Nationalised data

The recent coup in Bolivia reminds us that poor countries rich in resources continue to be plagued by the legacy of colonialism. Anything that stands in the way of a

foreign corporation’s ability to extract cheap resources must be removed.

Today, apart from minerals and fossil fuels, corporations are after another precious resource: Personal data. As with natural resources, data too has become the target of extractive corporate practices.

As sociologist Nick Couldry and I argue in our book, ‘The Costs of Connection: How Data is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism’, there is a new form of colonialism emerging in the world: data colonialism. By this, we mean a new resource-grab whereby human life itself has become a direct input into economic production in the form of extracted data.

We acknowledge that this term is controversial, given the extreme physical violence and structures of racism that historical colonialism employed. However, our point is not to say that data colonialism is the same as historical colonialism, but rather to suggest that it shares the same core function: extraction, exploitation, and dispossession.

Like classical colonialism, data colonialism violently reconfigures human relations to economic production. Things like land, water, and other natural resources were valued by native people in the precolonial era, but not in the same way that colonisers (and later, capitalists) came to value them: as private property. Likewise, we are experiencing a situation in which things that were once primarily outside the economic realm — things like our most intimate social interactions with friends and family, or our medical records — have now been commodified and made part of an economic cycle of data extraction that benefits a few corporations.

So what could countries in the Global South do to avoid the dangers of data colonialism?

One option is to follow proposals from the likes of computer philosophy writer Jaron Lanier and US presidential candidate Andrew Yang, who have suggested that individuals should be paid for their data. But this neoliberal attempt to try to solve the problem at the level of the individual can dilute the value of the accumulated resources. After all, is said and done, if we work at the level of the individual (or even at the level of collectives, platforms or unions that collect money on behalf of individuals) payments to users would be rather small.

Instead, it makes much more sense for countries to take advantage of their scale and take the bold step to declare data a national resource, nationalise it, and demand that companies like Facebook and Google pay for using this resource so its exploitation primarily benefits the citizens of that country.

Excerpted from: ‘Why the Global South should nationalise its data’. AlJazeera.com