There is much hope at the moment that web 3.0 will provide solutions to the problems brought about by the data economy (by the way, I just realised that with just one sleight of hand, hope becomes hype, and vice-versa). Web 3.0 proposes that users own their own data, instead of leaving it to other actors to use freely. The reasoning is that they can then decide what they want to do with that data, and who they want to release it to and when. We often hear the expression “paradigm shift” when it comes to Web 3.0. Is it? It proposes to solve the issues of surveillance capitalism by shifting data ownership from companies to the users themselves (i.e. users own their own data and the problem will be solved). But are we in fact trying to solve problems with the same tools that created them in the first place?
Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation (1944) explored how capitalism creates fictitious commodities. Capitalism commodifies nature into land, human activity into work, and exchange into money. Nature, life and exchange are not tradable. Land, work and money are. The word “fictitious” is important here. It suggests that commodification creates tradable products out of something that is not tradable. In the 19th and 20th centuries, industrial capitalism commodified nature, the environment we live in. In the 21st century, surveillance capitalism is commodifying human life.
We have the environmental problems we have today because fundamentally, we see nature as an object to be grabbed, sold and exploited. Similarly, human life today is grabbed (i.e., datafied), traded or used as raw material to create valuable behavioural products that are traded on behavioural markets for profit (See Zuboff “The Age Of Surveillance Capitalism”). The concept of ownership and property is solidly anchored into the capitalist idea that everything out there can be owned and turned into tradable commodity. First, during the industrial revolution, it was nature which was divided, sold and exploited for its resources. Today, under surveillance capitalism, it is human life. Two different objects, but same process. When we talk about paradigm shift, we need to explore whether the avenues we are embarking on right now (such as ownership of one’s own data) truly represent a paradigmatic shift or whether we need to review our assumptions.
Furthermore, users’ ownership of their own data is a neat idea in principle, but its application raises many complex questions because real life is not neat. Ownership of data is not a clear-cut category. The concept of ownership is structured (a Yes or No proposition), life is not. Ownership does not necessarily provide the type of structure that accurately reflects life. There is a large dimension of life that happens outside of this paradigm.
First, having ownership of our own data does not mean that we will have the wisdom to use it well. We have been trained and conditioned for the past 20 years to value convenience above all other things when it comes to using digital technologies. But convenience is not the value most conducive to sustainability. It is more convenient to throw garbage through the window rather than recycle, but in doing so, we create an ecological crisis. By choosing convenience in our digital lives, we also create an ecological crisis. How many of us prefer to visit a website rather than an app (apps have many more prying capacities)? How many of us take the time to change our phones settings to increase privacy, and to review them regularly, to delete apps downloaded once and never used again? How many of us read through privacy policies? How many of us just click yes out of convenience when a website asks us whether to accept all cookies (instead of spending a few minutes customising them)? Not that many. So when given the choice between releasing all data or customising, how many people would actually take the time to choose which data to release and which not to?
Also, releasing one’s data “according to what’s needed” presupposes that we understand very clearly how it is being used, what are the consequences of releasing it, and what is truly needed and what is not. Say I own the data I produce and I can choose to release it or not. That does not solve the issue of what is done with aggregated data once it is released. If that data is transformed slightly in one way or another, is it still mine? Or can someone else trade it or turn it into a product to be traded?
There are tricky questions that pertain to the ambiguous nature of the digital terrain. How do we treat ownership of metadata (the data about data)? How do we treat data that is not about a person but a group of people, or communities? Who owns what in this case, and who decides? And who decides who decides? Who owns the data that is recorded by someone but includes someone else (like for example police patrols, or like when I post a photo of me on Instagram but my friends are also there)? And what happens to the zillions of terabytes of data that are already “out there”, irretrievable? How do we put in place those infrastructures against the backdrop of a probable huge pushback from those who benefit from the data economy? And how do we make sure that the data released is used to perform what it is supposed to perform and not used in another way? Blockchain mechanisms promise absolute certainty and privacy, but this also presupposes that absolutely everything happens on the blockchain.
How, as a caring society, do we protect the vulnerable? How about children? Or those who are not digitally literate (probably 99% of the world, because knowing how to use a smart phone does not equate with digital and technical literacy and awareness)? How about those who live at the fringe of society or at the fringe of the power centres of the world? It’s all very good to say that all our data is in a little box on our phone, but that presupposes that all have physical access to it, and the means to get the phone and the little box. Do we think about this from the point of view of an Indian mother in a village, or a Mexican child, or anyone who is not part of the 1%, or are we (AGAIN) going to develop the next generation technology from the eyes of a white male from a developed country?
Then, there is the essential question of translation. The digital is a translation of real life, it is not real life itself. It is just a map. From the beginning of AI, data science has been trying to create a language that could adequately reflect life, but so far it has not succeeded. Because of historical and technical reasons, the digital language that its used today has been developed along the lines of information theory. Information theory is based on Shannon’s linear communication model. Humans, and life in general, do not communicate like this. The digital has not been able to domesticate and integrate tacit knowledge. This is seen when data science uses proxies for aspects of life that cannot be turned into discrete data, like using US zip code as a proxy for wealth or education for example.
Furthermore, data is not information. Data is a way to classify. Classifications and standards are imbricated in our lives. They operate invisibly, but they create social order (Bowker & Star). Despite all the hype (and the hope) about the digital revolution, the digital is still trying to fit the messiness of life into the clearcut categories of the linear world of the industrial revolution. Data creates classifications, but data is not information. The enterprise of datafication (i.e., turning human life into discrete computer-ready data) is essentially a reductionist enterprise, it does not creates real knowledge, but as Bernard Stiegler once mentioned, “stupid” knowledge. It is the issue with algorithms today. Ownership of data does not address the fundamental fact that datafication creates a world that is not fit for humans, because it denies and destroys that which makes us humans, i.e., tacit knowing.
Finally, as mentioned above, datafication is a process of commodification of human life. For all the benefits of Web 3.0, the decentralised blockchain-based web anchors this process even more strongly into the fabric of society.
