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- Convenors:
-
Marie Kolling
(Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS))
Sofie Henriksen (Danish Institute for International Studies)
Pernille Hohnen (Roskilde University)
Send message to Convenors
- Discussant:
-
Moisés Kopper
(University of Antwerp)
- Formats:
- Panel
- Mode:
- Face-to-face
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 23 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Short Abstract:
The panel explores contemporary capitalism, datafication and inequality. It also addresses methodological and ethical challenges in 'studying up' and getting access to the black box of regulatory and commercial business models that thrive on AI, algorithmic predictions and big data harvesting.
Long Abstract:
Anthropologists doing fieldwork in data-driven markets have challenged classic ethnographic practices and ethical conventions (Seaver 2017; Bonini and Gandini 2020; Souleles 2020). In order to unveil current state-led and corporate practices of harvesting and commodifying data about people’s social lives, they suggest developing alternative tactical ethnographic techniques and to work with a set of less ‘protective’ ethics. This panel seeks to explore ethnographic research on datafication and contemporary capitalism 1) to discuss concerns with the shortcomings of ethnographic methods and ethical conventions when ‘studying up’ (Nader (1972) and trying to access closed economic fora (Garsten & Sörbom 2018) and 2) to engage in dialogue with critical literature on contemporary capitalisms such as “data capitalism” (Myers West 2019), “surveillance capitalism” (Zuboff 2019), “data colonialism” (Couldry & Mejias 2019), “platform capitalism” (Srnicek 2017), “data extractivism” (Mezzadra & Nielson 2017; Jung 2023) and “digital capitalism” (Burrell & Fourcade 2021). Individuals typically have limited options to opt out from having their data harvested, data that in turn is processed to determine the services that are offered or denied, often producing new or reinforcing existing inequalities. Papers may include research on for-profit and non-profit data-based interventions addressing inequalities in areas such as insurance, banking, and development aid. We invite papers discussing implications of current data practices and data-driven business models that are notoriously hidden from public view, and also reflecting upon methodological and ethical challenges of accessing and conducting research on the “black box” of algorithmic decisions and digital infrastructures.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 23 July, 2024, -Guilherme Fians (University of St Andrews)
Paper short abstract:
Based on ethnography, this paper analyses how Wikipedia editors perceive knowledge co-production and open-source software as resources to oppose datafied capitalism and the neoliberal obstacles posed by unaffordable learning materials, presenting technology as a controversial anti-capitalist tool.
Paper long abstract:
As ‘the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit’, Wikipedia draws on relinquishing the requirement for expertise: the freedom granted to any internet user to edit Wikipedia articles is meant to challenge the hegemony of the intellectual elites over knowledge production, thus democratising and freeing knowledge. Similarly, Wikipedia presents its open-source wiki software as the result of open collaboration, detached from the ‘black box’ functioning of commercial platforms. Such discourses inform the practices of Wikipedia editors, who engage with this encyclopedia as a collaborative space co-constructed and run by humans, free from the intervention of algorithms, AI and the dangers of datafication. Against this background, this paper asks: how do technologies (such as open-source software and ‘the internet’ more broadly) emerge as neoliberal-laden tools set to address neoliberal problems?
Grounded on interviews and ethnographic fieldwork conducted on Wikipedia in 2022-2024, this paper argues for the use of technoliberal participation as a framework to better understand both datafied capitalism and certain forms of opposing it. While the Big Techs are driven by a combination of distrust of vertical authority and faith in the transformative power of technology (Malaby 2009, Pfister and Yang 2012), these dispositions nurturing the for-profit digital economy also seem to feed the practices of Wikipedia editors, FOSS activists and hackers, who use technology to oppose private property, maximise freedom of expression and experiment with direct democracy. Additionally, I take the assumed openness and transparency of Wikipedia’s infrastructure as an entryway to discuss the practicalities and ethics of online ethnography.
Sofie Henriksen (Danish Institute for International Studies)
Paper short abstract:
Based on an ethnographic case study of Signpost, a digital information platform for migrants developed in partnership between aid organizations and Big Tech companies, this paper discusses the challenges and importance of understanding the ambiguous role of corporations in digital humanitarianism.
Paper long abstract:
Technology companies are increasingly involved in humanitarian responses to refugee crises. Whether as partners of aid agencies or developers of border technologies, their involvement often centers on providing refugees with free access – to the Internet, information, or digital identification systems – in exchange for personal data from e.g., iris scans or tracking mechanisms. In this paper, I analyze the data practices and collaborations in Signpost, a digital communication platform developed in 2015 in partnership between Google and the International Rescue Committee with the aim of providing access to life-saving information for migrants and refugees on the move. Based on ethnographic data collected over three years (2019-2022), including interviews and participant observation with the teams of developers from the involved tech companies and humanitarian organizations, I show how the Signpost project constructs a narrative of information as both a form of aid and power for refugees, which conceals an unequal and opaque exchange of aid, information, and data. In doing so, the paper argues for a deeper understanding of the role of corporations in digital humanitarianism.
Felipe Figueiredo (IT University of Copenhagen)
Paper short abstract:
Through an ethnographic approach about cryptocurrency farms in Iceland, this presentation discusses the claims for sustainability of the IT industry amidst energy controversies. Unpacking power dynamics and techno-economic perspectives, we discuss future perspectives of digital capitalism.
Paper long abstract:
Through an ethnographic approach of cryptocurrency farms in Iceland, this presentation is going to critically discuss the claims for sustainable development of the IT industry and its forms of digital extractions and materialities. The surge in cryptocurrency, particularly its influence on energy issues related to IT infrastructures, has garnered attention from researchers examining the intersection of IT, digital colonialism, and climate change (Turby et al., 2022; Howson, Vries, 2021; Jingming et al., 2019). According to the International Energy Agency, in 2021, cryptocurrencies consumed around 140TWh of electricity globally, surpassing Argentina's entire energy consumption for the year with a population of 45 million (IEA, 2022). In this context, Iceland emerges as a promising site for investigation due to the rapid growth of crypto farms fueled by abundant, inexpensive renewable energy and favorable climate conditions for data center refrigeration. Additionally, Iceland strategically positions itself as a "hotspot" for data centers, enticing expansion through low corporate taxes and financial incentives (Sovacool et al., 2022). However, in the wake of recent energy shortages, Landsvirkjun, Iceland's national power company, decided to cease powering new crypto farms and imposed constraints on existing ones. This development sparked a sociotechnical controversy, with arguments revolving around energy security, consumption constraints on one hand, and on the other, the potential sustainability of blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies in the country. Drawing from this ethnographic case, how power relations operate in these infrastructures, and how techno-economic practices are shaping future perspectives on digital economy in the data-driven capitalism?
Sabina Vassileva (Charles University)
Paper short abstract:
Exploring algorithmic opacity in a Czech delivery service by ethnographic fieldwork, this paper investigates how worker-app interactions enable surveillance mechanisms that exacerbate inequality and discusses methodological intricacies of accessing AI-driven labour environments.
Paper long abstract:
Celebrated as autonomous and flexible, platform labour represents a rapidly growing and accessible work provider on the labour market. In the local context of the Czech Republic this expanding economic model aligns with a long tradition of legally categorizing employees as independent contractors and thus depriving them of legal certainties. This study, grounded in extensive ethnographic fieldwork within a Czech delivery service, interrogates the nuanced interplay of digital management and labour practices questioning the incorporation of digital surveillance in work exploitation and the potential for worker resistance through subversive micro-practices. This inquiry highlights how the digital application acting as an intermediary in the labour process not only orchestrates work but also facilitates extensive capture of value that extends beyond formal economic productivity to include data generation and digital surveillance further entrenching inequalities within the workspace. The investigation pays close attention to how various actors within the company – ranging from self-employed couriers to dispatchers and managers – navigate opacity and moldability of the digital application revealing mechanisms of (dis)empowerment and adaptation to extreme precarity. In this respect it develops a methodological reflection on challenges of doing ethnography of algorithmic systems by approaching algorithms as practical products resulting from human-technology interactions (Seaver, 2017). It therefore contributes to an ongoing debate about the practical and ethical difficulties of accessing and interpreting the “black boxes” of digital labour, aiming to shed light on the complex realities of platform work and its implications for inequality.
Marie Kolling (Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS))
Paper short abstract:
The paper analyses the commodification of personal data and debt in Brazil and the role of opaque credit criteria. It discusses the implications for automating inequality in Brazil’s credit society and methodological challenges in researching an opaque industry.
Paper long abstract:
In the era of Brazil’s “fintech revolution”, data driven technologies including algorithmic assessments of credit-worthiness have facilitated the expansion of credit to the low-income population (Miller 2003, vii, Fourcade and Healey 2013). As people have come to heavily rely on credit for daily living and life projects in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic and economic crisis, access and assessments have become pivotal in people’s lives. Meanwhile, as observed by Fourcade and Healy: “The basis upon which people are being scored, rated and evaluated is less predictable, or even knowable, to most of those who rely on it” (2017: 11). As this paper will show, this is also the case for many of the employees offering credit. Based on multimodal fieldwork, the paper seeks to unpack “the black box” of Brazil’s credit industry in which people’s private data and debt is being commodified by financial actors to generate profit. It will discuss the methodological paradox of doing fieldwork among consumers and servicers for whom credit is vital to their lives and businesses and yet the conditions on which it is offered is opaque. While opacity is in fact intrinsic to the business model, consumers’ lack of knowledge is cast as “financial illiteracy”. By engaging with critical studies of financial extractivism (Bernards 2022; Gago and Mezzadra's 2017) and datafied capitalism (Burrell and Fourcade 2021), the paper examines the capitalist experimentation and expansion of “subprime empire” (Schuster and Kar 2021) as it plays out in Brazil and its implications for automating inequality.
Shirin Bismillah (University of Roehampton)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores Indian homegrown dating apps, addressing methodological and ethical challenges within the framework of data colonialism - which appropriates human life through data extraction.
Paper long abstract:
This paper delves into the landscape of homegrown dating apps in contemporary India, examining how methodological and ethical challenges intersect within the pervasive framework of data colonialism. In the burgeoning digital ecosystem of India, online dating apps are not just facilitators of romantic connections but also agents of data extraction and algorithmic processing, where social life and finding love are appropriated through data extraction. Thus, ‘it is a fallacy to believe that more [online] connections generate more security’ (Couldry and Meijas, 2019). While many studies on heterosexual dating apps focus on user motivations and app interface dynamics within the Western world, my analysis focuses on Indian dating apps to demonstrate how forging intimate relationships and data colonialism are negotiated by media giants and tech corporations to define what counts as ‘love’.
The concept of data colonialism offers a useful framework for examining the expansion of algorithmic powers into new cultural and geographic territories (Kotliar, 2020). Through a qualitative approach encompassing semi-structured interviews and app walkthroughs, the paper will attempt to shed light on the implications for privacy, consent, and user autonomy in the Indian cultural frame. The questions guiding this paper are - How do dating app users in India perceive the collection, filtering, and use of their data by dating app companies? How does the concept of data colonialism shed light on the uses and production of Indian dating apps? Now that data colonialism is becoming more of an emergent reality, how are post-colonies like India addressing digital inequalities?
Daniel Souleles (Copenhagen Business School) Amir Massoumian (SOAS University) Dan Artus (UCL)
Paper short abstract:
In this paper we request a new code of ethics, one that takes seriously 1) the diversity of anthropological research, 2) the differing aims in different parts of anthropology, and, crucially 3) how varying power relations affect research.
Paper long abstract:
Our current incarnation of anthropological ethics came from the serial crises that swept through the discipline in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Anthropologists sought to make amends for contributing to race science and genocidal colonialism by adopting a code of ethics that presumed a sort of sub-altern other as the object of anthropological analysis, and then, second, sought to create an ethical code which would protect such a sub-altern from the anthropologist. Setting aside how effective such an ethics code was for ameliorating the harms of the colonial encounter, such an encounter and such a subject was never the only sort of research anthropology made or did. More to the point, since the crises of the 60s, 70s, and 80s, and anthropology has moved on. While some still do continue to go from core to the periphery and work with colonial or formerly colonial subjects, many anthropologists work in contexts with far different histories and power relations, often seeking to do activist work, applied work, or to criticize power by studying up. None of these streams of anthropology are well-served by the default assumptions in our present codes of ethics.. In fact, Anthropologists can often be put in harm’s way by sticking to the letter of our current codes. Given all this, in this article we request a new code of ethics, one that takes seriously 1) the diversity of anthropological research, 2) the differing aims in different parts of anthropology, and, crucially 3) how varying power relations affect research.
Eleni Theodorou (European University Cyprus) Katerina Mavrou (European University Cyprus) Spyros Spyrou (European University Cyprus)
Paper short abstract:
This paper presents findings of a study on youth’s practices and experiences of digital surveillance. It explores how children and youth in Cyprus understand and practice acts of digital surveillance as part of a broader question on the reconstitution of childhood in the era of datafied capitalism.
Paper long abstract:
Children’s and youth’s interactions in the industrialized world are mediated by technology, are marked by the production of large amounts of (meta)data, and have intensified children’s and youth’s experiences of/with the digital, giving way to what researchers have described as datafied childhoods (Mascheroni, 2020). A big part of datafied childhood is dataveillance (Van Dijck, 2014), that is the surveillance of people based on their online data; a characteristic of a new political and economic order Zuboff (2019) has called ‘surveillance capitalism’. However, notwithstanding calls for a more critical examination of children’s and youth’s lived experience with digital surveillance and its implications for children’s rights as data subjects (Lupton & Williamson, 2017), little is known on how children and youth make meaning of and engage as watchers and watched in acts of dataveillance and self-surveillance in the context of surveillance capitalism. This paper presents findings of a qualitative study on youth’s practices and experiences of digital surveillance. Using personal interviews, focus group interviews and a speculative design component with 15-19 year-old participants, we sought to explore how children and youth in Cyprus understand and practice acts of digital surveillance as part of a broader question on the reconstitution of childhood as a result of digital surveillance technologies (Marx & Steeves, 2010; Steeves & Jones, 2010) in the era of datafied capitalism.
Pernille Hohnen (Roskilde University)
Paper short abstract:
The paper investigates ‘platformization’ in the Danish banking sector by ethnographic fieldwork showing how Danish financial actors present their harvesting of personal payment data as ‘a public good’ while simultaneously establishing new asymmetrical (in)visibilities.
Paper long abstract:
In recent years, the Danish banking sector has developed a business model relying on citizens’ personal data, reflecting a gradual process of ‘platformization’ (Srnicek 2017). With the ‘open banking’ directive (PSD2), EU has further promoted this development by requiring European banks to give access to their customers’ payment data and accounts for third parties (Westermeier 2020). Several studies have investigated the changing logics of platformization and the central role of payment infrastructure in finance (e.g. Maurer 2012, 2014; O’Dwyer 2018). This paper takes a slightly different and more empirical route based on an ethnographic study on how platformization is ‘played out’ in and by the Danish banking sector, e.g. by analyzing privacy policies and participating in finance conferences. The paper aims to investigate how various actors in the banking sector frame the use of citizens/customers personal data, and what notions of (in)visibilities and asymmetries this framing conveys. More specifically the paper shows how automated profiling and ranking of citizens (based on payment data) is presented by financial actors as being in the interest of the public and as being for the sake of empowering customers. The paper is based on fieldwork across various sites of the Danish Banking sector. Certain ‘tactics’ (Seaver 2017) were developed in order to counter the fields’ notorious opaqueness and financial (and fintech) companies’ tendency to frame data extractivism as ‘business secrets’ (Bonnini and Gandini 2020). The paper also revisits literature on ‘studying up’ (Nader 1972) and more generally draws on ‘assemblage ethnographic techniques’ (Wahlberg 2022).