate transportation. In Barcelona, more than 20,000 smart meters are installed on bins, streetlights and other pieces of infrastructure, col- lecting socio-environmental Big Data. At Walmart, the world’s largest company with a turnover of almost half a trillion US dollars per year, an analytics team analyses hundreds of data streams in real time, including customer data, sales data, meteorological data, social media data and event and location data, all with a view to responding rapidly to emerging trends and thereby increasing sales and catering to its customers’ perceived needs. These examples, in the areas of disaster risk (UN Global Pulse), media and communication (Facebook), smart cities (Transport for London) and business (Walmart), demonstrate the vast amount, variety and speed of data collection and analysis. Big Data has transformed our ways of knowing in different fields, and algorithmic knowledge is impacting on everyday practices and processes. This book aims to clarify what is at stake when knowledge, subjects, objects and society become digital and algorithmic. Algorithmic detection of correlations across time and space enables Big Data approaches to operate in ‘real-time’ sce- narios, as in the examples of food prices in Jakarta, TfL’s data management of traffic, Facebook’s advertising practices, and Walmart’s retailing strategies. Although there is no agreed definition of what Big Data means, it tends to be understood as being related to volume, variety and velocity (Kitchin 2014, 68). Big Data’s volume refers to datasets so large that they cannot be processed and analysed by humans but only by machine-driven algorithms. There is a wide variety of sources and types of Big Data. Big Data has a high velocity: it is pro- duced, circulated and acted upon in real time, and at very high speeds. Connected digital devices such as CCTV, drone cameras, Internet of Things sensors, Twitter, Google, Facebook, smartphones, UN Global Pulse technolo- gies, smart city technologies, news feeds, weather report stations, demographic and population data collectors, price and economic data tools, or Walmart’s data collection methods, create constant streams of data. Algorithmic knowl- edge enables Big Data analytics that are produced by correlating these data streams to identify and analyse patterns of occurrences that enable new under- standings and ways of seeing the world. In philosophy, the rationalist tradition saw knowledge as existing in fixed causal relations and in fixed properties or essences of entities that were inde- pendent of and prior to experience, while empiricism argued that knowledge was experiential, contextual and obtained through the human sense organs. It was Immanuel Kant who advanced an epistemology that stressed the importance