Thoughts on { Data product, Desire & Belief | Alfie Bown / Anthony Giddens

Stelios Faitakis, 1976-2023

Data product

“The indirect harvesting of valued-per-click leisure time by corporations has led many technocapitalists to support projects like the Universal Basic Income (UBI), which would free up users’ time which could then potential y be spent generating valuable data and content on their own platforms. The driving force of this trend is the Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising campaigns that have grown simultaneously with corporations like Google over the last 15 years, but now the value of the click is not based only on the likelihood of purchasing success, as older models of Google AdWords and other targeted ad campaigns functioned. Instead, the click is conceptualised as a data-point that connects two or more actors in the network. It is those moments of connection between subjects and objects that have potential value to data-driven companies from corporate advertisers to election meddlers like Cambridge Analytica and policy influencers like Palantir. This only works because the user can be libidinally motivated to conduct the ‘free labour’ constituted by the click. The situation was prophetically predicted by one of the most historically influential Marxists still alive, Mario Tronti. His 1966 book Workers and Capital gave rise to the concept of ‘neocapitalism’, which anticipates the environment in which the digital worker operates today. For Tronti: At the highest level of capitalist development, the social relation is transformed into a moment of the relation of production. In this environment, the data-point connecting two people, generated at the moment of every click between social media pages, connects the social relation itself to a relation of production in real time. Seeing this in his own future, Tronti worried that society itself would run by the logic of the factory. Each interaction between individuals would incorporate a surplus value turned to profit by the class owning the means. dream lovers of social production. If the factory workers could be made to relate to each other in a way that was productive for the factory owners, so too could the entirety of social life be modified and edited for the profit of the capitalists. The whole of society is turned into an articulation of production, that is, the whole of society lives as a function of the factory and the factory extends its exclusive domination to the whole of society.” *

“Data technologies do not simply predict the future by guessing what an individual or group might do or want to do in the future. It is rather that those futures already exist, completely realised, and they reach backwards into the present to guide it. The possible paths for our desires to travel are mapped ahead of time by algorithms in the hands of platform capitalists.” *

“All so-called ‘quantitative’ data, when scrutinized, turn out to be composites of ‘qualitative’ – i.e., contextually located and indexical – interpretations produced by situated researchers, coders, government officials and others.” ^

Desire

“The technologies of our space, place and time set the scene for love to appear – make the emergence of desire possible. We don’t fall in love with an object in isolation but with how it appears in a curate scene determined by a variety of technologies. The Tinder profile card could hardly be a more perfect example from today.” *

“No one knows whether at the global level a framework of democratic institutions will develop, or whether alternatively world politics will slide into a destructiveness that might threaten the entire planet. Nobody knows if sexual relationships will become a wasteland of impermanent liaisons, marked by emotional antipathy as much as by love, and scarred by violence. There are good grounds for optimism in each case, but in a culture that has given up providentialism futures have to be worked for against a background of acknowledged risk.” ~

Belief

“Religion provides a feeling that life is ultimately meaningful. It does so by explaining coherently and compellingly what transcends or overshadows everyday life, in ways that other aspects of culture (such as an educational system or a belief in democracy) cannot (Geertz,1973; Wuthnow, 1988).” #

* Alfie Bown, Dream Lovers: The Gamification of Relationships
^ Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration
~ Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies
# Anthony Giddens, Introduction to Sociology