Jonathan Gray, Liliana Bounegru, Tommaso Venturini
In this article, we examine how the social disturbance precipitated by ‘fake news’ can be viewed as a kind of infrastructural uncanny. We suggest that the threat of problematic and viral junk news can raise existential questions about the routine circulation, engagement and monetisation of content through the Web and social media. Prompted by the unsettling effects associated with the ‘fake news’ scandal, we propose methodological tactics for exploring (1) the link economy and the ranking of content, (2) the like economy and the metrification of engagement and (3) the tracker economy and the commodification of attention. Rather than focusing on the misleading content of junk news, such tactics surface the infrastructural conditions of their circulation, enabling public interventions and experiments to interrogate, challenge and change their role in reconfiguring relations between different aspects of social, cultural, economic and political life.
“The Physical Internet” visualisation from DensityDesign Lab undertaken by Beatrice Bazzan, Allegra Colombo, Martina Giordano, Gianluca Misto, Ludovica Piro, Irina Stojsic
The Labour Party’s recently launched manifesto and associated proposals contain the seeds of an egalitarian, progressive vision of the role that digital, data and knowledge infrastructures might play in contemporary life. While their proposals on broadband, tax, data, patents, platforms, AI and digital rights have largely been reported and evaluated separately, together they serve as a reminder that “another internet is possible”.
Online platforms such as Uber and Deliveroo promote exploitative and precarious “gig” work. The algorithms, tracking ecosystems and personalisation mechanisms of search and social media companies contribute to the commodification of public life, the polarisation of political debate, as well as new forms of discrimination and inequality. As new media scholar Richard Rogers frames the recent turn in public discourse, “instead of emancipatory, the web became authoritarian, with Shirky’s web supplanted by Morozov’s”.
In response to these developments, Labour have committed to taxing multinational corporations (“including tech giants”) in proportion to their economic activities by closing loopholes and changing rules which currently enable avoidance at a massive scale ($100 billion in avoidance for just six firms over the past decade, according to one recent report). The manifesto also proposes a new “Charter of Digital Rights” which would challenge algorithmic injustice, surveillance and support user rights for access and ownership to their data.
In addition to this agenda of redistribution, regulation and rights, Labour’s manifesto also contains proposals around alternative arrangements for the ownership, governance and control of digital and data infrastructures. Most prominent are the “free full-fibre broadband for all” proposals through the creation of a new “British Broadband” public service building on the successes of publicly owned networks around the world.
As internet studies and science and technology studies researchers have argued for many decades, digital infrastructures are not just neutral vehicles, but embody different kinds of values, politics and relations. Prioritising public access over private profits, publicly owned broadband networks challenge the long-standing assumption that “corporations necessarily provide connectivity”. British Broadband could commit to lowering environmental impacts by repurposing existing fibre, rather than laying new cables.
Taken together, Labour’s proposals for British Broadband and the Charter of Digital Rights suggest the possibility of changing not only the means but also the meaning of connectivity. With a shift from broadband as commercial service to broadband as a public commons comes the promise of reconfiguring relations between digital infrastructures and their users – for example, figuring the latter as networked citizens with expertise to offer rather than surveilled consumers from whom value can be extracted through transactional data.
I’ve been told that a free digital copy is forthcoming, and in the mean time printed copies of the translation are available here and here. The original version is available under a Creative Commons Attribution license here (PDF) and all assets are on GitHub here. There’s also a Japanese translation available here.
The book draws on a major exhibition at the ZKM Centre for Art and Media (Karlsruhe, Germany) on the legacy of Ramon Llull, including in fields such as “literature, visual arts, music, philosophy, religion, and politics” (the brochure for the exhibition is available here).
Gray, J. (2018). Computational Imaginaries: Some Further Remarks on Leibniz, Llull and Rethinking the History of Calculating Machines. In A. Vega, P. Weibel, & S. Zielinski (Eds.), DIA-LOGOS: Ramon Llull’s Method of Thought and Artistic Practice. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
The course supports students to critically engage with emerging practices associated with data activism, drawing on perspectives from science and technology studies, (new) media studies and data studies. Along with other readings, it also incorporates materials from my forthcoming Data Worlds book.
Stefania Milan (University of Amsterdam + University of Oslo) on her work on data activism with the ERC-funded DATACTIVE project.
The course outline, learning outcomes and illustrative readings are copied below. Further details can be found on the website of the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London here. Further readings from the course can be found here: https://www.zotero.org/groups/data_activism
Information, Communication & Society have just published an article that I wrote on “Data witnessing: attending to injustice with data in Amnesty International’s Decoders project”. The article is open access and the abstract and full reference are copied below.
This piece would not have been possible without the time and input from the list of people mentioned in the acknowledgements section of the article, to whom I’m most grateful. You can find out more about the current work of Amnesty Decoders here.
Gray, J. (2019). Data witnessing: attending to injustice with data in Amnesty International’s Decoders project. Information, Communication & Society, 1–21. DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2019.1573915
Data witnessing: attending to injustice with data in Amnesty International’s Decoders project
The concept of witnessing has been used to explore the construction of evidence and experience in settings of law, religion, atrocity, media, history and science. Recent research has examined how digital technologies may multiply the involvement of remote, non-present and unanticipated actors in the witnessing of events. This paper examines what digital data practices at Amnesty International’s Decoders initiative can add to the understanding of witnessing. It introduces the notion of ‘data witnessing’ with reference to four projects on (i) witnessing historical abuses with structured data from digitised documents; (ii) witnessing the destruction of villages with satellite imagery and machine learning; (iii) witnessing environmental injustice with company reports and photographs; and (iv) witnessing online abuse through the classification of Twitter data. These projects illustrate the configuration of experimental apparatuses for witnessing injustices with data. In contrast to accounts which emphasise the presence of an individual human witness at the scene, Amnesty’s data practices are conspicuously collective and distributed, rendering the systemic scale of injustices at a distance, across space and time. Such practices may contribute to research on both (new) media witnessing and data politics, suggesting ways in which care, concern and solidarity may be constructed, structured, extended and delimited by means of digital data.
Following is the abstract for our contribution on “The Fog of Finance? Visualising Offshore and the Aesthetics of Uncertainty” at the upcoming MoneyLab #6: Infrastructures of Money hosted by the Institute of Network Cultures and the University of Siegen. This is based on a collaboration between the Tax Justice Network, the University of Sussex, Density Design and the Public Data Lab. The MoneyLab #6 programme is available here, and the abstracts are available here.
Fog of Finance? Visualising Offshore and the Aesthetics of Uncertainty Chris Anderson (University of Leeds) Angeles Briones (DensityDesign Lab, Politecnico di Milano) Jonathan Gray (King’s College London) Daniel Haberly (University of Sussex) Michele Mauri (DensityDesign Lab, Politecnico di Milano) Tommaso Venturini (CNRS)
What can be learned from data practices to render offshore financial flows visible and actionable for advocacy, policy and public debate? How can data visualisations be used to narrate the scale and dynamics of offshore financial activity? How can they convey uncertainty without insinuating sublime unfathomability? How might the communication of what we know and what we don’t know about offshore finance both draw on, complement and modify existing visual cultures, practices and aesthetics of uncertainty? What might critical or inventive data practices for visualising offshore finance look like?
This paper explores the making of an Atlas of Offshore FDI as a collaboration between the Tax Justice Network, a network of researchers and research centres and the Public Data Lab. Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) is supposed to reflect bricks-and-mortar investments and “real” acquisitions by multinational corporations, and is often considered to be the backbone of globalization (Haberly & Wójcik, 2015). However, roughly two thirds of total global FDI is either from or in jurisdictions widely used as domiciles for shell companies and corporate inversions – most often for purposes of tax avoidance. Despite international action to address offshore tax avoidance and financial secrecy, there is still no publicly available dataset that allows for the FDI entering countries via particular offshore jurisdictions to be traced back to its ultimate origin. The Atlas of Offshore FDI aims to explore the scale and significance of this offshore activity, as well as to shed new light onto its contents, by creating the first publicly available database of global offshore investment.
The project explores combination and modification of visual practices for making sense of transnational economic activity and financial flows (Gray, Bounegru, Milan, & Ciuccarelli, 2016), as well as visual practices for representing uncertainty. While public data practices often emphasise and value the production of certainty (Anderson, 2018), this project considers what data projects may learn from diverse cultures for visually representing, managing and articulating uncertainty, including in physics (electron clouds), meteorology (weather conditions), statistics (confidence margins) and art history (landscape painting).
As well as reflecting on the prospects of critical data practice around financial flows (Gray & Bounegru, forthcoming), the paper situates the atlas project against broader debates around the knowability, unknowability and governability of transnational economic activity (Slobodian, 2018) and the infrastructural configurations of relations between markets, states and citizens (Roberts, 2011).
References
Anderson, C. W. (2018). Apostles of Certainty: Data Journalism and the Politics of Doubt. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gray, J., & Bounegru, L. (forthcoming). Introduction. In The Data Journalism Handbook: Towards a Critical Data Practice. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Gray, J., Bounegru, L., Milan, S., & Ciuccarelli, P. (2016). Ways of Seeing Data: Toward a Critical Literacy for Data Visualizations as Research Objects and Research Devices. In Kubitschko, Sebastian & Kaun, Anne (Eds.), Innovative Methods in Media and Communication Research (pp. 227–251). London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Haberly, D., & Wójcik, D. (2015). Tax havens and the production of offshore FDI: an empirical analysis. Journal of Economic Geography, 15, 75–101.
Roberts, A. (2011). The Logic of Discipline: Global Capitalism and the Architecture of Government. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Slobodian, Q. (2018). Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Thank you so much for inviting me to join you today. I wish I could be there in person, but I’m happy to be able to “dial in”.
I wanted to start by stepping back and asking:
What is data?
What is datafication?
What can data do?
How might we intervene around it?
Who gets to shape the future of the “data society”?
It is important to keep asking such questions because the answers we give – about what data is, why it matters and what is at stake – can inform different kinds of responses and interventions, perhaps different kinds of data politics. Answering such questions involves empirical specification, conceptual elaboration and critical reflection (perhaps one of the areas where activists, organisations and researchers convened by Privacy Camp may work together).
There are many ways in which data and data infrastructures can become what the science and technology studies scholar Bruno Latour calls “matters of concern”.
A book chapter on “Making Data Public? The Open Data Index as Participatory Device” co-authored with Danny Lämmerhirt has just been published in a new open access book on Good Data. The book is part of the Theory on Demand series of the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam, founded by media theorist and activist Geert Lovink. You can find more about the book here and a direct link to the PDF is here.
The chapter draws on ongoing research around my Data Worlds book, research collaborations and experiments around doing participation with data (including with the Public Data Lab) as well as research, policy and advocacy work at the civil society organisation Open Knowledge International. Here’s the abstract:
The Open Data Index is a ‘civil society audit’ which strives to shape the availability and openness of public sector data from around the world. In this chapter we examine the social life of this project, including how it evolved, the changing visions and practices associated with it, and how it serves to assemble and involve different publics in the assessment of institutional practices and forms of datafication. Drawing on recent work on statactivism, data activism and the performative effects of numbers, rankings and indices, we look at how the index organises participation and data politics in specific ways, raising questions about not only making data public but also the making of public data. It plays two roles which are sometimes in tension: (i) conventionalising assessment to facilitate comparability, and (ii) reflecting the diversity of different interests, issues and settings involved in opening up public sector data. It also facilitates the creation of ‘enumerated entities’ as objects of concern in open data advocacy and policy. The Open Data Index may thus be viewed as a site where participation is both configured and contested, and where practices of valuation and enumeration are both conventionalised and brought into question.
The full reference for our chapter is:
Gray, J., & Lammerhirt, D. (2019). Making Data Public? The Open Data Index as Participatory Device. In A. Daly, S. K. Devitt, & M. Mann (Eds.), Good Data. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures.
The book is edited by Angela Daly, S. Kate Devitt and Monique Mann, and there are chapters on indigenous data sovereignty, “good enough data”, energy data, data journalism, communal data sharing, data ethics, data activism, accounting for network practices, designing with data and more.
