Tag: Politics

Data and ownership of it has increasingly become not just the measure but the object and engine of economic and political power. Corporations and states which do not control it on their own are merely producing it for others.

From one perspective, data resembles property, property being, as Proudhon put it, theft, theft from the Commons. From another “neo-Marxist” perspective, data is analogous to “work value”.

Our activities are the source of every bit of data out there, but the data value obtained from our activities is alienated from us in the same way the surplus value of labor is extracted from workers in the old industrial order of things.

Concern for privacy, typically turning around a question of “bourgeois” individual rights, is only a sideshow compared to the transformation in social relations occurring before our eyes.

One doesn’t have to be an avid reader of Michel Foucault to see that our willing participation in social media is a new and invidious form of confession, which he understood as the most intimate instrument of institutional power and control. As we delineate and expose our wishes, wants and needs, our likes and dislikes, we willingly provide the information necessary for our own manipulation and subjugation. We make our selves into subjects, unless we learn to simulate, dissemble, bluff, fake, counterfeit, feign or sham. Never tell the truth. Never turn yourself in.