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Pluto Press

Chapter Title: Front Matter

Book Title: Data Power

Book Subtitle: Radical Geographies of Control and Resistance
Book Author(s): Jim E. Thatcher and Craig M. Dalton
Published by: Pluto Press. (2022)
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Data Power

“A call to arms [...] sets out a clear, persuasive argument for the need to
challenge the power of platforms and systems, and details the tools to do so.
A thought-provoking read.”
—Professor Rob Kitchin, Maynooth University

“The first non-technical guidebook on how to live with location data and it
is a truly radical response for our times. Spatial data for us, not about us.”
—Jeremy W. Crampton, Professor of Urban Data Analysis,
Newcastle University

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Radical Geography

Series Editors:
Danny Dorling, Matthew T. Huber and Jenny Pickerill
Former editor: Kate Derickson

Also available:
Disarming Doomsday:
The Human Impact of Nuclear Weapons since Hiroshima
Becky Alexis-Martin
Unlocking Sustainable Cities:
A Manifesto for Real Change
Paul Chatterton
In Their Place:
The Imagined Geographies of Poverty
Stephen Crossley
Geographies of Digital Exclusion:
Data and Inequality
Mark Graham and Martin Dittus
Making Workers:
Radical Geographies of Education
Katharyne Mitchell
Space Invaders:
Radical Geographies of Protest
Paul Routledge
New Borders:
Migration, Hotspots and the European Superstate
Antonis Vradis, Evie Papada, Joe Painter and Anna Papoutsi

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Data Power
Radical Geographies of
Control and Resistance

Jim E. Thatcher and Craig M. Dalton

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First published 2022 by Pluto Press
New Wing, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 1LA

www.plutobooks.com

Copyright © Jim E. Thatcher and Craig M. Dalton 2022

Front cover designed by David Drummond for the Radical Geography series;
with additional image and color work by artist, geographer, and friend Nick
Lally. Image source: “2020.06.06 Protesting the Murder of George Floyd,
Washington, DC USA 158 20209” by tedeytan and is licensed with CC BY-SA
2.0. The color scheme, viridis, was created by Stéfan van der Walt and Nathaniel
Smith and is intended to more clearly visualize data for readers with common
forms of colorblindness.

The right of Jim E. Thatcher and Craig M. Dalton to be identified as the authors
of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 7453 4007 4 Paperback

ISBN 978 0 7453 4008 1 Hardback
ISBN 978 1786805 56 0 PDF
ISBN 978 1 786805 57 7 EPUB

Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England

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Pluto Press

Chapter Title: Table of Contents

Book Title: Data Power

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Contents

List of Figures and Tablesvi

Series Prefaceviii
Acknowledgmentsix
List of Abbreviationsxi

Introduction: Technology and the Axes of Hope and Fear 1

1 Life in the Age of Big Data 13
2 What Are Our Data, and What Are They Worth? 46
3 Existing Everyday Resistances 65
4 Contesting the Data Spectacle 84
5 Our Data Are Us, So Make Them Ours 119
Epilogue131

Notes133
Bibliography140
Index159

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Pluto Press

Chapter Title: List of Figures and Tables

Book Title: Data Power

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Figures and Tables

figures

1.1 The Lackawana Valley, by George Inness 14

1.2 An 1863 image of Philip Reis’ telephone from the
German newspaper Die Gartenlaube20
1.3 Images at two scales around Boston from the “One Dot
Per Person for the Entire United States” visualization
created by the Demographics Research Group at the
University of Virginia 35
1.4 A clearly demarcated US military base discovered in
Strava’s Global Heatmap by Nathan Ruser 37
1.5 Inspired by Nikita Barsukov’s work, Nathan Yao built
these maps using public RunKeeper data 44
1.6 Sample code to scrape RunKeeper’s public routes for
the city of Tacoma 44
2.1 One of Chicago’s police surveillance cameras 60
3.1 A map of surveillance cameras in Times Square,
Manhattan, created by the Surveillance Camera Players
in May 2005 80
4.1 Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin model for the redevelopment
of Paris 96
4.2 Guy Debord’s Life Continues to Be Free and Easy (1959) 97
4.3 Map showing one of Precarias a la Deriva’s drifts through
the daily lives and practices of domestic workers in Madrid 100
4.4 Walking route, Thursday, September 1, 2016 103
4.5 “Cat and Girl are Situationists,” by Dorothy Gambrell 106
4.6 A billboard in San Francisco détourned by the Billboard
Liberation Front, a group devoted to “improving outdoor
advertising since 1977” 107
4.7 A détournement of corporate statements made in support
of Black Lives Matter, created by Chris Franklin 109
4.8 A screenshot of Inside Airbnb’s web map, created by
Murray Cox and Inside Airbnb 111

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figures and tables . vii

4.9 A screenshot of the Anti Eviction Mapping Project’s

Mapping Relocation map 112

tables

3.1 A typology of responses to data capitalism 71

5.1 Suggested yarn colors for a temperature blanket based on
Tacoma, WA 129

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Pluto Press

Chapter Title: Series Preface

Book Title: Data Power

Book Subtitle: Radical Geographies of Control and Resistance
Book Author(s): Jim E. Thatcher and Craig M. Dalton
Book Editor(s): Danny Dorling, Matthew T. Huber, Jenny Pickerill
Published by: Pluto Press. (2022)
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Series Preface

The Radical Geography series consists of accessible books which use

geographical perspectives to understand issues of social and political
concern. These short books include critiques of existing government
policies and alternatives to staid ways of thinking about our societies.
They feature stories of radical social and political activism, guides to
achieving change, and arguments about why we need to think differently
on many contemporary issues if we are to live better together on this
planet.
A geographical perspective involves seeing the connections within
and between places, as well as considering the role of space and scale
to develop a new and better understanding of current problems.
Written largely by academic geographers, books in the series deliber-
ately target issues of political, environmental, and social concern. The
series showcases clear explications of geographical approaches to social
problems, and it has a particular interest in action currently being
undertaken to achieve positive change that is radical, achievable, real,
and relevant.
The target audience ranges from undergraduates to experienced
scholars, as well as from activists to conventional policy-makers, but
these books are also for people interested in the world who do not already
have a radical outlook and who want to be engaged and informed by a
short, well written and thought-provoking book.

Danny Dorling, Matthew T. Huber, and Jenny Pickerill

Series Editors

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Pluto Press

Chapter Title: Acknowledgments

Book Title: Data Power

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Acknowledgments

Change requires hard work and building solidarity. With the help of so
many others, we’ve written this book as an exercise on building alterna-
tives.
Books are weird, complicated things in which there are fragments of
both ephemeral conversations and decadal arguments. For Jim, this book
would have been impossible without the support of family and friends
near and far. I’d like to first thank Courtney, my partner for nearly two
decades now, for her support, calm, and general equanimity. Hannah,
age eight, and Ben, age four, were similarly crucial for the development
of this book, as were my parents, Sally and Richard, for their periodic
care of those two. Intellectually, I owe a debt of gratitude to Craig for our
many collaborations, but also to folks including Luke Bergmann (who
provided notes on an early draft), Nick Lally (who revised the cover),
Laura Imaoka, Clancy Wilmott, Emma Fraser, David O’Sullivan, Dillon
Mahmoudi, Alicia Cowart, Ryan Burns, Kelly Kay, Alida Cantor, Chris
Knudson, Carolyn Fish, Anthony Robinson, Danny Kunches, David
Retchless, Lauren Anderson, Megan Finn, Madelynn von Baeyer, Josh
Gray, Karen Thatcher, and—I am certain—a host of individuals I’m
unintentionally forgetting.
Also, I appreciate the many master’s students with whom I’ve had
long-standing discussions on these topics, including Corrine Armi-
stead, Matt Seto, and Ryan Mitchell. Although gone now, David Waring
deserves mention for our many late-night conversations over nearly 20
years of friendship. A special, long-term, thanks must go to my erst-
while advisor, James McCarthy—any misapplication of rigorous Marxist
thinking should not reflect poorly upon the source. Finally, I must thank
Joe, Jon, Dan, Steve, Jason, and Mike for Friday evening gaming; we’ll
make diamond in Rocket League someday.
This book was also only possible with the support of many people in
Craig’s life. This includes both those who directly inform the ideas of my
work and those whose reproductive labor and support made it possible
to develop and write a book at all while simultaneously raising a child
and teaching heavy loads every semester though a pandemic. Cecilia, I

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x . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

cannot imagine this book without your unwavering emotional support,

material labor, down-to-earth feedback, and patience under exceptional
circumstances. Thank you. Rowan, for consistently bringing me back to
what really matters in life and the true magic of the everyday. Thank you
as well to Courtney for supporting Jim and keeping him going; I see and
appreciate your work from 2,800 miles away.
Gma, Papa, Momo, Teetee, GrAnna, Grandpa, thank you for all the
love and childcare while we podded up in one house or another and the
COVID positivity rates outside kept rising. Dad, decades ago I asked you
why you wrote a book if you would not be paid much for it. You said, “To
change how people think.” We’ll see how this one goes.
To all the members of the Counter Cartographies Collective, you
taught me the true meaning of resistance as well as counter-mapping, the
Situationists, and to pay attention to reproductive labor. Y’all continue
to inspire my ideas. In particular, thank you Maribel Casas Cortés for
introducing me to the work of Precarias a la Deriva.
This book would not be half as strong without the direct input of Tim
Stallmann and Debra Mackinnon early in the process. Thank you as well
to Clancy Wilmott, Emma Fraser, Ryan Burns, Leah Mesiterlin, Gregory
Donovan, Liz Mason-Deese, and Erin McElroy for our productive
conversations around these themes. Kari Jensen, Grant Saff, Zilkia Janer,
your support provided a foundation at Hofstra that made this scholarship
possible. And above all, thank you Jim, for getting me to dream bigger.
Finally, from both of us, this book was only possible through the
incredible patience and attention to detail of our exceptional editor, David
Castle, the hard work of everyone at Pluto, as well as the anonymous
reviewer.

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Pluto Press

Chapter Title: List of Abbreviations

Book Title: Data Power

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Abbreviations

3Cs Counter-Cartographies Collective

3PLA Third Department of the People’s Liberation Army’s General
Staff Department (China)
AEMP Anti-Eviction Mapping Project
AI artificial intelligence
API Application Programming Interface
CCPA California Consumer Privacy Act
CCTV closed-circuit television
CEO Chief Executive Officer
EU European Union
EULA end-user license agreement
FCC Federal Communications Commission (US)
GDPR General Data Protection Regulation (EU)
GML Generalized Markup Language
GPS Global Positioning System
HFT high-frequency trading
IoT Internet of Things
JSON JavaScript Object Notation
NSA National Security Agency (US)
SGML Standardized Generalized Markup Language
VPN virtual private network
XML Extensible Markup Language

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Pluto Press

Chapter Title: Introduction: Technology and the Axes of Hope and Fear

Book Title: Data Power

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Introduction
Technology and the Axes of Hope and Fear

Our first step is to bring back curiosity.

(Tsing 2015, 4)

We are the most fantastic and beautiful mistake.

(Russell 2020, 147)

One step after another, each recorded and located by the Global Position-
ing System (GPS) and shared with the world. Sequential steps repeated
daily in our morning run or commute become part of an economic
cycle of digital tracking, extracting our location data and serving parts
back to us as directions, as ads, as insurance rates. And also as egregious
privacy violations which set off, like clockwork, another cycle—a media
cycle. In 2018, Nathan Ruser revealed that Strava’s Global Heatmap of
users’ exercise routes had inadvertently revealed the locations of several
nominally secret military bases. A parade of news articles followed that
ranged from how-to pieces on managing the fitness application’s privacy
settings (Pardes 2018) to more widely questioning the very concept of
privacy and informed consent (Tufekci 2018).
The problem with this media cycle is not with any individual piece of
content. Pardes’ WIRED article is an excellent guide to navigating Strava’s
privacy and security settings. Rather, the problem lies in how each data
scandal is framed as separate and surprising, seemingly unforeseeable
even as each extraction of data for the purpose of profit inevitably sets
up the conditions for exactly this kind of event (Thatcher 2018). Even a
cursory glance at recent technology news reveals the cyclical nature of
such spatial (geographic/location) data abuse narratives: before Strava
there was Microsoft’s Avoiding the Ghetto patent (Thatcher 2014), and
before that, Girls Around Me leveraged the Foursquare and Facebook
data to help men stalk women (Bilton 2012). Examples of outrage, and
even congressional and European Union (EU) court hearings (Jacobson
2020), abound, but policy is slow and at times reversed or co-opted by
the companies it is meant to regulate. As with running for exercise, the

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2 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

destination of this data cycle isn’t the point; maintaining the cycle is.
Continuing to extract our data themselves,1 and spatial data in particu-
lar, is profitable. While an individual application or feature might change
due to a data scandal, the overarching cycle of spatial data creation,
extraction, and exchange with little regard for the users producing the
data or other consequences continues apace.

This is a book about what we can do to change that.

Non-fiction narratives about technology tend to be either utopian

or dystopian: eschatological visions of mobile applications ending
pandemics or of drone strikes silencing political dissent. Accounts of
Google’s attempted smart-city neighborhood in Toronto or Cambridge
Analytica make for great stories, but they miss the forest for the trees.
Both tropes oversimplify complex processes and contexts, hamstring-
ing attempts to understand how individual cases reflect broader systems.
Processes of profit-seeking and capital accumulation frame recent dis-
cussions around technology, delimiting what is thought possible and
desirable for technology to do. That need not be the case. More alter-
natives are possible. We explore hopeful tactics and strategies for living
amidst and moving beyond the ruins created by an ideology of tech-
nology which “move[s] fast and break[s] things” (Facebook founder
and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, quoted in Taneja 2019).
In recent decades, technology firms sought to “disrupt” existing social
relations and remake them in their own image: Facebook with friend-
ship, Uber with movement, Google with knowledge. In so doing, ever
greater parts of daily life, of personal identity, become the playground of
this speculative form of capitalism.
Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Hemant Taneja (2019)
declares that the era of new tech entrepreneurship is over, due to people
growing weary of the cavalcade of abuses perpetrated by firms like
Facebook and Google. Taneja and others rightly note that this is in part
due to a new generation of technologies, such as GPS tracking, facial
recognition, and genomic profiling, that are far more personal and
tangible in the daily lives of individual people. And, as such, a number
of institutes, initiatives, and other public-facing endeavors have emerged
to engage with the underlying algorithms and biases of these systems.
These initiatives operate at different scales and with different stakehold-
ers. Some, such as the Partnership On AI, are explicitly aimed at working
with the leaders of tech firms to shape practices. Others, such as the Elec-

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introduction: technology and the axes of hope and fear . 3

tronic Frontier Foundation, employ lobbying and lawsuits in attempts to

shape policy. There is nothing inherently wrong, and many things truly
beneficial, about such approaches. Nevertheless, we choose not to focus
on institutional policies, real or potential, in this book.
We focus on lived cultures of technology, especially the grounded
experiences and potential geographies of resistance amidst the everyday.
We focus on a praxis—the putting into action, the embodying, of the
hard-won insights of theory—to live joyfully within the social and literal
ruins of data capitalism. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (2015) brilliantly
depicts the communities that grow up amidst environmental change
and degradation (the ruins of another aspect of capitalism) and how
they fit within larger global systems of production and consumption.
We seek to do the same amidst the creation, extraction, and analysis of
the spatial data produced through everyday life. We focus upon a daily
life enmeshed within the technical apparatuses of new data regimes as a
means of being “truly present … as mortal critters entwined in myriad
unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings” (Haraway
2016, 1). Our language and examples are attempts to describe, as new
media theorist McKenzie Wark (2020, 168) puts it, “a present that could
be open to other futures.” Through this, we offer a guide on what is to be
done to live with, not under, new spatial technologies.
In this book, we offer five chapters centered around the goal of finding
new and creative ways to enact a radical political praxis with new spatial
technologies. Each chapter can be read independently, but together they
form a hopeful narrative arcing towards something better. The remainder
of this chapter introduces the book in detail: first, answering for whom
this book is intended; second, outlining the content of each subsequent
chapter; third, reflexively examining the perspective of the authors’ and
what is therefore missing from this volume; and finally, providing a brief
note on how to make use of the online resources associated with the text.

so what? why this book matters

At this point, you’ve picked up and opened a book from Pluto Press’
Radical Geography series titled Data Power. From our perspective, it
seems safe to assume that you have at least a passing interest in the role
of data and technologies in culture and society, radical geography’s ideas
and practices, or the critical orientation of Pluto’s publications. If that is
the case, then this book is for you.

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4 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

This book does not assume any deep familiarity with technical
systems or digital spatial data’s creation, dispossession, and commodi-
fication as we introduce what is important and relevant over the course
of the chapters. That said, it is useful to begin here with a brief descrip-
tion of the production of data through everyday living as a key means of
capitalist profit-seeking. The book centers on these social processes and
how they may be resisted.
Put simply, each interaction with a digital system produces data. For
example, a post to Facebook will often record not simply the post itself,
but also where the user was when it was made, other users who were
with them, and even the browser/device used to make the post (this is
often referred to as the post’s metadata). These data are extracted, tied
to other data points about the user, and analyzed to produce digital rep-
resentations of them. These representations are not complete captures
of their life, but specifically focused on predicting their actions and, in
particular, their consumptive practices. This is why Craig receives adver-
tisements for a new tent after mentioning camping on Twitter.
While each individual data point holds little meaning or value, a collec-
tion of data points tends to mean more than the same points in isolation.
Data are much more valuable when connected to still more data. The
degree to which multiple data points can be tied together, especially if it
can anticipate how likely (or able) a user is to spend money, determines
the value of the data they produce for advertising and data analytic firms
like Facebook, Google, Twitter, and many others. The massive scales of
data and users at which such data technology companies operate produce
centralized, multi-billion-dollar industries that continually seek to shape
your actions, your life, in ways more amenable to predictable consump-
tion, and therein, their bottom line.
In light of these ongoing processes, this book does three things. First, it
surveys the current context in which new technological regimes, histori-
cally contingent socio-political systems, of spatial data play in our world.
Rather than the one-off solutionism offered by technology’s most dis-
ruptive boosters, we instead “move slow,” purposefully turning towards
the long history of critical and radical thought concerning the questions
technology poses for our lives, from Walter Benjamin to Ruha Benjamin.
We find these ideas to be the best available tools for “staying with the
trouble” (Haraway 2016), situating what we know about the present and
sifting through the past to help create alternative futures. Second, we
examine current individualized responses to data regimes, demonstrat-

ing both where these practices succeed and where their limitations lie.
Third, we outline a clear set of collective practices focused on developing
radical solidarities, kinships against and through spatial technologies.
Our purpose is to develop ways of (re)asserting our humanity within the
sociotechnical milieu in which we live—a guidebook of sorts for living
with data. Perhaps these pages will even be as “disruptive” as the unicorns
and rock stars of the tech industry dream themselves to be.
What we promise is that by the end of this book, you will have a deeper
perspective on why and where the location data you create in your day-
to-day life are extracted, analyzed, and come to stand for you as well as
a conceptual toolkit for evaluating, resisting, and making use of those
systems more on your own terms.

the rest of this book: a dialectic tension

In the past, we’ve written about the ongoing framing of technology as

a double-edged sword with respect to culture and society (Thatcher
et al. 2018, xvi). Following that, we structure the rest of this book as a
“broad dialectic between hope for technology’s role as liberator and fear
of its domination of everyday life” by drawing on Kingsbury and Jones’
(2009) interpretation of the Frankfurt School’s studies of technology. We
return to that somewhat obscure, critical social theory not as a means of
obfuscating our point, but of developing our practice.2 Whether or not
you’re familiar with the Frankfurt School, the tension of technological
hope and fear is a common one in current culture. One example is the
question of labor: “Robots will destroy our jobs—and we’re not ready for
it” (Shewan 2017) versus “Robots are increasing our wages, not stealing
our jobs” (Clark 2015). Thinking through these ideas dialectically allows
us to understand how both can be and likely are true, but also that both
are beside the point unless we radically alter the ways technological and
social relations interact to reassert our humanity.
Thinking through those ideas appears here via the themes explored
in each chapter. In Chapters 1 and 2, we follow technology and society
from the nineteenth century up through our present day; in doing so,
we tie the ruins in which we live not to Silicon Valley’s promised solu-
tionism, but to the long-standing roles quantification, classification, and
abstraction have played in capitalist exploitation. Chapter 3 then surveys
current forms of individual resistance and acceptance, of technologi-
cal enabling and constraining actions, that have occurred with and in

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6 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

response to spatial data regimes. Finally, Chapters 4 and 5 build from

the limits found in current practices to develop collective modes of resis-
tance and a synthetic set of concrete practices that engage new systems of
daily data creation and collection in ways that produce new solidarities
and hopeful experiences. Finally, in a brief epilogue, we reflect upon the
limits of our own scholarship and how the writing of this book has been
shaped by an ever-changing world.
We begin the first chapter, “Life in the Age of Big Data,” by stepping
backwards in time to the widespread adoption of telephones and motion
pictures. By puncturing the liberal myth of individual empowerment
through technology, we draw on an argument that begins with the work
of Karl Marx and works towards the present moment in which data
have come to represent and speak for us. The works of Walter Benjamin
and Guy Debord figure prominently in this chapter, as do other critical
theorists that allow us to draw parallels between early critiques of cultures
of technology and current experiences of mobile phones and media
today. Specific parallels are drawn between how Benjamin understood
the telephone as reaching into and disrupting personal private spaces
and how the spatial data produced by mobile devices now inscribe and
map our most intimate moments.
Refusing to remain dormant in a misplaced past, we follow this line of
thinking (and critiques thereof) up to the present moment, diagnosing
the ways in which spatial data and their analyses influence and sustain
social relations and produce new spaces of consumptive experience.
This view of how new spatial data systems affect where we go, who we
encounter, and what we can (and cannot) know of places and individuals
stakes out the fear side of the hope/fear tension.
Throughout, current cases such as Girls Around Me and Strava com-
plicate and ground our arguments in a critique of the everyday. The
inequities of these experiences and the resulting media coverage, as well
as the assumptions of both the creators and users of these systems, reveal
the limits of popular critique and the perennial framing of new privacy
scandals as unexpected. They also lay clear the multiple social and
physical scales at which these systems operate with and upon our lives.
Expanding from the individual scale, the second chapter, “What Are
Our Data, and What Are They Worth?”, moves towards societal nar-
ratives around data and algorithms. We introduce the concept of data
colonialism and the “wild west” roots of the Silicon Valley ethos, calling
particular attention to the ways in which we are dispossessed from the

data we produce. From there, we demonstrate the near-theological,

faith-based relationships modern society has with data: the belief that
data, their analyses, and their visualization will progressively, inevita-
bly, and irrevocably improve our lives. Second, we argue that through
these individual data experiences and societal narratives, our personal
relationships with data have become bearing witness to, rather than
actively intervening in, the construction and analysis of the data that
represent us.
Early in the chapter, we draw on work that demonstrates how faith in
the data, analyses, networks, and infrastructures that support algorith-
mic decision-making have become the dominant metaphors for society
in the twenty-first century—data is the new oil, we must run our cities like
start-ups, and so on. Returning to examples from the popular press, we
focus first on Silicon Valley and the narratives that have emerged around
its most prominent corporations. We also highlight the portrayal of
similar cultures of technology in China as a constructed dystopian other.
The faith-based nature of these narratives articulates a desire for an ever
smoother, more predictable form of societal organization. Such narra-
tives contrast with the actual lived experiences of the individuals who
create and then are separated from and represented by data under these
regimes. Building on the work of Melissa Gregg (2015), we untangle this
process of data spectacle.
The data spectacle in Chapter 2 marks a turning point in the book
as it begins to lay the groundwork for material practices to address the
problems with current data regimes. Focusing on spatial data, their
creation, extraction, and analysis across scales as key aspects of our daily
lives, we now turn towards active engagements with and resistances to
data relations and geographies.
The third chapter, “Existing Everyday Resistances,” evaluates a series
of existing tactics for individuals resisting the dispossession and com-
modification of data. We introduce a typology for understanding how
individuals engage daily data production and analysis through acts of
acceptance, resistance, making present, and escape.
By acceptance, we mean consenting or acquiescing to a technology’s
terms of service to function and participate in society and culture today.
The pretense of these terms allows data regimes to slip into invisible
ubiquity, disappearing into the banal plain sight of everyday life. Under
these circumstances, they re-emerge for conscious consideration and
critique only at moments of rupture where systems break or data leak.

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8 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

Resistance therefore constitutes tactics that contest the data production

and extraction outlined in those terms. For example, active resistance
may create inaccurate or false tracking data and insert them into targeted
marketing systems. Making present is another resistance tactic that
reveals the invisible infrastructures underlying regimes of data accu-
mulation, such as the mapping of data centers or reverse engineering
and making public various sorting algorithms. Finally, escape refers to
attempts to remove oneself from the generation of spatial data at various
levels of intensity, whether living entirely off-grid or simply switching
to an ancient flip phone (or none at all). Opportunities for all of these
tactics, but escape in particular, are not equitably distributed through-
out society.
The purpose of this typology is to provide a shorthand means of
assessing the intent, effectiveness, and limitations of existing practices.
The focus on examples from artists and academics is not by coinci-
dence, but highlights the avant-garde and individualistic nature of
many of these practices. Academics are, if nothing else, excellent neo-
liberal subjects—just look at our citation rates. Throughout Chapter 3
we tie together common threads between these approaches and the sit-
uations in which they arose. We call for a weaving together of disparate
attempts into a lived practice of the everyday that makes new technolog-
ical systems fundamentally work towards the building of solidarities and
liberation of humanity.
In Chapter 4, “Contesting the Data Spectacle,” we answer this call with
a focus on collective modes of resistance. Returning once more to the
asymmetries between the individual data producer and the firms which
extract and analyze those data, we again confront the data spectacle. We
offer four approaches informed by social theory by which groups or coa-
litions may confront and change the data spectacle: data regulation, data
dérive, data détournement, and data strikes.
With the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation
(GDPR) and similar changes coming online elsewhere, regulation of indi-
viduals’ spatial data looks promising thus far. However, even the GDPR
is unlikely to overturn the capital relations behind data-driven firms, and
even the strongest policies have limited social effects without parallel
cultural changes. With those limitations in mind, we explore the data
dérive (drift). This builds on the dérives developed by the Situationists,
an international radical art and political collective most active during the
1950s–1960s in France, and Precarias a la Deriva, a radical feminist col-

lective for women active in Spain in the 2000s. Building on their work, we
propose applying the dérive to the current contexts of the data spectacle.
The resulting “data dérive” is a way to purposefully approach spaces of
everyday life while cognizant of associated data regimes (Thatcher and
Dalton 2017). Building on the dérive, we next engage another Situation-
ist approach to develop what we call data détournement. This approach
involves employing or differently applying data not as a commodity,
but as a means for political change. Counter-mapping provides exciting
examples of this sort of practice. For the last mode of collective resis-
tance, we briefly propose a data strike. The idea is to withhold data, to
the extent possible, from data-driven companies to incentivize them to
make changes. We say strike, not boycott, because producing data, and
therein value, is labor.
Chapter 5, “Our Data Are Us, So Make Them Ours,” returns to the
idea that the data regimes in which we find ourselves are not wholly
“new” and have their roots in long-standing processes of exploitation
and domination within modern, capitalist societies. For example, the
direct development of modern locational tracking for targeted adver-
tising springs from earlier geodemographic profiling and anti-poverty
initiatives (Dalton and Thatcher 2015; Eubanks 2018). History matters,
as examples of taking back or repurposing data indicate some of the
radical moves available to us today.
Eschewing blanket rejections of the role of technology in our lives,
we return to the question of liberation, of asserting our humanity with
and through technology. Based on the critical and empirical examples
throughout the book, we argue that we can both anticipate and under-
stand the role data and their analyses play in enabling and constraining
our everyday spaces and knowledges. In so doing, we are able to contest,
repurpose, and recreate these spaces through a set of concrete practices
that inform a radical politics of change. We end the book with three
“calls to action” that form the basis of a more engaged, technologically
informed radical politics.
The first is a rejection of the “Who could have known?” fictions that
perpetuate modern popular press coverage of the media. The second is
a return to the examples from Chapters 3 and 4 to once more suggest
where and how we might find working solidarities in a world of data-
derived value. Third, we suggest a praxis that “lives in the cracks,” one
that embraces incomplete knowledge, partiality, and the subversion and
repurposing of technology in novel ways. We provide examples of this

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10 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

through a living repository where readers are encouraged to contribute

and comment—a perpetual work in progress. Without denying the
oppressive nature of technology in society, we conclude with an invitation
to act: we can and must reassert our shared humanity, not just in the face
of new regimes of data creation, extraction, and analysis, but through the
very technologies which make these regimes possible. We must create new
spaces of affinity, new politics of change with and through the enabling
elements of new spatial technologies while eschewing, resisting, and
subverting the constraining ones.
Finally, in a brief epilogue, we reflect on the production of this book
itself—how it shifted and changed, both due to our own scholarship
(and limits thereof) and the world around us. COVID-19, the presence
of which is felt throughout the book, also shaped its construction—
who could (not) be interviewed, when, and how. Although different in
form and intent, we draw inspiration for this reflection from the audit
Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein (2020) conducted at the end of
their own excellent work, Data Feminism.

who speaks for whom?

The contours of data accumulation are uneven in both existing and

potential spaces. What we can and do know of a young stockbroker in
London who uses her mobile phone to make trades, find restaurants, and
summon ride-sharing services is different from what we may know of a
farmer in sub-Saharan Africa who uses a shared mobile phone to coordi-
nate market prices and check upcoming weather forecasts. Furthermore,
the dangers and risks at which our own data might put us are highly
variable upon our position and privilege.
The UK Home Office’s use of data collected by a charity on “hard
sleepers” (homeless people) illustrates this point.3 Data intended to
ensure that case workers spoke each individual’s native language was
instead repurposed as a means of locating, apprehending, and deporting
immigrant homeless individuals. For the same reason, while mapping
the daily practices of migrant workers in North Carolina could provide
deep insights into their needs, it would also create a detailed record
for deportation purposes (Dalton et al. 2016). The techniques we
discuss, from active resistance and making present to data dérives and
data strikes, take many forms and will depend on context. Thus, their
potential risks and rewards are highly situated and variable. Our intent is

never to suggest that any reader must follow any given recommendation
or that to not do so is some kind of moral failing. Depending on the cir-
cumstances, some modes of resistance may not be appropriate because
under those circumstances they are dangerous or likely to harm other
people, or they simply may not be possible.
The practices and ideas we develop ultimately stem from our own
positionality. We are cis white men raised and educated in the global
north. We each hold professor positions within neoliberal universi-
ties and live in urban areas. While our experiences differ, they are also
limited. While we bring in examples of spatial data regimes and resis-
tances from around the globe and ideas from different kinds of thinkers,
there are blind spots and aporias in our work, just as there are in any
scholarship. We say all this to make clear from the outset that as reflexive
as we try to be throughout this work, we recognize those efforts are never
complete. Indeed, working with individualized data offers new oppor-
tunities to connect and entwine subjects and objects, such as their own
spatial data, for better-situated thinking.
Our goal is to build shared affinities, tactics, and solidarities through
experiences of new spatial data regimes that are sorting and oppress-
ing, enabling, and constraining our actions. To do so, we draw upon our
decades of experience researching and teaching geospatial technologies
at the undergraduate and graduate levels; but rather than eschew our
limitations, we call attention to them now and ask that readers keep their
own perspectives in mind as they read.

online resources (or the digital appendix)

New technologies are rarely as “disruptive” as they seem and never as

much as their boosters claim. Throughout this book we emphasize a need
to view technology as part and parcel of larger historical systems of cap-
italist exploitation and development. Our path forward is shaped by the
successes and failures of past resistances and past solidarities. Neverthe-
less, how a specific technology functions, its mechanical and algorithmic
processes, can and will differ over time. For example, around the turn
of the century, Extensible Markup Language (XML) was the “hot” new
way to structure data for sharing and use across the internet.4 Writing
20 years later, XML is viewed as relatively archaic. Software developers
today favor formats like JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), which forms
the backbone of many spatial data applications in its geoJSON form.

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12 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

Putting aside the alphabet soup of acronyms, we can’t answer now

what specific apps, data, and algorithms you will encounter in the
years after this book is published. Acts that work to subvert and resist
the current Snapchat application may be meaningless against whatever
TikTok releases next (and in years to come, those application names will
likely be meaningless or antiquated to our readers). In order to provide
a meaningful praxis, one informed by long histories and attuned to the
present moment, this book has a digital companion.
At https://github.com/DataResistance you will find a continually
updated set of digital resources that extend, update, and revise the
content of this book. As a living archive, you will find, for example,
code for pulling and visualizing your tracking data from Google Maps
as well as links to ongoing projects by other artists, academics, and col-
laborators. That site serves and will continue to serve as a generalized
repository for tools and ideas on how to speak with our digital data. It is
intended as a collaborative space for discussion as well as contribution,
and all of our readers are encouraged to visit, collaborate, and perpetu-
ate a resistive reclaiming of technology.

In the chapters that follow, we chart the history, present, and future of
spatial data and the devices which create, extract, and analyze it in our
lives. Together, they develop practices that we can carry through our
everyday lives, describing not only what is, but more importantly, what
might and must be. Spatial data stand for us, but we must learn how to
make them our own.

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Pluto Press

Chapter Title: Life in the Age of Big Data

Book Title: Data Power

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1
Life in the Age of Big Data1

Not many of those who use the apparatus know what devastation it
once wreaked in family circles. The sound with which it rang between
two and four in the afternoon, when a schoolfriend wished to speak
to me, was an alarm signal that menaced not only my parents’ midday
nap but the historical era that underwrote and enveloped this siesta.
(Benjamin 2008[1938], 77)

[Chaplin’s] unique significance lies in the fact that, in his work, the
human being is integrated into the film image by way of his gestures—
that is, his bodily and mental posture. The innovation of Chaplin’s
gestures is that he dissects the expressive movements of human beings
into a series of minute innervations. Each single movement he makes
is composed of a succession of staccato bits of movement. Whether it
is his walk, the way he handles his cane, or the way he raises his hat—
always the same jerky sequence of tiny movements applies the law of
cinematic image sequence to human motorial functions.
(Benjamin 2008[1935b], 340)

It matters which stories tell stories, which concepts think concepts.

(Haraway 2016, 101)

How is technology impacting society? How can we live amidst tech-

nology? Far too often, the term “technology” serves as a catch-all, an
inevitable, ineffable force behind change. Even when closely evaluated,
technology’s inner workings and effects are still often presented as an
unexplained or proprietary black box—if not inevitable, a fait accompli
justified by self-interested claims to innovation and newness. But these
are not new questions or new claims, and in reality, a technology’s
impacts reflect the social imperatives of its designers and users, not a
force of nature.
Picking apart the promises of technology to find alternative paths
requires an understanding of the history of their functions and

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14 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

Figure 1.1 The Lackawana Valley, by George Inness. (National Gallery of Art,
public domain)

myth-makings within capitalism. The questions of how data are used

today and how to resist or change associated relationships require
engaging ideas about the roles technologies play in societies and the
opportunities opened therein. In the case of data, this involves ongoing
processes of quantification and representation that undergird technolog-
ical data produced by and for systems of capital accumulation.
Due to this connection to capitalism, theorists of technology usually
emphasize the first question, how data are used, and examine the conse-
quences of technologies for societies at large and the subsequent roles of
people within them. Their work provides a critical foundation on which
to unpack what technology actually is and how it actually works, from
Marx’s hand-mill to Adorno’s cinema to Marcuse’s one-dimensional
man to Feenberg’s instrumentalizations. But unlike those theorists, we
are more concerned with the second question, how the current relations
of data might be resisted or repurposed, a careful exploration of possibil-
ities for how we can live with data-driven technology in more practical,
equitable, but no less critical, ways. We necessarily focus more on par-
ticular, situated experiences of the everyday rather than more broad
attempts to theorize technology and society as a whole.

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life in the age of big data . 15

One of the first to evaluate such technologies in conjunction with

changes in daily life was culture critic and theorist Walter Benjamin.
Active from the 1920s to the 1940s, his ideas went on to shape the
post-war Frankfurt School of Critical Theory and numerous scholars,
artists, and activists thereafter. In the passage on the telephone, he calls
attention to the intimate disruptions of technologies that are now banal,
tying them outwards to profound shifts in societal relations (“an alarm
signal that menaced … the historical era”). Further, with Chaplin he
illustrates how people can adapt themselves to technologies designed by
others (“applies the law of cinematic image sequence to human motorial
functions”). In each case, human and technology couple in intimate
relations involving both fear and hope.
In this chapter, we lay the conceptual foundation for how current
relations of data may be resisted and better lived using critical ideas
about technology, culture, and capitalism. We begin by dispelling the
liberal myth that technology (and data) is always neutral and simply
reflects the priorities of those who use it. We also confront the idea that
technologies determine economic relations and culture. The historically
situated reciprocal relationships of societies and technologies are far
more complex than these linear formulations. Shifting from technology
in general to representational, for example data-driven, technologies, we
trace how pre-war Walter Benjamin saw hope for class consciousness
and liberation where his post-war colleagues, Horkheimer and Adorno,
found none. But given the failure of Benjamin’s hopes, how can we resist
the current cultural economy and the data technologies that facilitate
it? We explore three proposed ways out through everyday practice from
Heidegger, Debord, and Marcuse. Finally, building on all these ideas,
we evaluate two recent geographic data scandals, Strava and the Home
Office’s use of homelessness data.

the (neo)liberal myth of technological empowerment

When technology isn’t referred to as an external, natural force, one

common trope assigns all of its consequences to the choices of individual
users. Such claims rest upon the idea of technology as inherently neutral,
its effects instead decided by the person who wields it. Obviously, this is
true to an extent; a sword can be used for cutting, threatening, or repur-
posed into a plowshare; so too may an encrypted email contain directions
for a romantic getaway or the plans for an improvised explosive device.

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16 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

However, this formulation entirely misses the social and material

contexts of those actions that lead to and delimit the options of those
making the choice. We make use of our technologies, but not in circum-
stances of our own choosing.
First, people cannot act outside their social, cultural contexts. Focusing
on someone’s choice to use a sword ignores the systems of power that put
them into that position. A conscripted footsoldier directed to use that
sword based on commands from a king under pain of execution for dis-
obeying orders doesn’t have many choices. Moreover, social contexts go
far deeper. The very basis of social systems and ways of knowing tech-
nologies are socially constructed, be they the militaries of medieval
kingdoms or the social pressures placed upon young people to use social
media “appropriately”: “Delete those pictures of you partying and make
some LinkedIn connections or you’ll never land that dream job!”
Second, the designed, material structure of a technology has con-
sequences for how someone may use it. Designers create technologies
to fulfill particular social imperatives, such as capital accumulation,
national defense, or fun. As a result, the literal construction of those
technologies reflects the purposes and biases of their designers. One of
the reasons so many early mobile applications focused upon the interests
of men with high levels of disposable income in urban settings is because
they were designed by white men with high levels of disposable income
living in an urban environment and who therefore knew what to create
for that demographic group. UnTappd, a social network built around
tracking craft beer consumption, is emblematic of this.
However, a technology’s designer does not wholly determine sub-
sequent users’ actions. A user may apply a technology in a way not
foreseen or intended by a designer, but that user’s range of possible
actions, “margin of maneuver,” is delimited by the technology’s material
structure, and therein, the designer’s social imperatives (Feenberg 1999).
The designers’ social imperatives:

create a framework of activity, a field of play, but they do not determine

every move …. The “weaker players,” those whose lives or work are
structured by the technical mediations selected by management, are
constantly solicited to operate in this range of unpredictable effects.
(Feenberg 2002, 86–87)

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life in the age of big data . 17

A small screwdriver may be used on screws, or as a lockpick, but it is not

useful as a hammer, no matter how hard you swing it.
This is also the case in purely digital technologies. Google Maps is
a consumer-grade navigation service, and excels in that role. It’s also
been applied to purposes within its material margin of maneuver that
its original designers did not anticipate, from real estate to contempo-
rary art (Dalton 2015). However, it’s a poor tool beyond that margin,
such as for commercial truckers concerned about the heights of freeway
overpasses, regional planners who want to evaluate the environmental
impact of new zoning rules, or land trusts trying to create more afford-
able housing.
Moreover, due to social and material context, the intentional and
unintentional effects of technologies are not equally distributed. Tech-
nologies frequently reinforce and reproduce social biases, often in new,
powerful ways. Ruha Benjamin (2019b) writes at length about what she
terms “Jim Code”: how digital technologies facilitate and reinforce racist
ideas and practices, not only in intentionally white supremacist social
media, but also in systems intended to be impartial. She harrowingly
depicts how the data fed into algorithms meant to establish recidivism
rates for convicts feed upon the unequal distribution of racial justice
within existing structures. It is not simply Garbage In, Garbage Out,
but Racism In, Racism Out. As geographer Brian Jefferson (2020, 6)
notes, “computation does not signify a new cultural logic so much as it
performs an upgrade of entrenched modes of social differentiation and
dominance.” The designers of such technologies may not intend their
works to have such racialized consequences, but by performing tech-
nological design within larger systems of racialized capitalism, such
unequal consequences are both extremely common in practice and
perhaps unavoidable in execution. Political geographer Louise Amoore
(2020a, 146), expands on this idea:

This means that one could be doubtful of all claims, for example, that
the bias or the violence could be excised from the algorithm and begin
instead from the intractable political relations between the algorithm
and the data from which it learns.

The biases of a technology cannot be fixed unless the circumstances

from which it springs and within which it functions change.

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18 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

In sum, technologies are part of situated, recursive processes between

social and material aspects which produce one another. Technologies
shape our options and actions as we, in turn, shape both the structure of
technologies and what we are expected to do with them. These relations
are inherently part of technologies and their use. A simple recidivism
algorithm written in San Francisco is intimately tied to the history of
racism within the United States judicial system. Uber’s allocation of
rides connects the gig economy to the history of labor exploitation. To
follow Haraway (2016), staying with the trouble means we must situate
our approach. To look at where we are, and where we might go, we must
first turn to how we got here. This is not in terms of abstract data and
technology as entities separate from people, but as data and technology
produced and used and repurposed by and for people amidst an actual
history and place.

political economy and technology as determination

In an age when large corporations, such as Google, attempt to track

our movements down to the meter and when data clearinghouses, like
Acxiom, allegedly hold over 15,000 individual data points on each of
our financial histories, the disruptive ring of Walter Benjamin’s landline
telephone comes across as quaint. Nevertheless, his comments on the
culture of technologies connect past and present fears and hopes about
technologies and their roles in society. After all, Hollerith’s counting
machine was both the foundation on which IBM was built and a key
tool of the German Nazi Party’s brutal eugenics policies during the
Holocaust. In the 1920s, it also served as the basis for statistical applica-
tions in social work from which spring the racist recidivism algorithms
that classify imprisoned people today. In tracing these histories, Brian
Jefferson (2020, 78) deftly suggests Marx’s analysis of industry can aid in
the analysis of twenty-first-century digital Satanic Mills.2
The strengths of Karl Marx’s analysis of technology are its direct con-
nections to society and historical contingency, as we see at IBM. He
approaches technology not as a primary focus, but as a contributing
factor in his larger project, a political economic theory that demon-
strates the inherent contradictions of capitalism. To him, technology
acted as a sort of guiding precondition within a historical era, setting the
stage for social relations at that time. In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx
(1955[1847]) writes “[t]he hand-mill presupposes a different division

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life in the age of big data . 19

of labour from the steam-mill,” a phrase perhaps best known in its

aphorism form: “The hand-mill gives you a society with the feudal lord;
the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist” (Marx and Engels,
in Thompson 2008[1978], 201).
In the writings of subsequent orthodox Marxists, this was simplified
into a technologically determined concept of society in which tech-
nology determines the type of economy (and class conflicts), and the
economy outputs the culture. Such a simplistic approach misses the
expansive, historically contextualized work of Marx himself.3 In Marx’s
own immanent, revolutionary vision, competition forces continual rev-
olution in the “instruments of production, and thereby the relations of
production, and with them the whole relations of society” (Marx and
Engels 1978[1848], 476). In other words, in part facilitated by tech-
nological innovation, the internal contradictions of capitalism move
inexorably forward towards the inevitable victory of the proletariat and a
classless society (Marx 1975[1852]; Friedman 1986).
While the hand-mill is a handy heuristic for launching a Marxist
understanding of historical development and technology, Max Weber,
the German social theorist and one of the founders of modern
sociology, saw Marx’s approach to technology as “simply wrong” (Weber
2005[1910], 26). In his early habilitation thesis work on class formation
in the Roman era, Weber illustrates that “the same technology does not
always denote the same economy, nor is the reverse always the case”
(Weber 2005[1910], 27).4 While Weber takes aim at the hand-mill
aphorism, he is not dismissing Marx’s political economic analysis, but
instead a specific technologically determinist reading of economy and
culture in Marx. For Weber, there is never a resting place that determines
events in the ultimate last instance, instead emphasizing the dynamic
movement of Marxian theory in which “everything relates to everything
else” (Harvey 1999, xxix).5
In Science as a Vocation, Weber (1946[1919]) levels what’s often con-
sidered his most trenchant critique of Marxism’s view of technology as
the arbiter of change. There, he posits the “alienation of reason from
values, and its confinement to the instrumentality of bureaucracy and the
aestheticism of a contemplative science” (Friedman 1986, 187). In such
a condition, the inevitable victory of the proletarian remains trapped
within the iron cage of capitalist modernity wherein the “technical and
economic conditions of machine production … determine the lives of
all individuals who are born into this mechanism” (Weber 2005[1930],

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20 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

123).6 For Weber, seizure of the means of production is insufficient

to escape modernity’s iron cage as it was instantiated and reinforced
through multiple registers of existence (such as religion), not simply the
economic base of production. Further, the very role of science and phi-
losophy, of thinking, was not to change the world as Marx had suggested
in the Theses on Feuerbach (1978[1888]), but to contemplate it.
This clash of the possibilities and purposes of knowledge still echoes
today at the intersection of science, politics, and daily life. Marx’s
struggle for social change versus Weber’s contemplation of his iron cage
continues as one aspect of the axis of hope and fear today. Concerns and
hopes for technology are far older than the branding of the latest widget
or revelations about how it violates users’ privacy. However, these ideas
operate at broad societal scales, and thereby miss the nuances of data and
technology in actual practice.

a menacing alarm

Walter Benjamin inherited Marx’s conception of distinct historical eras

dominated by particular modes of production, and his work reflects
both the hope and the fear of Marx’s and Weber’s discourses on tech-

Figure 1.2 An 1863 image of Philip Reis’ telephone from the German
newspaper Die Gartenlaube. While Bell’s legal patent eventually won primacy,
Reis had invented a telephone-like device (and coined the term Telephon) in
Germany by 1861. (Public domain)

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life in the age of big data . 21

nology. But Benjamin focuses not on modes of production and broad

social forces, but inwards upon his experiences and rhythms of everyday
life within those contexts. Born at the end of the nineteenth century, he
is known for his work in Berlin and Paris in the 1920s and 1930s before
perishing on the French–Spanish border while fleeing the Nazis in 1940.
During his life, he worked prolifically to excavate how the dialectic
conditions of production had seeped from the economic base into the
cultural superstructure. This occurred in large part through technolo-
gies that had altered the way time and private space were experienced,
thereby setting the very limits of what could be known amidst the bustle
of daily life.
For Benjamin, so-called “Citizen King” Louis Philippe’s ascension in
1830 marks the beginning of an era. In this period, “the private individual
makes his entrance on the stage of history” and with them “living space
becomes, for the first time, antithetical to the place of work” (Benjamin
1978, 154).7 The home becomes a refuge from both commercial and
social obligations, a private universe in which the individual may sustain
themselves. This interior is the space that is disrupted and transformed
decades later by the “violence” of the telephone (Benjamin 2008[1938],
78). It pierces this sanctuary of privacy, allowing the outside to reach into
the home; to disrupt any quiet, any respite, with its clarion call.
Writing on technologically produced media and art, Benjamin asked
two entwined questions of the transformations happening during his day
(Jennings 2008, 9). First, what can art encode of the world around us?
What can it reveal of the current epoch that would otherwise remain
inaccessible and unknown? Second, how do modern media affect the
human sensory apparatus? These ideas continue to resound today.
For example, Benjamin examines the role of the camera as a tool of
knowledge discovery (through slow motion, zoom, and so on) in shifting
cultural expectations of truth and knowledge. These ideas prefigure
arguments among Science and Technology Studies scholars about the
roles tools play in the production and acceptance of knowledge and truth
by decades. In We Have Never Been Modern, Bruno Latour (1993) sets
a disagreement between Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes as a funda-
mental moment in the construction of modernity. He argues that Boyle’s
development of a process by which observations are made in a controlled
laboratory (in that case, the use of vacuum tubes to manipulate and study
the property of objects) contrasted with Hobbes naturalistic refusal. This
clash “invents” the modern world, “a world in which the representation

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22 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

of things through the intermediary of the laboratory is forever dissoci-

ated from the representation of citizens through the intermediary of the
social contract” (Latour 1993, 27). However, where Latour sees a separa-
tion of political and scientific power marked by the walls of a laboratory,
Benjamin sees the new technologies of his era as opportunities both for
disruption and the formation of new political and social solidarities.
Film, for Benjamin, is the foremost dissecting, dehumanizing technical
apparatus, as it literally breaks life down into a series of still, jerky images.
In this, it represents the subjugation of life to the assembly line in both its
production and consumption (Benjamin 2008[1935b], 340). At the same
time, once the camera is capable of making new discoveries, its very dis-
secting nature allows it to perfectly reproduce humanity against capitalist
modernity, a “vast apparatus whose role in their lives is expanding almost
daily” (Benjamin 2008[1936], 26). The camera both offers the ability to
reproduce one’s humanity and simultaneously extends with whom this
experience of humanity may be shared (Benjamin 2008[1935b], 100).
Without using today’s buzzwords, Benjamin argues that film offers the
first of what we would now call social media. It grants the masses the
ability to share their humanity across time and space in ways previously
unimaginable. In a moment of hope, he suggests it offers a pathway to
liberation as the proletarian mass will be able to understand “themselves
and therefore their class” (Benjamin 2008[1936], 24).
What Max Weber had challenged as impossible, creating art “com-
prehensible to other members of his class” (Weber 2005[1910], 28),
Benjamin sees as feasible through the incipient social media of popular
cinema.8 In fully reproducing class identity and fostering class solidar-
ity, film was a means of politicizing art, of creating an aesthetic register
capable of directly invoking revolutionary action. It is a means of reas-
serting shared humanity in the face of a technological apparatus that
seeks to order, calculate, and control. If we follow this line of thinking
with respect to the spatial data we produce every day, we can see that
data come to stand for individuals in ways both banal, such as targeted
ads for new shades of lipstick, and violent, such as the targeting of drone
strikes based upon phone metadata. But we also see that data might also
open spaces and moments for new joyful encounters and alternative
political economic relations. The multiple axes of hope and fear exist
simultaneously in dialectic tension with one another. Benjamin was not
and is not alone in these ideas, and tracing their subsequent develop-
ment better contextualizes the current political economy of data.

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life in the age of big data . 23

there is no alternative

I bought a bourgeois house in the Hollywood hills

With a truckload of hundred thousand dollar bills.
Man came by to hook up my cable TV.
We settled in for the night my baby and me.
We switched ’round and ’round ’til half-past dawn.
There was 57 channels and nothin’ on.
(Bruce Springsteen, “57 Channels (and Nothin’ On),”
Human Touch, 1992)

Publishing after Benjamin’s death and the defeat of fascism in Germany,

Horkheimer and Adorno take up the question of capitalist society’s “irra-
tional rationality” in the face of Stalin’s authoritarian Soviet Union and
the post-war economic boom of the United States. Their view of technol-
ogy is not wholly dissimilar from Benjamin’s: technology has seeped ever
more into our lives, which have become dominated by a “unanimous”
system of “aesthetic manifestation of political opposites [that] proclaim
the same inflexible rhythm” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002[1947], 94).
However, where Benjamin took solace in the radical art appearing in the
Soviet Union, its disappearance late in Stalin’s reign signaled the Soviets’
desire to “turn the world into an enormous workhouse” (Horkheimer, in
Friedman 1986, 191). For Horkheimer (1995), his work on the failures of
the Enlightenment and attempts to reclaim science with a critical spirit
were a response to the perceived collapse of “critical theory” in the Soviet
Union at the time. In their bleak “relentless complaint about technology
and techno-culture,” Donna Haraway finds a direct engagement with
Weber’s iron cage of life in light of its seeming confirmation in post-rev-
olutionary Soviet society (Gane 2006).
A key tenet of Marxist thought is the ways in which capitalists reduce
labor from qualitative differences (what one does and makes, who one is)
into the quantitative differences of their outputs (how many items they
make).9 Agreeing with Benjamin, Adorno and Horkheimer see a similar
process playing out in the “non-productive” or reproductive areas of
society, the “superstructure” in Marxist terminology. They argued that
the “culture industry” had created a social hierarchy that ranked humans
as consumers placed into different calculable brackets.10 The quantitative
ranking for the purposes of consumption created a false sense of choice
within a society, allowing individuals to develop fierce loyalty to certain

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24 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

brands, such as Ford versus Chevy trucks. Thus, making a consumptive

choice becomes based on differences so illusory that they can be
recognized “by any child” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002[1947], 97).
In this way, humans become reified even to themselves, judging value
by objects owned and brand loyalty. In a world where personal brand
worth is measured by retweets and Instagram followers, it is not difficult
to see immediate, deep connections between this insight from the mid-
twentieth century and our present moment.
This reduction to rhythmic, repeatable quantification occurs at the
levels of both consumption and the ideologies that enforce it. In Adorno
and Horkheimer’s argument, science and philosophy have lost their
critical edge, descending into a quantitative practice of measurable
outputs that describe and classify. For example there is an almost feral
quality to citation counting within academia, and at times a poor, biased,
or even fabricated publication may accrue thousands of citations because
it makes for a convenient punching-bag.11 Instead of thinking and
building alternatives to the present, research retreats into an ivory tower
in which its most valorized practitioners decree that values and norms of
present-day society always have and always should remain the same in
perpetuity. “Well, first of all, tell me, is there some society you know that
doesn’t run on greed?”, as the Nobel prize winner Milton Friedman put
it to Phil Donahue in a 1976 interview, cavalierly ignoring centuries of
work in history, anthropology, and other fields in the name of orthodox,
twentieth-century economics (Donahue 1976).
Where Benjamin saw hope in emerging technologies and new
forms of art as opportunities to realize our shared class consciousness
and reassert our humanity, Horkheimer and Adorno found only the
“sardonic realization of man’s species-being.” They saw a consumptive,
flattened ideology that insists that the present is inevitable, natural, and
unalterable, “hid[ing] itself in probability calculations” (Horkheimer
and Adorno 2002[1947], 116). In their line of thinking, the ideologi-
cal reduction of possibilities, and the coinciding retreat of science into
its ivory tower, controls the inherent tensions and contradictions found
within capitalism. Where Marx sees the contradictions within capital-
ism’s productive economic base as steps towards an inevitable systemic
collapse and social liberation, Benjamin, Horkheimer, and Adorno
find little solace. They see that these contradictions have seeped into
(or always-already have been, as Max Weber previously observed) the
ideological underpinnings of society, and Horkheimer and Adorno find

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life in the age of big data . 25

the contradictions to have been stabilized through management.12 The

culture industry sets the stage for humans to accept, and even identify
with and revel in, the banal choices presented to them. There is no
outside alternative, but a million variations on what brand of jeans to
wear. Benjamin’s fervent hope for technology to realize class conscious-
ness in the face of fascism has too often become an epistemological cry
of despair in the consumerist post-war world. Simply from a historical
perspective, Benjamin was proven wrong and ultimately lost his life for
it, while Horkheimer and Adorno have not yet been. “Someone once
said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine
the end of capitalism” (Jameson 2003, 76). The tensions and contradic-
tions favoring social change may have risen, but so too have the forces
aligned to negate and manage them, from geodemographics to individu-
ally targeted advertising, from closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras
in stores to street corner cameras tied into facial recognition systems. So
why talk about Benjamin?

ways out?

The purpose of this book is to use critical thought to inform daily

practice in ways that reshape and repurpose the data that have come to
stand for us in systems of capital, surveillance, and governance13 in ways
that produce hopeful, productive moments of joy and solidarity. Such
possibilities are at the heart of Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of
Its Technological Reproducibility (2008[1936]). The power of technolog-
ically enabled creativity in the right context is the potential for change
and new ways of life:

Whether it is a self-taught engineer designing machines using scraps

scavenged from junkyards, a performer developing a new instrument
using electronics and open-source technology, a comic book artist
creating an imaginary world that uses secret technologies, or an
architect using aesthetics to bring about social change, [techno-
vernacular creativity] practitioners sample (simulate), reappropriate,
and remix heritage artifacts and technologies to generate works that
can be embedded into different environments.
(Gaskins 2019, 272)

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26 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

We contend that critical thought can help in understanding the tech-

nological apparatuses which seek to manage and dominate our lives.
Moreover, critical thought’s conceptual tools can assist in identifying and
realizing contextual technological openings and possibilities that can
facilitate more empowered, humane, equitable relationships and ways of
living through technology.
Walter Benjamin joins a long list of optimists, from John Dewey to
Marshall McLuhan to the self-serving promises of Mark Zuckerberg,
whose hopes have been dashed when technology does not inherently
deliver better ways of life, much less some kind of utopia. Instead of
realizing better ways of life, Zuckerberg’s personal net worth exploded.
Yet for all the trials of the last century, there remains a narrow glimmer
in Benjamin’s work. If one reads his focus on creativity for social change
not as inherent or predetermined outcomes, but instead as possibilities
that could be leveraged and realized with dedicated effort, alternatives
can be found. With that approach, technologies can, with care, become
tools for helping produce solidarities and better daily lives.
As we’ve already seen in this chapter, technologies do not determine
society, nor are the outcomes of a technology wholly up to the individuals
using it. Technologies are socially, historically contingent; no technology,
from data to algorithm, can fully escape the material conditions in which
it is both designed and used. Current contexts of digital data, systems of
counting, of ordering and sorting continue to spiral into new potentially
productive and ideological terrain. Applications rate everything from
our Facebook photos to our creditworthiness to our potential sexual
partners. In light of the material failure of Benjamin’s hopes, we consider
three further potential routes of escape, ways to approach those possibil-
ities for human life amidst, with, and through technology: one abhorrent
(Heidegger), one provocative (Debord), and one earnest (Marcuse).
These three are hardly the only thinkers to critically engage this ques-
tion. Others have come from other spaces, places, and orientations, as we
will continue to highlight throughout this work. However, interweaving
threads from these particular three allows us to draw forward and form
the basis for productive radical practices of resistance.

only a god

Martin Heidegger was a Nazi. While his public persona always attempted
to eschew this reality after the war, publication of his so-called “black

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life in the age of big data . 27

notebooks” after his death has removed any pretense or doubt.14 Never-
theless, his thinking on the relations between technology and society and
his pursuit of alternatives and escapes from the excessive alienation of
humanity under modern capitalism cannot be so easily dismissed, espe-
cially in light of our actually existing world.
Heidegger makes clear that technology is in no way neutral or
impartial. First, viewing it as such delivers humanity “to it [technology]
in the worst possible way” (Heidegger 1977b, 4), akin to Thoreau’s line
that people “have become the tools of their tools” (Thoreau 1910, 47).
Second, while “[s]cience is the theory of the real,” the real will always
approach mankind through modern technology (Heidegger 1977b,
157). Third, “[t]echnology is … no mere means. Technology is a way
of revealing” (Heidegger 1977b, 12). These three points concerning the
neutrality of technology, its relationship to the real, and the revealing of
technology provide powerful insight into the means and limits of tech-
nology as it functions in our world today.
Heidegger’s insights build upon the phenomenological movement in
philosophy. In this line of thinking, “things” are objects that appear as
present in consciousness as “things themselves” without having a hidden
or deeper existence (Husserl 2001). Heidegger’s thinking insists that as a
technological object functions, it retreats from conscious consideration
and becomes a “thing” taken for granted (Harman 2010). In modern
terms, we rarely notice when our phones seamlessly find a restaurant
nearby when we are looking for dinner in an unfamiliar place. Only
a few years ago, choosing our cultural and culinary experience would
have been up to a generic guidebook, a friendly recommendation, or
chance, not a GPS-indexed, personalized algorithmic ranking. Digital
media scholar David M. Berry has highlighted modern technology’s par-
ticular ability to elide the technical considerations by which it works.
He suggests that algorithms have moved people from knowing that to
knowing how (Berry 2011, 121). We know how to search for a restaurant
using Yelp, but we do not stop to think about the obfuscated system of
hardware (processing units, cell towers, and so on), software (operating
systems, Yelp’s app), and data (Yelp’s individualized profile of each of us)
that make finding a restaurant possible.
Heidegger’s insistence that technology is not and cannot be neutral
helps dispel the liberal belief that “it’s not the technology, but how an
individual uses it.”15 The idea that a technology itself, regardless of
the intention of its users, may have intrinsic orientations towards the

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28 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

world is a powerful one. It undercuts the very structures on which nar-

ratives of tech solutionism are built. Take, for example, the ousting of
Timnit Gebru, the former co-lead of Google’s ethical artificial intelli-
gence (AI) research team. In short, Gebru and her co-authors suggested
that there were underlying, structural, and even intractable risks associ-
ated with training artificial intelligences on large language models. For
all the seemingly meaningful texts their AIs produced, they suggested
real, material dangers lurked both in the environmental impacts of
running such models (and the resources they consume) and also in a
shift from understanding to manipulating language (“knowing that” to
“knowing how”). These problems, Gebru and her co-authors suggest,
will remain regardless of steps taken to mitigate them and regardless of
how profitable their application may be. Google’s management, citing
disagreements about their conclusions, which would coincidentally
impact the company’s bottom line, dismissed Gebru.16
Mobile spatial applications and the data they produce, extract, analyze
and help users enact both performative and normative tasks: apps
announce locations at specific events to a users’ friends (performing our
mobility), they recommend which meals to order at a restaurant (normal-
izing what is and isn’t eaten), and they suggest nearby potential romantic
partners. As technology comes to mediate and shape these actions,
according to Heideggerian thinking, everyday life transforms into a
condition of standing-reserve (Berry 2011; Heidegger 1977b). This is an
important shift in the orientation of life and is central to Heideggerian
thought on technology and potential escapes thereof. Standing-reserve
can be thought of as a counted stock. It is something that awaits its own
use in an orderly, known, manner (Edwards 2007). Take, for example, an
airliner waiting on a runway. It reveals itself as standing-reserve in that it
is “ordered to ensure the possibility of transportation”(Heidegger 1977b,
16). Any deeper meaning to its function and purpose is left unconsid-
ered: there is a plane, it will fly some number of people or things to some
other location.
At their most bombastic, tech evangelists see the world as standing-
reserve. In an infamous WIRED piece from 2008, then editor-in-chief
Chris Anderson wrote of how big data signaled the “end of theory,” a
situation in which it didn’t matter why things happened, only that they
could be successfully predicted and modeled.17 In this formulation, the
fullness of the world can and will be explained entirely through quanti-
fied, calculated sets of information, the world as standing-reserve. Spatial

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life in the age of big data . 29

data are particularly useful in such a rendering as it attempts to reduce

the fullness of a person’s experiences and observations, in Heidegger-
ian terms their being-in-the-world, into a set of quantified coordinates,
latitude, longitude, time, and so on.18 These can be linked to other data
and indexed by location to call forth consumptive practices. The leap from
traditional geodemographics, aimed and based upon one’s home postal
code, to one’s bodily location is an attempt to move towards a smoother,
more predictable, quantifiable space of capitalist consumption. The
so-called “killer app” of the twenty-first century has been described as
the ability to guide a consumer from their every waking moment to their
next purchase (Krumm 2011). As Anderson’s triumphalist call makes
clear, this is done not through any deeper understanding of the motiva-
tions of said consumer, but through the processes of creation, extraction,
interconnection, and analysis that make up so-called big data.
Heidegger’s insight into life as standing-reserve and the global spread
of calculation and quantification demanded by modern technology have
clear implications for how we make use of and are used by our everyday
technologies. However, his response to these conditions marks a distinct
retreat from any sort of practical engagement with the world. Comparing
Marxist thinking with Heidegger’s thought, geographer Stuart Elden
(2004) observers that, for Heidegger, the relations between society and
technology set the very conditions for the possibility of science in the
modern world: all thinking occurs within a specific enframing that sets
the limits of what may be recognized and researched. Within capitalist
modernity, where technology has come to demand life as standing-
reserve, this enframing is one in which philosophy has been taken
over by a science that is overdetermined by what can be known of and
through technology (Heidegger 1981[1976]; Harman 2010). Science, for
Heidegger, is an endeavor which “entraps the real and secures it in its
objectness” (Heidegger 1977a, 168). It is a means by which being-in-the-
world is reduced to standing-reserve.
In this line of thinking, philosophy has become unable to change the
world, and any belief that it may is an example of the worst possible
kind of arrogance of humankind (Heidegger 1981[1976]). By the end
of his life, the only possible way out that Heidegger sees is a removal of
humanity as the object of history, allowing for things “to be” in a way not
mediated by human goals and desires: only a god can save us (Heidegger
1981[1976]). While his point that technology is inherently not neutral is
valuable, Heidegger’s conclusion is paralyzing. Rather than waiting for

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30 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

divine intervention, others in the post-war period attempt to take tech-

nology, as non-neutral as it is, in more productive directions.

an off ramp

Even as Heidegger published his work on technology, members of

the soon-to-be Situationist International were beginning to develop a
radically different approach to imagining ways out through activist
politics and culture jamming. Emerging from Marxist thought in
post-war Paris, the Situationists, chief among them Guy Debord,
approach technology as directly tied to capitalist production. However,
they break with traditional Marxist thought by emphasizing culture and
technological media as a form of production. Technological media aren’t
limited to capital, for they also include the labors of people going about
their daily lives. In practice, they attempted to utilize these ideas in a
wide variety of arenas, from urban planning to film to acting as key insti-
gators in the May 1968 Revolution in France.
One of the key themes running through Debord’s work is how capital-
ism attempts to colonize and extract value from the practices of people’s
everyday lives. Doing so involves stripping a person of their authentic life
and replacing it with spectacle, commodified images of such a life: “All
that once was directly lived has become mere representation” (Debord
1967, Thesis 1). He continues:

The images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common
stream in which the unity of that life can no longer be recovered.
Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a
separate pseudo-world that can only be looked at. … The spectacle is a
concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the nonliving.
(Debord 1967, Thesis 2; original emphasis)

This technological separation and replacement with commodified

images and identities is apparent not only in film and commercials, but
also the places we frequent. Billboards and product placement fill our
visions, separating ourselves from real experiences and replacing them
with imagery of social interactions and desires for purchase.
The concept of the spectacle directly connects capitalism’s need for
growth with everyday experiences as capital’s “corporeal corkscrew-
ing inwards” colonizes more and more everyday, banal experiences and

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life in the age of big data . 31

interactions and integrates them into market exchange (Beller 2012, 8).
This is a totalizing concept, “the autocratic reign of the market economy
which had acceded to an irresponsible sovereignty, and the totality of
new techniques of government which accompanied this reign” (Debord
1998, 2). Some argue this limits its utility, for how can we resist that
which is total? Is it not better to, as Heidegger suggested, wait for a god?
But, as we’ve written elsewhere (Thatcher and Dalton 2017, 137), such
views mistake “a totalizing tendency for a static totality.” The point of the
spectacle is that it dynamically attempts to colonize and subjugate daily
life at all levels of experience and at all times. This dynamic tendency
opens fertile ground for resistance, both among the Situationists and
later activists who take inspiration from them.
The Situationists are not known for direct success in their resistances,
whether overthrowing capitalism or shaping the mid-century redevel-
opment of Paris. Rather, as we see with the May 1968 Revolution, their
ultimate impact tends to be cultural, which reflects the nature of their
methods. They developed and practiced their own resistance methods,
such as détournement, artistic repurposing of existing advertising and
spectacle imagery turned back on itself. Perhaps most relevant to geo-
graphic data is the dérive (drifting), a form of semi-systematic wandering
to better know and articulate a place.19 Such cultural practices are signifi-
cant because the Situationists see the possibility of a world built on play,
an alternative to the howling feedback loops of consumption in which
capitalism entrenches us. Moreover, such play opens paths through
engagements with and repurposing of existing systems, destruction
through plagiarism of ideas, media, and actions (Wark 2013). A similar
ethos suffuses this work.

earnest multidimensionality

If Heidegger turns to fascism to displace the iron cage of modernity, and

when that fails, waits in faith, and if Debord insists on playing the role of
avant-garde urban provocateur, then Herbert Marcuse offers our third
pole for (re)asserting our shared humanity in the face of the current
sociotechnical apparatus: not through listless waiting or art-fueled sub-
version, but through a radical synthesis of Heideggerian and Marxist
thinking. Marcuse re-orients Heidegger’s enframing to encapsulate cap-
italism such that he offers a productive engagement with technology
amidst capitalist modernity.

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32 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

Marcuse studied under Heidegger at the University of Freiburg, only

to later reinvent himself as an engaged Marxist social theorist. While it
was Heidegger’s early support for National Socialism that led the two
men to break both politically and personally, Marcuse’s thought on
technology and scientific reason retain Heidegger’s influence (Thom-
son 2000).20 For example, Marcuse rejects the neutrality of technology
due to social context. In the modern world, there is “no personal escape
from the apparatus which has mechanized and standardized the world”
(Marcuse 1982, 143). Similarly, science functions under a “technological
a priori which projects nature as potential instrumentality, stuff of con-
trol and organization” (Marcuse 1991[1964], 153). Although he eschews
the terms standing-reserve and enframing, the underlying ideas remain.
However, Marcuse combines this with a Marxist rethinking of tech-
nology as part of a mode of production within a larger socioeconomic
system of capitalism. For him, technology represents a “mode of organiz-
ing and perpetuating (or changing) social relationships, a manifestation
of prevalent thought and behavior patterns, and an instrument for
control and domination” (Marcuse 2009, 138). And here, Marcuse makes
a most critical intellectual move: technology is all of those things as well
as potentially, and necessarily, a specific technique of liberation. That
which surrounds society, that which renders it flat and hides the depth
of true being (the enframing for Heidegger), is capitalist modernity for
Marcuse. Technological rationality calls for nature in a calculable and
orderable manner and creates a standardized excess of resources and
humans ready to be called forth through technology. But in so doing,
“technological rationality has become political rationality” in which a
totalizing system of capital has emerged that is “everywhere and in all
forms” (Marcuse 1991[1964], xlviii, 11).
To avoid Heidegger’s dead end, Marcuse inverts both Heidegger and
Weber by suggesting that it is the very commitment to truth, to “real
facts,” that instills the scientific endeavor with its critical spirit, with its
desire and need to change, not just interpret, the world (Marcuse 2009;
Friedman 1986). Where Weber saw this as utopian fantasy, Marcuse
reads a political necessity, a charge where “[t]ruth becomes critique
and accusation, and accusation becomes the function of true science”
(Marcuse 2009, 161).
Echoing Heidegger and Benjamin, Marcuse wrote of existing as an
instrument, as a thing that could be called forth to function in predict-
able, expected ways. Here was a “society without opposition” that had

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life in the age of big data . 33

grown directly out of “technology as a form of social control and domi-

nation.” But rather than effectively giving up on human agency, as Weber,
Adorno and Horkheimer, and Heidegger had, Marcuse harkens once
more to Benjamin, ending his work declaring “Nur um der Hoffnung-
slosen willen ist uns die Hoffnung gegeben” (“It is only for the sake of
those without hope that hope is given to us”; Marcuse 1991[1964], 257).
Forty years after his death, Marcuse’s work remains more pertinent
than ever in its lucid insistence both on the role technology plays in
society and in the need and possibility for alternatives. Our winding path
from neoliberal myths of technological triumphalism back through the
mills of Marx and Weber and into Heidegger’s contemplative retreat have
all led us here: Marcuse matters because of his insistence that alternatives
must not just be thought, but also acted.
That is the core concern of this book: it is absolutely necessary to
both think through and act to produce alternatives. Radical thought
and practice form a nexus through which alternative technologies can
emerge. In this we echo and extend calls that we trace back through
Benjamin, and that reverberate through academic and some popular
presses even as our relations with and representations in spatial data
grow apace. In his beautiful work All Data Are Local, Yanni Alexander
Loukissas (2019, 162) develops an idea of critical reflection as “a process
by which the interwoven social and technical dynamics of data are made
visible and accessible to judgement.” If that constitutes reflection, then
what does it mean to think and enact a radical praxis of spatial data, to
reorder our relations with technology? In the final section of this chapter,
we present two additional, recent examples of spatial data and the knowl-
edges they enable bursting beyond their intended uses and slipping into
the public view. Thinking through these approaches using the reflection
of Heidegger, the playfulness of Debord, and the inversion of thought
and action provided by Marcuse allows us to move from the depths of
social theory in the mid-twentieth century into our daily routines today.

the curious cases of strava,

and the home office’s charity map

According to McKinsey, a well-known management consulting firm,

the number of Internet of Things (IoT) (and thus at least passively loca-
tion-aware) devices will surpass 43 billion in 2023. That would constitute
a €14.5 billion worldwide market (Dahlqvist and Patel 2019). While

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34 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

the scale of this may be surprising, the normalization of quantified

self-tracking is likely not new to many readers. We track our packages,
our runs, our diets, our sleep patterns. At larger scales, corporations
track our purchases, our web views, our likes. Digital personal assistants
sit on our tables and in our pockets listening to our conversations, and
governments are well established to be tracking not only traffic patterns,
but also our private conversations and exchanges.
Much as the ways of thinking through the relations between society
and technology are not new, nor are the practices that prompt the
necessity of such thinking. Benjamin Franklin enjoyed self-quantifi-
cation through personal charts of how he spent his time and whether
he lived virtuously or not (Neff and Nafus 2016, 15) while James Bridle
relates the story of Robert Lawson who, in 1967, revealed that the UK
government was collecting a copy of every telegram that entered or left
its nation (Bridle 2018, 175). We have lived for some time in what geog-
rapher Matt Wilson described as a “quantified self-city-nation”—a space
in which:

the flickering screens, the dynamics of real-time data and the prospect
of behavioural change intersect in a glossy imaginary where being
technologically fashionable and facile supersedes concerns of differ-
ential docility. … [W]e are assured of the untapped potential at the
touch of the flat screens in some of our pockets, that the possibil-
ity of our “fittest” bodies and “smartest” cities rests with individual
behaviour.
(Wilson 2015a, 39)

In post-War America, Horkheimer and Adorno (2002[1947], 71)

decried a reduction of personality to “hardly more than dazzling
white teeth and freedom from body odor and emotions.” Now we are
promised something both shinier and more sinister. In the quantified
self-city-nation, the data we generate, the steps we take, our swipes to
the left, the rides we share become our outward-facing personality.
This representation is algorithmically produced through the analysis of
said data that comes to stand for us both in systems of global capital
(our mortgage rate, what jobs we are offered) and our personal, private
moments (potential partners offered through an app, the directions
we are given through a city). While this quantified reduction to data is
sold as our best selves, as a life easily and fulfillingly lived, fitness at ten

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life in the age of big data . 35

thousand (counted) steps a day, it masks a deeper slippage between who

we are in the world and who our data say we are. When these two forces
rub against one another, they can produce unexpected results.
Founded in 2009 by Mark Gainey, Mark Shaw, and Michael Horvath
(all white men), San Francisco-based Strava bills itself as the “#1 app for
runners and cyclists” and raised over $110 million in funding in 2020
alone to support this goal (Etherington 2020). You may have used it or
something like it, such as RunKeeper, MapMyRun, Fitbit, or Garmin.
In essence, it’s an app that tracks your exercise using the GPS sensor in
your smartphone. Even if you have not used such an application, you’ve
likely seen someone doing so: checking their phone or smartwatch at the
beginning or end of a run or sharing a particularly good time on social
media. This is the sort of banal practice through which quantification
and tracking seeps into our everyday.
In November of 2017, Strava created a visualization of all their users’
paths in the form of its Global Heatmap. Made up of 5 terabytes of input

Figure 1.3 Images at two scales around Boston from the “One Dot Per
Person for the Entire United States” visualization created by the Demographics
Research Group at the University of Virginia. A dot-density map built upon the
2010 census enumeration. Though blurry here, this style is emblematic of many
current approaches to data visualization. At regional scales (the left), the dots
blend into one another, producing what appear to be filled areal units; however,
when zoomed in to more local scales (the right), the dots disaggregate and
show the emptiness within said units. (Image copyright © 2013 Weldon Cooper
Center for Public Service, Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia,
Dustin A. Cable, creator)

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36 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

data and 1.4 trillion coordinate points, it promised the “largest, richest,
and most beautiful dataset of its kind” (Robb 2017). Why build such a
map, on a worldwide scale so far divorced from the distance that people
actually run daily? Chief Technologist of User Experience and Sustain-
ability at Intel Melissa Gregg points to a specific scopophilic pleasure to
be found in viewing large data sets. Building on Orit Halpern’s Beautiful
Data (2014), she describes the appearance of “command and control
through seeing” that follows from the rendering of massive sets of data
imaginable through their visualization (Gregg 2015). Figure 1.3 illus-
trates how in such over-loaded visualizations, data points bleed together
at more extensive, regional scales, only to pull apart at more local scales,
providing the illusion of analytical meaning. To see is to know, to imagine
the whole of a complex system that constitutes data points beyond the
scale of which we could otherwise think.
Nonetheless, visualizing this kind of spatial information, connecting
who, when, and where, has profound implications beyond aesthetics,
as quickly became apparent in Strava’s Global Heatmap. On January
27, 2018, Nathan Ruser, then an analyst for United Conflict Analysts,
tweeted:

Strava released their global heatmap. 13 trillion GPS points21 from

their users (turning off data sharing is an option). https://medium.
com/strava-engineering/the-global-heatmap-now-6x-hotter-23fc01
d301de … It looks very pretty, but not amazing for Op-Sec. US Bases
are clearly identifiable and mappable22

This marked the beginning of a Twitter thread that explored examples

of Strava’s Global Heatmap making visible various military bases and
patrols around the world. Within days, the story had been picked up
by The Guardian, the BBC, WIRED, and a host of other online, print,
and television media venues (see, inter alia, Hern 2018; BBC News 2018;
Hsu 2018). Strava, in response, made a number of changes both to who
could view the Global Heatmap (registered users) and how its data were
stored (data marked private was deleted monthly). Moreover, a second
wave of articles in the news media described how to better protect your
data when using such applications.
In the case of the Strava Global Heatmap, what was put at risk were
the secrets of some of the best-funded and most powerful organizations
in the world, the US military and its affiliates. Nonetheless, this type of

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life in the age of big data . 37

Figure 1.4 A clearly demarcated US military base discovered in Strava’s

Global Heatmap by Nathan Ruser. (Image used with author’s permission)

unintended visibility through spatial data production and its conse-

quences also occurs at other scales with more vulnerable populations.
One such case was the UK Home Office’s use of data from a London
homelessness charity to identify and deport homeless people from the
country.23
The story, extensively covered in The Guardian, began when local
charities began to collect data from the homeless people they worked
with, including nationality and where that person frequently spent time
on the streets. With the charities’ consent, the Home Office gained access
to this information and used it to identify, locate, and deport non-na-
tive individuals. When this secret partnership became public knowledge,
public outrage and a government investigation ensued. As we wrote with
Clancy Wilmott and Emma Fraser in 2020 (Dalton et al. 2020):

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38 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

The data in question was part of the Combined Homelessness And

Information Network (CHAIN), a shared database funded by the
London Mayor’s office and administered by St. Mungo’s, a major
homelessness charity, with access to the data granted by the Greater
London Authority (GLA). Each homeless person has a listing, logged
by charity outreach workers, with their name, history of homeless-
ness, special needs, gender, age, and crucially, their regular location
and nationality …. In May 2015, the Home Office secretly obtained
GLA permission to access the CHAIN database. That data now served
a Home Office program to remove homeless non-UK nationals. If a
homeless person declined contact or refused an outreach worker’s
offer of help to voluntarily return to their country of origin, the
Home Office would send officers to their regular location to detain
and deport the person by force …. CHAIN geographic data facilitated
the detentions by indicating where to find the homeless person in
question, and, in the aggregate, geographic “hotspots” where potential
deportees might be concentrated. “We are trying to build in a timeline
on the map so you can see where non-UK nationals have moved to
over time, which hopefully will also be able to help you establish pri-
orities by seeing patterns …” [an officer from the Home Office told the
press] … Deportation rates rose an estimated 41% for EU nationals,
totalling 698 EU nationals deported by May 2017.24

In both the case of Strava and the case of London homelessness, we

find the representational ability of spatial data slipping beyond the intent
of their creation. In both cases, lived experiences, where one runs, where
one sleeps, become translated into aesthetic representations of geo-
graphic “hotness,” where one is likely to be/have been at some time. These
two disparate registers, the state military secret and a homeless sleeper,
are united in a visual rhetoric which promises calculation, control, and
predictability through the mapping and visualization of spatial data. And
as we see, that visual rhetoric and the data behind it easily slip beyond
the original intent of data creators.
This kind of control based on population is the logic of the carceral
state. It is clearly visible not only in Strava or the Home Office, but in
the unfortunately popular genre of crime “hotspot” maps. The individ-
ual person necessary to commit an act is completely effaced, replaced by
an areal representation of likelihood for someone to commit some crime
within said area (Jefferson 2017).

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life in the age of big data . 39

Even if the topic isn’t crime, data assembled into such maps become
an aesthetic representation of “hotness,” where one is likely to be/have
been at some time, where some act has occurred or is likely to occur. In
New Dark Age, James Bridle suggests that the very excess of informa-
tion creates the very conditions in which it is unlikely for us to think
and to know in detail; with every new piece added to the pile, the world
expands beyond our ability to conceptualize and threatens our ability to
act in it. Mapping and visualization offer a path through this fog. In the
face of overwhelming data, Orit Halpern (2014, 22) illustrates how these
methods become a “map for action” that transforms what it means to
know through what it means to see. Pivoting from nineteenth-century
motifs of extracting value from natural resources, she writes of how in
the twentieth century there emerged:

an aspiration and desire for data as the site of value to emerge from the
seeming informational abundance once assumed to be the province
of nature. Data … appeals to our senses and can be seen, felt, and
touched with seemingly no relationship to its content.
(Halpern 2014, 15)

Large, location-indexed data promise such control through visualiza-

tion, life as standing-reserve, placed, known, circulated, and called forth
for algorithmically sorted purposes at algorithmically calculated times.
This is part of data’s promised leap from geodemographics to individual-
ized marketing. The focus is no longer “people in this neighborhood are
likely to buy trips to Cancun over the summer,” but rather “Jim Thatcher
will purchase a purple sweater this coming Tuesday.” More data, through
algorithmic processing and visualization, are transformed into a means
of governance and consumption.
Jennifer Gabrys (2016, 41) writes of how “[p]rocesses of producing
data are also processes of making sense.” Drawing on Foucault’s analysis
of how neoliberal thinking permeates governance and its subjects, she
suggests that efforts to make our environments more computational
produces a “biopolitics 2.0,” which:

[e]merges within smart cities that involves the programming of

environments and citizens for responsiveness and efficiency. Such pro-
gramming is generative of political techniques for governing everyday
ways of life, where urban processes, citizen engagements, and gover-

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40 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

nance unfold through the spatial and temporal networks of sensors,

algorithms, databases, and mobile platforms.
(Gabrys 2016, 203)

Quantification becomes representation at scale, allowing spatial data to

become the individual that capital can see.25 It is not the individual as they
might understand or describe themselves, but rather an amalgamated
population built around similar data points within a matrix according
to the chosen algorithmically based analysis. To accomplish this, sensing
apparatuses have shifted from discrete points, such as CCTV cameras
and credit card machines, to what Greenfield (2006) described as “every-
where”: our phones, our homes, even our cars and refrigerators can now
provide a litany of information tied to where we are, when, and what
we were (allegedly) doing. These data are not so much a reflection of
who we are, but a construction of how capital and government see and
attempt to manage us. Our UberEats orders are linked to our Tinder
matches which are tied to our Facebook accounts that in turn advertise
us products from our Amazon wishlists. Moreover, as social processes,
the benefits and penalties are not equitably distributed. The carceral
logic at work is clearly apparent in the racially biased outcomes of even
“impartial” services and data connections (Benjamin 2019a).
Nevertheless, there remains a rupture, a crack that opens as data are
transformed from their expected, intended uses into moments of repre-
sentation. In practice, this excess and its unexpected outcomes remain a
source of apparently constant surprise.

from girls around me to drones above me and back

In 1993, Oscar Gandy Jr. published The Panoptic Sort: A Political

Economy of Personal Information, in which he attempted to outline the
growing stakes of informational sorting vis-à-vis personal privacy and
political autonomy (Gandy 1993a). A prescient and sadly out of print
book, Gandy’s fears (and hopes) seem all the more pertinent in light
of Acxiom’s supposed 15,000 interlinked points on every United States
citizen and the National Security Agency’s (NSA’s) supposed recordings
of all digital communications. He illustrates again and again the dangers
of viewing personal information as a commodity:

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life in the age of big data . 41

In general, we wish to suggest that unlike the value generated when

free labor enters into a contract with capital to sell its labor power,
much of the personal information gathered by business and govern-
ment is collected either surreptitiously, or under circumstances which
reasonably can be understood as coercive.
(Gandy 1993b, 82)

Writing in 1995 about asymmetries of access to information, Eric

Sheppard similarly asked, “What does it say about the influence of social
power over information systems … when individual credit card ratings
are available to private firms, whereas detailed financial information
about those firms are defined as proprietary information[?]” (Sheppard
1995, 12). The scale may change, but the intent does not. When discuss-
ing risk management through data analysis, Gandy noted how rental car
agencies refuse service or charge more to local renters due to perceived
risks of unsafe driving or theft, so that “[c]lass membership then predicts
individual experience” (Gandy 1993b, 88). Today, it is increasingly the
norm for rental agencies to use GPS trackers to monitor driving habits
which, in turn, place renters into representative categories based on
determined fares. The scale has changed, the intent has not.
Twenty years later, writing for The New York Times’ Bits blog, Nick
Bilton (2012) seemed fatigued by the latest invasion of privacy through
spatial data: “Another day, another creepy mobile app. Here is one that
allows you to find women in your area. It definitely wins the prize for too
creepy.” Bilton was describing the short-lived and infamous mobile appli-
cation Girls Around Me. It linked together Facebook and Foursquare
through their Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)26 within
the Girls Around Me app to provide a near-real-time profile of each
of the women near the device. In many ways, it functioned like Tinder
or Grindr do today. Girls Around Me would check nearby locations
(typically bars and restaurants) for women who had checked in to that
location using the Foursquare application. Then it would attempt to pull
up their Facebook profiles, providing interests, likes, and photos. Of
course, the core concern here is that while users intentionally create and
log into Tinder, Girls Around Me did this by repurposing women’s data
generated by Foursquare and Facebook without the women’s knowledge.
Unlike Tinder, in which a user can choose what information to make
visible to potential sexual partners, disclosing more information (such as
actual location) at their discretion, Girls Around Me provided check-in

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42 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

locations and the full suite of information available publicly through

their Facebook accounts without consent.
Once “discovered” by a blogger at Cult of Mac (Brownlee 2012),
press coverage was generally outraged and appalled in tone. Only a
few bloggers, such as Kashmir Hill of Forbes noted that the app func-
tioned like certain dating applications, specifically Blendr, a forerunner
of Tinder based upon the success of the gay-oriented Grindr application.
She suggested: “I’m sorry, my friends, but I think apps like ‘Girls Around
Me’ are the future” (Hill 2012). Hill also, quite correctly, noted the patri-
archal tones in coverage of Girls Around Me in which women were
framed as damsels in need of protection from a lack of understanding of
security features. As she put it, “Sometimes we can be found because we
want to be found” (Hill 2012).
About a year later, in June 2013, Edward Snowden set off another
data scandal by releasing thousands of purloined NSA documents to a
group of journalists at outlets like The Guardian and The Washington
Post. The narratives and counter-narratives of Snowden and the
documents he released are now legendary, having been presented in a
variety of media forms, up to and including a dramatic biopic starring
Jason Gordon-Levitt and directed by Oliver Stone. Amidst the stories of
Snowden’s escape and NSA wiretapping, one of the revelations to receive
less attention at the time revolved around the use of metadata in the US
military’s drone strike program.
Buried in Snowden’s release was the description of a program
that used phone metadata, unconfirmed by human intelligence, to
sanction lethal drone strikes.27 In short, this means that lethal strikes
(assassinations) by drones are authorized based on the data produced
by and captured from mobile phones and other devices with no human
confirmation of the identity of the target. Thus, if you are the target of a
metadata-determined strike, loaning your phone to your grandmother
means that she will become the recipient of a strike. This account was
confirmed by a separate whistleblower, an operator at Joint Special
Operations Command, whose account was released in The Intercept.
That whistleblower described this practice as one of the primary causes
of civilian deaths, noting that sometimes “it isn’t until several months
or years later that you all of a sudden realize that the entire time you
thought you were going after this really hot target, … [and] it was his
mother’s phone the whole time” (Scahill 2015).

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life in the age of big data . 43

What these techno-socially produced moments have in common is

a (re-)emergence of conscious consideration of an otherwise taken-for-
granted function of technology. Each occurred when data escaped their
original intended purpose and became representative of the individual
in some unexpected and potentially disastrous way. The revelation of
both of these initiatives produced outrage at the time, and yet led to no
substantial policy or cultural change. Girls Around Me was promptly
pulled from the iTunes store. Foursquare changed the function of its
API to foreclose the possibility of similar applications in the future, but
went on to collect more data than before.28 While the drone program has
continued, it has also been the subject of continued protests both in the
US and around the world.
Sadly, both cases also had precedents that grabbed headlines but
similarly failed to spark substantial change. Two years before Girls
Around Me, Please Rob Me satirically illustrated the utility of spatial
check-in data for potential burglars. Local news reports were scandal-
ized, but users kept checking in. Seven years before Edward Snowden
emerged as a charismatic and enigmatic heroic lead for news reporting,
The New York Times used NSA sources to cover the Bush administra-
tion’s use of warrantless wire tappings and data mining of US citizens
(Risen and Lichtblau 2005). And yet, a few years later, when Strava unex-
pectedly revealed the location of military bases, the popular press was
shocked yet again.
It’s not even as if Strava was the first exercise application mapped on a
large scale. In 2014, Nathan Yao had successfully scraped and visualized
the running routes of RunKeeper, producing arresting visualizations
through relatively straightforward code (see Figures 1.5 and 1.6) and
what he called “the tip of a very interesting iceberg” (Yao 2014).
By now, we’ve automated the process of checking in. In 2019, the
Foursquare app re-emerged as a “city guide” that tracks the places you
go in order to suggest new venues you might enjoy. In 2020, Foursquare
attempted to repurpose that data to track the spread of COVID-19 (Four-
square 2020). When, of course, the inevitable press coverage of to whom
this application is selling user data or the biases of its algorithmically
tailored urban experiences emerge, we will no doubt see more shocked
press accounts. And yet people will keep signing into Foursquare, Strava,
Facebook, Google Maps, Snapchat and all the others.
Or perhaps not. Perhaps now is the moment to end the perpetual “who
could have known”-ism and instead recognize the likely outcomes of

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44 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

Figure 1.5 Inspired by Nikita Barsukov’s work, Nathan Yao built these
maps using public RunKeeper data. https://flowingdata.com/2014/02/05/
where-people-run/ (last accessed July 2021). (Used with author’s
permission)

Figure 1.6 Sample code to scrape RunKeeper’s public routes for the city
of Tacoma. Written in Ruby by Josh Gray working with Jim Thatcher, it
demonstrates the ease with which data may be acquired for those with specific
technical knowledge. (See https://github.com/DataResistance for more
examples of our work; also, note this script may violate RunKeeper’s terms of
service)

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life in the age of big data . 45

new forms of spatial data analysis, extraction, and visualization within

longer histories of our relations with technology under capitalism
(Thatcher 2018).

In this chapter, we traced pathways by which technologies, and through

them, data, have come to represent us, to speak for us. Beginning from
the neoliberal myth of individualized technological empowerment, we
traced lines of critical thought on technology up through the present
moment. There, we found how data, algorithms, visualization, and
analysis have come to represent us, to speak for us, at the individual level
over and over again.
In the next chapter, we turn from the individual everyday experience
to more closely examine how we as a society have succumbed to almost
mythological narratives of technological development and solutions.
These narratives, which frequently star the paradigmatic “leaders” of
Silicon Valley, have produced a society in which we bear witness of our
lives to our technologies, accepting through faith that new technosocial
relations are superior.

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Pluto Press

Chapter Title: What Are Our Data, and What Are They Worth?

Book Title: Data Power

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2
What Are Our Data,
and What Are They Worth?

The Petabyte age is different because more is different.

(Anderson 2008)

In June of 2008, then editor-in-chief of WIRED Chris Anderson wrote

his article “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific
Method Obsolete.” Provocative on its face, the article remains a touch-
stone for understanding the hubris of “data revolution,” having been
cited over 2,000 times since publication. In scholarly literature on data,
it serves as a shibboleth and foil by which authors signal their critical
intents (Kitchin 2014; Thatcher et al. 2018). The durability and influence
of this article speaks to its capture of a certain modernist, triumphal-
ist zeitgeist that frames more data as inevitably and irrevocably better.
Perhaps most (in)famously, Anderson claimed: “With enough data, the
numbers speak for themselves.” He argued that it was no longer necessary,
or even interesting, to know why something occurred, only that it would
or would not occur. In this chapter, we argue that such an orientation is
emblematic of our current condition, a context in which data are some of
the most valuable commodities in the world precisely because of a near
theological faith in data’s perceived ability to produce knowledge and,
therein, the world. We do so first by situating the narratives that Silicon
Valley firms tell about themselves within this coproduction of a data-
world. Then we demonstrate that through this context, our very relations
to technology have shifted from speaking with data to situations in which
we bear witness of ourselves such that data are made to speak for us:

A NEW commodity spawns a lucrative, fast-growing industry, prompt-

ing antitrust regulators to step in to restrain those who control its flow.
A century ago, the resource in question was oil. Now similar concerns
are being raised by the giants that deal in data, the oil of the digital era.
These titans—Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Amazon, Apple,

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what are our data, and what are they worth? . 47

Facebook and Microsoft—look unstoppable. They are the five most

valuable listed firms in the world. Their profits are surging ….
(The Economist 2017)

Setting aside attempts at regulation for the moment, we’d like to

focus on the framing of data as commodity, and specifically as a new
commodity. This framing is realized in particular ways for both tech
giants and individual members of society. The simple metaphor “data
is the new oil” has appeared in an array of popular, mainstream press
stories about tech firms from The Economist above to The New York
Times to WIRED (Dance et al. 2018; Matsakis 2019b). While there is
a near universal consensus that data are valuable, such petro-nouveau
claims are often unaccompanied by what exactly it is about data that
makes them so valorized.
A thought experiment described by Antonio García Martínez, formerly
of Facebook’s monetization team, explains a bit of the conundrum behind
data’s valuation. In the pages of WIRED, he invites us to consider the dif-
ference between inheriting a tanker ship of crude oil and a van filled
with hard drives containing all of Amazon’s sales and browsing data for a
year. The difference, he suggests, is that while he could sell the oil even-
tually, he would not be able to do the same with the sales and browsing
data. The problem is that “Amazon’s purchase data is worth an immense
fortune … to Amazon” (Martínez 2019).
This suggestion that such a data set could not be sold is, of course,
bollocks, as Martínez goes on to admit later in the piece. Walmart, for
example, would gladly purchase those hard drives, as would a number
of other online and retail competitors to Amazon. That said, Martínez’s
overarching point that data do not function the same as oil is a sound one.
What matters for us here is the mindset that brings him to that point. In
his desire to explain why companies such as Facebook shouldn’t have to
pay individuals for their data, he misses the forest for his corporate bene-
factors’ trees.
He’s right that the revenue such technology companies generate is
typically quite small per user. He states $25 per annum for Facebook
globally and $130 for users within the United States. Other estimates
suggest that on an individual level, data per user are worth much less
that, perhaps only $1 annually (Steele 2020; Steel et al. 2013).1 The huge
revenues of technology companies come from their huge numbers of
users, which is possible through the economies of scale that digital data

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48 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

and technologies make feasible. His revenue per user estimate misses the
asymmetric relationship between Facebook and people. He pointedly
ignores the extent to which the company sets the terms for how an indi-
vidual’s data are extracted even if the person is not a consenting Facebook
user. This view of the world and people in it as a standing reserve of data
to be monetized by the few who have the means to do so is dangerous.
Mark Andrejevic, a professor of media studies, describes this as the
“big data divide.” While the data are extracted from many individuals,
they only emerge as having meaning and value for those who are able
to collect, store, and analyze large volumes of such data (Andrejevic
2014). While you or I may be able to sell Amazon’s van of hard drives, it’s
very unlikely that we would be able to put the data on those hard drives
to much use without both access to advanced technical and computa-
tional infrastructures as well as some kind of business plan related to the
buying and selling of goods online. It matters where, when, and for whom
data emerge as commodities. Illustrating this point, geographer Jeremy
Crampton and his co-authors have suggested that if the production of
data can be seen as the production of value, then the object of our study
should be not so much the content of the data, but the moments where
“subjects are constituted as laborers in an exploitative economic system”
of data production (Crampton et al. 2014, 3). Sociologist Christan Fuchs
comes to a similar conclusion through a meticulous study of how social
media users produce value for major technology firms under coercive,
exploitative, unpaid circumstances (Fuchs 2014). These data economies
work through processes of commodification and dispossession.

data commodification and dispossession

Scott Prudham (2009) suggests that something becomes a commodity

when the purpose of its production is not an intended use, but instead
market exchange (sales). Hand-drawing a map of town with a child is a
fun way to explore the area with them. Hand-drawing a map of town for
sale to tourists is producing a commodity. While both involve the same
geographic landmarks, this distinction demonstrates the gap between
daily practices that produce the spatial data points for direct use versus
the production of spatial data for sale as commodities. A tourist map
may sell for a few dollars; but when the data is global in scale, it may
be valued in billions of dollars for those large corporations that can
make use of it.2 This gap between everyday use and commodity serves

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what are our data, and what are they worth? . 49

a function for tech companies as it hides the extractive nature of our

relations with digital, spatial technologies:

The individual [data point] produced from a single user at a given

time and place (e.g., posting a picture of a meal to Instagram) is both
nearly meaningless (Wilson, 2015[b]) and valueless (Stalder, 2014)
until it is linked to the user’s past data produced, the user’s network
of other users, the user’s growing network of location data, and the
temporal rhythms and spatial patterns embedded in data from many
users. Conversion from an individual [data point] to an aggregated,
digital commodity necessitates linking data across users, spaces, and
times. These amalgamated data become necessarily large (“big”) and
thus a site for algorithmic selection, interpretation, and analysis as to
what data to include and exclude.
(Thatcher et al. 2016, 995)

This is a capital process in which companies colonize people’s everyday

lives through data.3 Previously private times, spaces, and activities
become subject to data (and specifically spatial data) extraction, analysis,
and mediation by large companies for the sake of their business, with or
without consent.
Following David Harvey’s (2004) work on accumulation by dispos-
session, we use “data colonialism” as a metaphor that emphasizes the
underlying processes of dispossession of data from those who create
them. Further, we find the term useful as a means of highlighting the
“wild west” ethos that continues to permeate much corporate action with
respect to data privacy, access, and rights. However, it is important to
note that colonialism was and is a horrific process by which peoples’
lands, identities, and lives are stripped from them through systemic
exploitation and appropriation. In their influential work on the topic,
Couldry and Mejias (2019a, 2019b) argue for a non-metaphorical under-
standing of data colonialism. In short, they suggest that data colonialism
calls attention to both the variegated ways that these processes play out
across the globe and the ongoing ways in which colonial legacies support
and undergird practices of modern capitalism. Noting the important
debates around this definition (see, inter alia, Calzati 2020; Milan and
Treré 2019; Halkort 2019; Dalton et al. 2016), in this book we focus upon
the processes of dispossession that occur within data regimes. As such,
we use the term “data capitalism” to refer to the overarching system in

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50 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

which acts of data dispossession (and resistance) occur. We metaphor-

ically employ the term “data colonialism” to better call out exactly how
data dispossession occurs and the ideological landscape in which data
capitalism is forged.
Data colonization of everyday life is powerfully shaping our life-
worlds, which has direct implications for the choices we can make and
the conditions in which we live and die. These effects come in two forms:
First, data colonialism feeds the self-justifying mythos of moving fast and
breaking things by suggesting that algorithms and data represent a new
“wild west” to conquer. This frontier mentality builds on previous dis-
possessions to promise better living, and coincidentally revenue for tech
companies, through data. Second, processes of data capitalism produce
the individual that capital can see, and then feed that profile back to us
through what we, following Melissa Gregg, call the data spectacle. This
data representation shifts our relations with technology (and data) from
us speaking with them to a relation of them speaking for us.

a new wild west

Early internet evangelist Howard Rheingold was emphatic in declaring

the internet a new frontier, one of infinite space and unlimited freedom
(Rheingold 1993; Hirschorn 2010). Much like sanguine expressions of
Manifest Destiny, such framings imagined the internet as an empty space
to be filled by pioneers. Of course, just as the west of what is now the
United States was filled with indigenous peoples with existing lives and
relations to each other and the land, the spaces the internet came to fill
were not empty. This is true both from an infrastructural perspective
and in terms of our living relations in the world.
In Code and Clay, Data and Dirt, Shannon Mattern (2017, vii) starkly
illustrates how “[i]nfrastructure begets infrastructure.” 4 New systems
tend to build upon old ones rather than recreate entirely new systems,
no matter how “disruptive” they may claim to be. For example, Union
Pacific, best known for operating North America’s first transcontinen-
tal railroad in the nineteenth century, has been laying fiber-optic cable
along its rail lines’ rights of way for over three decades. By 2014, 34,000
miles of fiber-optic cable lay along Union Pacific’s railroad rights of way
(Johnston 2014). And Union Pacific is not alone. The overall network of
internet cables in the United States tends to follow historic rail routes.5

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what are our data, and what are they worth? . 51

According to the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America

Project at Stanford University, upwards of 1,200 Chinese laborers died
connecting the first transcontinental rail line in the US, and that is to
say nothing of the dispossession and massacre of native peoples that
occurred in order to secure the land along which the line itself runs. We
may now have the means to video chat with family thousands of miles
away, but the networks that allow that are built upon the expropriated
labor of migrant workers and run through the stolen land of indige-
nous peoples.
Capitalism must grow to survive, finding new ways and geogra-
phies to accumulate value. At times, that growth happens along literal
geographic frontiers, producing new spaces of commodities, market
exchange, and exploitation (Harvey 1999). Under other circumstances,
capital grows inward, altering everyday practices and places, commod-
ifying and re-casting them in newly marketized relationships. In 2012,
Jonathan Beller wrote:

Capital’s geographical expansion outwards is accompanied by a

corporeal corkscrewing inward. Therefore, the visual, the cultural,
the imaginal and the digital—as the de/re-terriorialisation of planta-
tion and factory dressage, Protestant ethics, manners and the like—are
functionalised as gradients of control over production and necessar-
ily therefore of struggle.
(Beller 2012, 8)

And just as the material infrastructure on which the internet is built is

often elided, so too are the sources of data. This happens even as data are
procured and analyzed to produce the digital representations that have
come to speak for us in modern technological systems. This is a society
of control through images, of commodified spectacles that offer false
choices and further imbricate themselves into our very bodies. For tech-
nology firms, our bodily movements are empty spaces to be colonized
by slipping data-generating practices into our daily lives. Google Maps
renders movement and navigation into location-based advertising even
when no billboard is in sight. Nest does the same with home thermo-
stats. Tinder allows for dating to become a site for data generation
modulated by digital representations of our identity and place. Our pre-
viously private acts, the banal and personal moments of our everyday,

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52 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

become imbricated within systems of capital exchange through the

creation, extraction, and analysis of the data.
One of the great promises of modern software applications is to take
everyday tasks, these moments of everyday life, and transform them into
something easier, more comfortable, and preferably automated. Digital
assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and Google’s Assistant,
aren’t simply predicated on answering your questions, but reflect a stated
desire to provide you with solutions before you ask for them. A trio of
quotes from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt illustrates this point:

With your permission, you give us more information about you, about
your friends, and we can improve the quality of our searches. We don’t
need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where
you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.
(quoted in Thompson 2010)

The technology will be so good it will be very hard for people to watch
or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for
them.
(quoted in Jenkins 2010)

I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their

questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing
next.
(quoted in Jenkins 2010)

While the expression of this ideal varies from firm to firm, its underly-
ing ethos has two important aspects. First, it is an invocation of the high
priests of data, the idea that “data will make you better, because you are
data.” Moreover, this belief is realized in our daily rituals of truth-seek-
ing, from searching Google Maps for a local store to checking what
people are tweeting today (Hillis et al. 2013). In thought and practice,
this reflects a fundamental shift from speaking with our data to them
speaking for us. Second, it highlights a world in which, according to
Ruha Benjamin, an attitude that seeks to “disrupt” life and convert it
from “analog to digital” (Benjamin 2019b, 13) pervades the worlds’
largest corporations and governments, but does so without consider-
ation of “the people and places broken in the process” (Benjamin 2019b,
15; original emphasis).

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what are our data, and what are they worth? . 53

bearing witness to the data spectacle

Under data capitalism, people are represented by concoctions of captured

data, the individual that capital can see. The data produced through daily
life, through social media posts, credit card transactions, GPS tracking,
and the like become the data that represent us within systems of capital
flow and exchange. But agents of capital are not the only subjects in
play. These representations (of ourselves) are also fed back to us and
others in a spectacular fashion, distributed in a myriad of ways through
everyday life.
Before turning to the specifics of the data spectacle, it is necessary
to briefly introduce the concept of the spectacle as derived from the
works of the Situationist International and one of their key thinkers, Guy
Debord, whom we introduced in Chapter 1. The works of the Situation-
ists are of particular importance for, as McKenzie Wark argues, it was
historically “Henri Lefebvre and the Situationists that moved the site of
Marxist critique from the factory to everyday life,” requiring in turn a
refocusing of critique upon political economies’ “quotidian articles of
faith” (Galloway et al. 2014, 195).
Perhaps the best-known idea developed by the Situationist Interna-
tional was that of the spectacle, the way capitalism separates us from
actual lived experience and replaces those experiences with commodi-
fied representations thereof. Under these circumstances, the commodity
form is “no longer something that enters into the sphere of experience
in fulfilling particular needs or desires, but has itself become the constit-
uent of the world of experience” (Chu and Sanyal 2015, 399). Building
on Walter Benjamin’s work on living spaces, spectacle is “the general-
ization of private life” (Lefebvre, in Wark 2011, 104). Commodities and
associated market exchange no longer simply disrupt daily lives, they are
the means through which the world is experienced. But this spectacular
vision is not the full or complete world: “Apprehended in a partial way,
reality unfolds in a new generality as a [commodified] pseudo-world
apart, solely as an object of contemplation” (Debord 1967, 12; original
emphasis). By replacing lived lives with commodities, what is possible to
imagine, see, and do becomes delimited to what is permitted by market
exchange (Debord 1967, 13).
In Situationist writing, spectacle is often articulated in terms of
visual art and media, but the concept of the spectacle is meant to be
much broader. In our current context, it provides a handy conceptual

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54 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

tool for better understanding the roles of technology and data in current
societies. Melissa Gregg, Chief Technologist for User Experience and
Sustainability at Intel, connects the concept of the spectacle to data. She
problematizes performative representations of data as visual spectacle,
such as in pitches for “big data” services. This gives rise to unsuitable
ocular metaphors, such as data shadows, that distance a seemingly
empowered agent from their data (Gregg 2015). Following Debord, we
extend her critical analysis to incorporate the role of data as commod-
ities, constituting a data spectacle that extends beyond the visual and
that is intimately connected to the information political economy of our
times (Thatcher and Dalton 2017).
With the advent of “big data,” and specifically of spatial data of the
everyday, a key article of faith in tech industries is the very representa-
tion and reproduction of self within those data systems cum spectacles.
Data are valuable for multiple business models, so there is incentive to
colonize everyday life to extract people’s data, particularly spatial data.
Tech companies use these data to accumulate value chiefly through
targeted advertising, but also consumer and business services such as
insurance and credit ratings.
The data spectacle comes into play when data are combined, processed,
analyzed, and fed back to those from whom it was extracted and their
peers. For example, instead of walking around a neighborhood to learn
about an area, Craig tends to use apps on his phone to assist and augment
his practice. The actions of his daily life have been colonized through
the extraction of data by that device. Based on his location and multiple
other data about him, those location-based apps present him a spectacle
of his surroundings, algorithmically selected local features, advertise-
ments, and reviews. These are likely relevant to him, but they also serve
the app owner’s business plan. These suggestions, inputs, and images are
more than possibilities he chooses from freely. They shape how he sees
the area and what he perceives as options, thereby effectively delimit-
ing his actions to what the app’s owners deem profitable to present. This
is the data spectacle in action. Perhaps there are other things to see and
do, and perhaps he may end up outside of the spectacle, but it is hard
to know they are there, and much easier to not look. The data spectacle
presents a commodified, fun-house mirror of the world and ourselves,
exaggerating some things, minimizing others, and not showing things
outside the frame. But the realities of the data spectacle are far from fun
for many people.

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what are our data, and what are they worth? . 55

These regimes of data have consequences for people on the ground

as they see targeted ads and are subject to digital redlining (Noble
2018). Data-facilitated algorithmic analyses determine what sorts of
coupons are offered and which businesses in which neighborhoods are
recommended—or not. It takes the form of everything from targeted
advertising to loan interest rates, product scores to projected recidivism
scores. Horror stories of employers checking job applicants’ social media
histories have emerged as late-modern cautionary tales, as have a litany
of guides on how to manage your social media presence to better land a
job. More insidiously, social media have been suggested as an invaluable
tool in determining creditworthiness. In a troubling article titled “Credit
Scoring with Social Network Data,” Wei et al. (2016) suggest social
media data can be an invaluable tool in determining credit worthiness.
In an interview on the matter, the authors lament that it is regulation to
prevent discrimination that prevents the full embrace of such approaches
within the United States (Knowledge@Wharton 2014).
This isn’t to suggest that Wei and his colleagues want discriminatory
systems. From their perspective, the use of social media data enables
quite the opposite. Because more data make it so much easier to “run the
numbers and figure out whether you’re a good person,” it would poten-
tially, in their view, open up credit to swathes of the world currently
locked out of traditional opportunities (Knowledge@Wharton 2014).
Perhaps so, but while on one level it returns us to Ruha Benjamin’s astute
observation of the people and places broken by disruptive new techno-
logical practices, on another it rests firmly upon faith. In this case, the
belief that the data you produce is an accurate and valid stand-in for you:
that it can systematically indicate whether you are a good person or not.
Extracting our data and serving them back in the form of various
commodified options facilitates crediting or blaming ourselves (not
the system) for the consequences we experience and feel. Under the
data spectacle, what can we do but perform better, in those data-fied
terms, in the future? How better to measure that improvement than with
more data, more quantification? Humans, if nothing else, are excep-
tional at manipulating patterns, at both conforming to and exploiting
rule systems. We are so good at this that we can become susceptible to
apophenia, seeing and attempting to manipulate patterns and connec-
tions between things that don’t exist. Ultimately, this is what occurs as
we attempt to perform ourselves in the fun-house mirror of the data
spectacle by using the various technological apparatuses with which we

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56 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

interface daily. Melissa Gregg (2015) uses the delightfully visceral term
“data sweat” for data that are essentially of us, but may exude in ways we
don’t quite intend. She goes on to suggest that:

labor we engage in as we exercise and exchange our data—especially

in our efforts to clean up our image, present a hygienic picture, and
make ourselves look good—is a kind of sweat equity for the digital
economy. It is a form of work we perform in the attempt to control
what is ultimately out of our capacity.
(Gregg 2015, 45).

While we may try to alter or curate those spectacularized, data-fied

(re)presentations of ourselves to better control our dating, financial, pro-
fessional, gastronomical, and other experiences, we are struggling against
an ultimately unknowable force. The proprietary algorithms which sort
and shape us, whether via the locations we may visit, recorded in Google
Maps and Facebook profiles, or what we’ve posted on Twitter, are ulti-
mately trade secrets.
We have a shared vested stake in the (re)presentations of ourselves by
which corporations, other people, and ourselves come to know us, but
currently the means are shrouded in mystery. Our actions to manipulate
hiring algorithms are more than apophenia, as an algorithmic pattern
does exist, it’s just (relatively) unknowable to us. For the high priests of
data within major firms, this doesn’t matter. After all, as Chris Anderson
wrote, it doesn’t matter why something happens, just that it does.
Amazon is not so interested in why you might buy a purple cashmere
sweater as it knows when and for how much you will.
Troublingly, this type of reduction is also a key tenet of how “smart
cities” function and are governed, according to sociologist Jennifer
Gabrys. Drawing from the work of Michel Foucault and with a bit of
admitted irony, she coins the term “biopolitics 2.0” (Gabrys 2016, 192).
While for Foucault biopolitics was about control/governance over the
milieu in which human beings lived, of their ways and practices of life
(Foucault 2003), Gabrys adroitly inserts the “2.0” to emphasize the
milieu of humanity, technology, and environment within smart cities
and smart developments. If our future is to be “smart,” she highlights the
dangerous “transformation of citizens to data-gathering nodes” and how
it “potentially focuses the complexity of civic action toward a relatively
reductive if legible set of actions” (Gabrys 2016, 203). Efficiency, predict-

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what are our data, and what are they worth? . 57

ability, and increased production become the solutions to the challenges

faced by urban residents and local governments.

social credit

While smart cities move in this direction, initiatives like China’s social
credit system drive “biopolitics 2.0” to its logical conclusion. The intent
with this kind of system is to algorithmically calculate a reputation or
“trustworthiness” score for each adult citizen based on multiple indi-
cators which may include taxes, debts, crimes or citations, purchasing
histories, and community service. Not paying debts, crimes, minor
rule-breaking such as jaywalking or eating on public transit, and even
too much time playing video games could decrease the score. Actions
deemed as positive for society, such as caring for the elderly, donating
blood, community service, and raising a child would increase it. Too low
a score results in punitive measures, which may include being banned
from commercial air travel and high-speed trains, being prohibited from
receiving a loan or purchasing property, exclusion of one’s children from
admission to desirable schools, and even potentially public shaming,
such as seeing one’s name and face on billboards listing “untrustworthy”
individuals (Vanek Smith and Garcia 2018). Those with a high score
enjoy benefits which may include shorter waiting times for govern-
ment services, easier access to credit, and even the option to publicize
their score on dating services (Kobie 2019). While social credit could
in the future become a unified system at the national scale, Chinese
social credit currently exists as a web of multiple different systems. Some
are thematically focused, including the justice system, while others are
regional, working only in particular cities or provinces. Still others, such
as Alibaba’s Sesame Credit, run through contracts with major private
companies.
Regardless of whether the ultimate intent is direct or merely symbolic
control, the extent of such a system is only possible by collecting data
from multiple sources and calculating them in an automatic fashion.6
Once again, the resulting numbers are assumed to speak for themselves.
The question of “why,” much less the contributing social circumstances
for a score, is not deemed important. Unsurprisingly, such systems are
ripe for abuse by unscrupulous authorities, unintentional bureaucratic
errors, or cultural biases, any of which can have dramatic consequences
for someone’s life.

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58 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

This all sounds dystopian, and it is. That point is belabored by many
breathless English-language press accounts (Matsakis 2019a; Mozur
2018). Nevertheless, it bears mention that similar social mechanisms
employing algorithmic calculation of personal data are already in place
in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. Our debts are monitored not
only by banks, but also by entirely unaccountable credit rating companies
such as Experian and TransUnion. Insurance companies assess risk by
monitoring driving and attempt to incentivize and monitor exercise
and other healthy behavior (see, for example, Progressive’s “Snapshot”
discount for “good” drivers). Criminal justice, from policing focusing
on minor infractions to sentencing to incarceration, and even public
shaming on the internet, is increasingly algorithmically guided (Eubanks
2018). Travel is limited not by official prohibition, but through the
market.7 Similarly, money provides access to services and legal counsel,
largely preventing those with means from having to deal with waiting
for government bureaucracies. The implications of falling down due to
initially minor mistakes, uncontrollable circumstances, incorrect data,
or biased algorithms are no less extreme in North America or Europe.
What makes the Chinese system different is its use in the context of a
non-democratic government.

law enforcement surveillance

Whether in China, the United States, Europe, or elsewhere, when social

credit’s push comes to shove, law enforcement tends to get involved.
Though often formally enacted by government agencies, here again data
dispossession and its expansionist capital imperatives enter the picture.
For example, due to recent US Supreme Court cases, American law
enforcement agents must get an appropriate warrant before collecting
a suspect’s GPS location history or requesting it from a mobile phone
network provider.8 Yet today, law enforcement and national security
agents are increasingly circumventing these rules by simply purchas-
ing the very same data instead. Similar data markets exist for license
plate scanner data and facial recognition, circumventing attempts at
regulating the use of said algorithms and data (Cox 2021). Moreover,
in an age of social media, some revealing data are simply available on
social media platforms. For example, as Black Lives Matter protests
swept the United States in the wake of George Floyd’s murder at the
hands of police officers in 2020, police made clear their ability to track

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what are our data, and what are they worth? . 59

down protesters after the fact using digital data. For example, when two
police cars in Philadelphia were set on fire:

FBI agents were able to identify [the alleged perpetrator] thanks to an

investigation that largely relied on data freely available online, based
on an aerial video taken the day of the protests, an Instagram picture,
photos taken by an amateur photographer, and—crucially—a forearm
tattoo and an Etsy t-shirt.
(Franceschi-Bicchierai 2020)

According to press releases, this particular investigation was done

through human detective work, even as it relied on digital data available
online. Similar methods were used to identify right-wing rioters who
stormed the US Capitol building in January 2021. These examples stand
out because law enforcement press releases in the United States often
elide the use of supporting digital surveillance, such as the use of stingray
devices to identify all the mobile phones in a particular area at a partic-
ular time. Furthermore, law enforcement’s use of algorithmic services
to identify suspects has grown astronomically in recent years, even as
false positives and racial biases in the services have emerged (Hill 2020).
Examples include Clearview AI’s facial recognition service that draws on
a massive database of photographs scraped from the web and associated
social media.

the new normal

Given these developments in the United States, China’s burgeoning sur-

veillance networks serve as an orientalist “black mirror” for western
media outlets. Paul Mozur’s 2018 piece in The New York Times, “Inside
China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras,” speaks
of “a high-tech authoritarian future” in which “China is reversing the
commonly held vision of technology as a great democratizer.” Mozur’s
account obfuscates any reflective consideration of conditions in the west,
for example pointing out that China has roughly four times as many sur-
veillance cameras as the United States, but leaving out that it also has
more than four times its population. As of 2019, the United States had
the most surveillance cameras per person in the world, according to Pre-
ciseSecurity (Baltrusaitis 2019). Similarly, the existence of a list of 20–30
million individuals suspected of criminal activity in China is high-

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60 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

Figure 2.1 One of Chicago’s police surveillance cameras. Through

“Operation Virtual Shield,” the city has access to more than 10,000
surveillance cameras, many with artificial intelligence-enhanced
facial recognition and automatic tracking of individuals and
vehicles. The ACLU of Illinois (2011, 2) notes that these abilities “far
exceed the powers of ordinary human observation and dramatically
increase the power of the government to watch the public.”
(“Chicago Police Camera,” licensed under CC BY 2.0. https://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/#, last accessed July 2021)

lighted, but little mention is given to the Interpol Terrorist Watch List,
the US Department of Homeland Security’s No Fly List, or any of the
other myriad lists that have tracked millions of individuals for decades in
other countries. No, this is new and different. The fact that it has already
and continues to occur within other nations is immaterial, that it is in
line with data extraction and analysis efforts by state and private indus-
tries around the globe is ignored; here, China remains the other.
And then, in late 2019, COVID-19 emerged in Wuhan. As our societies
and lives continue to writhe and contort as global capitalism attempts

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what are our data, and what are they worth? . 61

to survive a crisis it not only manufactured, but continues to perpet-

uate, something interesting happened in China. Surveillance systems
were repurposed to track the disease, and a new “black mirror” emerged.
Systems previously used for general surveillance were repurposed for the
ongoing epidemic. Contract tracing through public streets and identi-
fying likely symptoms on corners became tasks of systems designed for
more general purposes.
And yet, even as outlets like The Guardian suggest (likely correctly)
that China’s increased surveillance to track COVID-19 may likely
become “the new normal,” left out are the similarities (and failures) of
similar systems in other nations.9 While both individuals and algorithms
pored over camera footage in China, around the globe another source of
data became intrinsic to supposed disease response: as always, mobile
phones. From Norway to the United States to, of course, China, mobile
phone location data were touted as a means of tracking and eliminating
the disease.
It didn’t work. Privacy concerns shut down the mobile app in Norway,
while in the United States the tracking never materialized. Mobile phones
stand in for us in so many ways, up to and including as authorization for
drone strikes by the United States government, but there remains a gap
between what they can capture and our emplaced, visceral bodies. The
spatial resolution of location tracking exists at a scale other than that
necessary to control an airborne virus.

speaking for

How, then, can we make geographical, technological systems work less

as bureaucratic fixes and more for actual people? We suggest that it is the
very opacity of algorithms and the spectacular (re)presentation of self
that have transformed the relationship from speaking with to speaking
for. In a provocative piece on the need for “big theory” to address big
data, anthropologist Tom Boellstorff (2013) writes:

The confession is a modern mode of making data, an incitement to

discourse we might now term an incitement to disclose. It is pro-
foundly dialogical: one confesses to a powerful Other. This can be
technologically mediated ….

As we’ve discussed and demonstrated, on one level, quantification and

the production of data have come to colonize our life-worlds with the

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62 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

intent to extract value. On another, they do so in exchange for “notional

advantages, [spectacular] experiences in which aspects of [our] lives
are algorithmically sorted and produced for [us]” (Thatcher et al. 2016,
999). However, these advantages are offered in an opaque manner. The
algorithms are trade secrets, and any ability to manipulate them occurs
at the risk of our tendencies toward apophenia.
The asymmetric relations between the algorithms which increasingly
guide our lives and the actions we take are mediated through the data we
produce. That key moment of quantification also serves as the moment
in which our relations with ourselves become one of faith. Much like the
supplicant whose prayers are answered after a sacrifice, we keep doing
those things which seem to produce results for our (digital) selves.
For example, a local politician in the midst of a campaign several
years back revealed to Jim how he only put up social media posts during
two two-hour windows: at the beginning and end of the workday. He
believed this was a time when people were browsing and therefore more
likely to see, like, and share his posts. Was this true? Maybe. A whole
cottage industry exists to help us with our digital presentations. A firm
called Later, dedicated to Instagram marketing, claims that the ideal time
to post is 9–11 a.m. Eastern Standard Time (with caveats for local con-
ditions and businesses). They based this on their analysis of “12 million
Instagram posts, posted in multiple time zones around the world from
accounts ranging from 100 to 1 million+ followers” (Chacon 2021).
However, Later also emphasized that “it’s best to find your personalized
best times to post,” in essence admitting that while big data may tell us
one thing, specificity—the why—remains unknowable. For Anderson
and his ilk, this doesn’t matter. For advertisers with global reach, the
specifics matter less than the outcome. But for us? For individuals who
will be policed, get dates, find restaurants, and be offered jobs based on
the data we produce?
For us, those things matter quite a lot, and so we’re left with our pro-
pensity for apophenia in the face of the data spectacle. Our data sweat,
the labor we undertake to produce and control our digital selves, is more
about guesswork than control. We’ve become supplicants at an altar
to unknowable data gods. We post what we think will look good, we
perform our humanity in the face of an apparatus over which we have no
control and little understanding. In this way, we bear witness to the selves
that our digital data produce, rather than having any concrete control
over their (re)presentation and (re)production. Our machines speak for

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what are our data, and what are they worth? . 63

us rather than speaking with us. When that speech aligns with our prayers
or hopes, a match on Tinder, a job offer, a mortgage, we reproduce those
actions, hoping that the past will predict the future—praying that we’ve
found a confession that works.
This is what we, along with others, suggest forms part of a spectacular
“howling feedback loop” in which “[t]he data generated by such actions
is then fed into systems which algorithmically shape what options will
be presented the next time (s)he makes use of the service” (Thatcher and
Dalton 2017, 140; Lohr 2012; Wilson 2012).
This may feel benign or seem (or even be) beneficial in certain cir-
cumstances. Individuals may have preferences for specific kinds of food.
If a food-delivery service notices that Craig tends to get pizza not nearby,
but at Mama Rosa’s in the next neighborhood over, it can be helpful for
him to get coupons or promotions for Mama Rosa’s rather than pizzerias
closer to his home. With modern machine-learning, this occurs without
the algorithm ever needing (or trying) to understand why, it simply
detects a pattern along some dimensional axes of data (Mackenzie 2017).
As long as coupons are the upshot, it does not matter if it is because
Mama Rosa’s pizza is better or because Mama Rosa’s happens to be along
his commute home.

uneven data

And yet what opportunities (and peoples) are foreclosed from con-
sideration by these loops? Information Studies scholar Safiya Umoja
Noble argues that while it is “certainly laudable” to suggest that major
technology firms like “Google/Alphabet [have] the potential to be dem-
ocraticizing force[s],” it is necessary to consider both who benefits from
data and algorithmic practices as well as how the effects of their adoption
are not experienced equally across populations (Noble 2018, 163–164).
Someone without access to credit may not be able to use a credit card to
access pizza deliveries. Not only can some people fall through the cate-
gorical and algorithmic cracks, social biases are replicated and catalyzed
by such systems. In Automating Inequality, one of the many individuals
Virginia Eubanks spoke to echoes this sentiment, suggesting that more
privileged individuals should pay attention to the surveillance and algo-
rithmic governance enforced upon the less privileged because they, the
privileged, will be next (Eubanks 2018). Ruha Benjamin puts it more

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64 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

bluntly when she writes that “Black people already live in the future”
(Benjamin 2019b, 32; original emphasis).
Whether we focus our attention on race, gender identity, age, income,
or geographical location, who is counted and how they count in data plays
out unevenly. Writing several years ago with Linnet Taylor, we discussed
the “uneven development of data,” how the data profile of a mobile device
user in Mauritania would likely differ significantly from that of someone
in central London (Dalton et al. 2016, 1). As we have seen, this difference
not only affects what these individuals can come to know within digital
systems (search results are tailored by location and profile), but also their
very access to opportunities like investment capital.
This is why the “decision” to participate within these systems, to
exchange our data for their notional advantages, is such a disingenu-
ous framing. On the one hand, there are real material advantages to the
acts of participation that play out differently across different popula-
tions and places. Ordering groceries for delivery is very helpful during a
pandemic. On the other hand, the very choice is one only offered to those
who have access to the advantages through other means. Keanu Reeves
can famously use a flip phone because he has a coterie of assistants that
can handle his financial and personal needs. A single mother who has
just been laid off may be forced into accepting a variety of surveillance
and data generation processes simply to access financial support for
her family.
The ability to opt out, to the degree that it does exist, favors those
whose lives are not predicated upon participation. Inclusion and
exclusion within data generating systems, and the algorithmic results
they produce, matter. The stakes of actual resistance, as opposed to priv-
ileged side-stepping, are steep. They may result in denied health benefits,
inability to access needed financial resources, or even refusal to be con-
sidered for employment or housing.

In the next two chapters, we survey practices of resistance and put

them into conversation with the larger project of solidarity through
machines—a shift back from speaking for to speaking with.

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Pluto Press

Chapter Title: Existing Everyday Resistances

Book Title: Data Power

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3
Existing Everyday Resistances

Where there is power, there is resistance.

(Foucault 1990, 95)

In early 2020, artist Simon Weckert became a traffic jam all by himself.
He did not cause a traffic jam by blocking a street; rather, he appeared
as a traffic jam on Google Maps, causing cars on the surrounding blocks
to be routed around the street he was on. Weckert’s jam was a simple art
performance/installation he called “Google Maps Hacks.”

99 second hand smartphones are transported in a handcart to generate

[a] virtual traffic jam in Google Maps. Through this activity, it is
possible to turn a green street red, influencing the physical world by
navigating cars on another route to avoid being stuck in traffic.
(Weckert 2020)

Weckert’s “hack” works by leveraging how the Google Maps app tracks
individuals to generate its traffic information. If location services are
enabled on a mobile device, especially when turn-by-turn navigation is
active, the company is collecting location and speed information from
that device. Those data are then fed into a system that estimates traffic
conditions based on the aggregate movement of phones along that street.
Weckert thought of his concept during a May Day rally in Berlin, when he
noticed that his Google Maps application was assuming that the people
in the streets were cars and therefore symbolizing them as a slow-mov-
ing traffic jam. As he notes, this intersection of material and virtual is a
powerful forum for “performance of activism” (Goldstein 2020).
Weckert’s actions are amusing and inspiring, but it doesn’t take an
artist or an activist for someone to exert greater control over the data
they produce and how it is extracted from them. In this chapter, we
survey different individualized ways of responding to the geographic
data collection in everyday lives. Here, the focus is on tactics: small-
scale, everyday actions that resist, contest, and alter the production and

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66 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

extraction of geographic data, such as Weckert’s traffic jam.1 We begin by

exploring the shortcomings of privacy measures offered by technology
companies to address concerns about current modes of data extraction
and the too-common rhetorical binary choice of privacy or security.
Such privacy-washing offers the impression of protection while main-
taining the underlying system of data extraction and exploitation. From
there, we explore several kinds of more independent reactions to data
dispossession to develop a cohesive, but not necessarily comprehensive,
typology: acceptance, active resistance, making present, and escape.
In practice, such choices and tactical actions are highly contextually
dependent, often deeply personal, and produce decidedly mixed results.
No one engages in all of them. Rather, most adopt a practice to a degree,
and may mix it with others. As individualized everyday practices, none
present total or complete engagements with the scope of data capitalism.
Furthermore, the very ability to engage in these acts rests upon varie-
gated layers of privilege and ability. Who someone is will have bearing
on what tactics are possible for them. That these lines of resistance are
not equally available reflects and contributes to broader processes of
prejudice and dispossession within digital and material environments
(Eubanks 2018; Benjamin 2019a). Some forms of escape, for example,
are simply not an option for Black Americans in heavily surveilled neigh-
borhoods or for residents of economically struggling rural areas with
spotty cell phone and broadband coverage. Likewise, it is increasingly
common for employers, especially those in the so-called “gig economy,”
to require workers to provide data about themselves; if only one provider
will offer a contract, the pathways of resistance can be rapidly curtailed
by the need for employment.
In addition to the inequities of access, individualized tactics are
inherently limited in what they are likely to accomplish unless they
are part of broader, more collective efforts. One person shutting down
their Facebook account will not lead to a meaningful privacy policy.
Employing GPS spoofing on a phone or a virtual private network
(VPN) over an internet connection may provide some additional indi-
vidualized privacy, but it does little to alter the social imperatives and
strategies of data capitalism and the technologies they inspire. Even in
the uncommon event that an individualized privacy method becomes
popular enough to impact the market, the incentive is for companies
to develop countermeasures to keep the data gravy train rolling. For
example, while web browser ad-blocking software has become common,

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existing everyday resistances . 67

even built-in to some browsers, data firms also continue to find ways to
collect data by other means (Nield 2021). Broad, meaningful changes in
the design of data technologies and related policy require more coordi-
nated efforts that engage not only the economies and politics of data, but
also the cultures and norms around them.
Even with all the biases and structural limitations, everyday tactics can
offer a degree of data control that is comparatively easy to implement. It
probably won’t save the world, but it might help you.

privacy-washing is not enough

Read at face value, technology firms’ press releases make the case that
their top priority is users’ privacy and that it has never been easier for
users to control how their data are collected and shared. Of course, the
seemingly endless succession of data scandals (Bishop 2018), threats of
regulations and fines (Information Commissioner’s Office 2020), and
antitrust and class action lawsuits (Georgiadis and Beioley 2021) suggest
that other factors are at play in these promises.2 Whatever the motivation,
some firms are beginning to allow individual users some control and
intentionality in how each user’s data are collected and shared. Examples
include app-specific access control to GPS information and the amount
of time before location history data are deleted from a Google account
(Morrison 2020).
However, not only does such language deceptively shift responsibil-
ity towards the individual, it also does nothing to alter the underlying
business model and profit incentives on which these firms rest. Data cap-
italism is built upon the creation, extraction, appropriation, analysis, and
trade of data. Privacy-washing provides the appearance of conscientious
responsibility to ensure the continued profitability of this strategy. For
example, Facebook, currently the world’s largest social media company,
has been most brazen in its privacy-washing attempts and, as such, has
drawn a great deal of media scrutiny and proposed regulatory action.
The company’s Cambridge Analytica scandal and its media coverage
illustrate both how responsibility is shifted to the individual and how the
profit motive drives considerations of “privacy” within systems of data
dispossession.
Cambridge Analytica was a third-party research and data broker
firm that improperly obtained upwards of 87 million Facebook users’
personal data which it then sold to predominantly (though not exclu-

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68 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

sively) conservative political campaigns and organizations including the

2016 US presidential campaigns of Ted Cruz and Donald Trump, and the
pro-Brexit campaign in the UK. Early coverage in The Guardian high-
lighted how the data were obtained and sold “largely without [the users’]
permission” (Davies 2015), but the story did not explode into a full-
blown scandal until years later, when The New York Times, The Observer
(London), and The Guardian received a trove of documents detailing
Cambridge Analytica’s practices from an internal whistleblower (Con-
fessore 2018).
Once the scandal broke, Facebook shares plunged, losing approx-
imately $119 billion in market value, the largest single-day loss by
one firm in Wall Street history to date (Picchi 2018). Narrating the
companies’ loss of users and expected downturn in revenue, the
company’s chief financial officer, David Wehner, explained that giving
users “more choices around data privacy” after the scandal was a likely
culprit for the drop (Neate 2018). In a Facebook post (and echoed in a
New York Times interview the same week), Facebook CEO Mark Zuck-
erberg similarly outlined the company’s response and responsibility in
three main points: (1) Facebook had already changed third-party access
permissions to user data in 2014, but would conduct a full audit to
establish whether other breaches had occurred; (2) third-party develop-
ers’ access would be restricted even further; (3) it was up to users to fully
understand what applications were doing with their data and to revoke
permissions if they objected. In short, Facebook had already addressed
the issue, but they were nobly willing to sacrifice their own profits to
make sure it didn’t happen again, and ultimately it’s your responsibility
anyway. The first, and as of this writing, only update to the internal audit
came two months later, and revealed that “around 200” applications had
already been suspended for being in violation of data privacy practices
(Archibong 2018).
Several months later, Facebook was hit with another wave of privacy
breaches as The New York Times revealed that it had failed to monitor
how device manufacturers handled the data of hundreds of millions of
users to which Facebook had granted access (Confessore et al. 2018).
This time, despite coverage in The New York Times and pressure from US
Senators, little came of the issue. The best explanation appears in Brian
X. Chen’s (2018) article, also in The New York Times, “How to Protect
Yourself (and Your Friends) on Facebook.” As he wrote:

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existing everyday resistances . 69

What, if anything, can [users] do to protect their data connected to

the social network?
Here’s the hard truth: Not much, short of ceasing to browse the web
entirely or deleting your Facebook account.

Ultimately, the asymmetric nature of the relationship between user

and technology firm ensures that while “best practices” may be followed,
there is little actual control within the system itself. Corporations will
privacy-wash their practices, particularly when their revenues are at
stake, offering more (mostly meaningless) choices and greater (largely
fictional) control. Moreover, with approximately 2.45 billion monthly
active Facebook users in January of 2020, the stakes for how people
engage Facebook and similar services are clearly high. Technology
companies cannot be relied upon to offer users greater control over
their data. Thankfully, such companies and their services do not wholly
determine the actions of their users. As we’ll see, users may repurpose a
service, and even resist the intentions of its designers.

everyday practices

In popular media, the dispossession of personal data is frequently framed

as a binary tradeoff between security (through surveillance) and privacy.
Moreover, the choice is often presented as resting with a technology’s
designers. Perhaps the most common, reductive form of this argument
was stated by the CEO of Google at the time, Eric Schmidt, when he
claimed: “If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear.” The
totalizing binary is presented as a choice of one or the other: privacy
(in this case, a nefarious one) or surveillance (in this case, a protec-
tive one). While much more nuanced discussions exist around privacy
and security,3 this diametric framing still structures much popular
media discourse on the topic. For example, when the Norwegian Data
Protection Authority temporarily banned the processing of data from
that nation’s COVID-19 tracking application, named Smittestopp, over
concerns about the invasive nature of the data gathered (“privacy”),
the Institute of Public Health argued that such measures weakened the
ability to control the ongoing pandemic (“security”) (Treloar 2020).
In actual lived practice, such distinctions are rarely so simple. Even in
the most straightforward cases, the privacy/security framing runs afoul
of two major assumptions: first, that a data technology actually works as

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70 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

advertised, and second, that consumers/users will only act in line with
the designers’ intentions. A closer examination of these assumptions
reveals a dialectical tension, rather than a diametric choice, between
“privacy” and “surveillance.”
For the first, technology companies, and startups in particular, are
notorious for promoting “vaporware,” over-promising the functional-
ities and possibilities of their products to attract publicity and investors.
Perhaps the most infamous example, Theranos, was once valued at $9
billion before collapsing under the weight of fraud and the fundamental
impossibility of its various medical promises (Carreyrou 2018). Driv-
erless cars may someday be commonplace, but as of this writing, the
billions of dollars invested in their engineering and geographic data do
not live up to the hype of technology company tycoons. For example, in
July 2020, Tesla CEO Elon Musk anticipated a car that required no driver
input by the end of that year (BBC News 2020).
Data technologies not only frequently fail to live up to popular expec-
tations, they can, and often do hang, break, and crash. In our experience,
GPS-enabled turn-by-turn navigation usually works as intended, but
sometimes it just doesn’t (Dalton and Thatcher 2019). Under the right
circumstances, glitches can be opportunities for wildly different, even
liberatory, experiences and modes of expression (Russell 2020). A tech-
nological navigational error could send us to a better (or worse) location
with different possibilities than originally intended.
The second assumption, that users will always do as the designers
intended, runs into problems when exploiting those glitches becomes
intentional. Users will attempt to utilize a technology to fulfill their own
needs and desires beyond what the technology’s designers intended.
However, users do not have total freedom, as their actions are limited
by the material structure of technology developed by the designers for
their own purposes: the users’ margin of maneuver. A pool noodle can’t
hammer nails, no matter how hard you swing it. Users operate within
a margin of maneuver between how they want to employ a piece of
hardware or software and what is possible given its designed material
structure. Under the right circumstances, within that margin of maneuver
can be found the means to repurpose/refashion/redesign a technol-
ogy that sparks subsequent larger technological and social changes.
Using components from a junkyard, Grandmaster Flash (Joseph Sadler)
developed an early cross-fader/DJ mixer, a vital tool in the early develop-
ment of sampled music in general, and now an inexorable part of audio

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existing everyday resistances . 71

technology, Hip-hop art, and Black culture (Gaskins 2019). Similarly,

self-driving cars provide potential opportunities for new kinds of repair
and aftermarket automotive modifications (Alvarez León 2019).
Given the contexts and possibilities of practice, the absolutist tradeoff
between surveillance and privacy breaks down. To get a better handle
on our data, we need a more nuanced understanding of everyday tech-
nological practices, a dialectical one. There is no doubt that many users
acquiesce to most technological conditions, but they do so in ways that
are partial and personally articulated.
Here, we begin to categorize how individuals actively and passively
resist and/or shape the collection and use of their geographic infor-
mation. This typology is not intended to be as comprehensive as other
less geographically focused work on resisting surveillance (Marx 2009).
Nor is it as detailed and nuanced as the number of contexts and cir-
cumstances it begins to describe. The dual purpose in identifying these
tactics is to begin approaching existing practices so that individuals may
consider whether and how to apply them in their own contexts, and at
another scale, begin to cobble together such practices into broader, more
comprehensive moments of resistance and alternative politics. Indeed,
we hope that this typology is not merely useful for a scholar seeking to
understand peoples’ actions, but to a popular audience as a way to learn
the resistance methods that are available so they may be shared, refined,
and used both individually and in groups.
Table 3.1 A typology of responses to data capitalism

Response What is it? Example

Acceptance Consenting or acquiescing to Clicking “Accept” on the terms
data extraction, dispossession of service
and analysis (business as usual)
Active Attempts to assert some control Turn off location services,
Resistance over data extraction fabricated information/data
poisoning, face coverings,
VPNs, Tor, ad-blockers
Making Attempts to make the Mapping infrastructure,
Present mechanisms of data production, contextualized exposés
extraction, and analysis legible
and understandable
Escape Attempts to avoid generating or Paying with cash, using a
extracting data “dumb” phone

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72 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

With those goals in mind, it is important to note that this is not a

technical guide detailing specific methods for resisting data capital-
ism. Such technical guides already exist (Thompson and Wezerek 2019;
Goodin 2020). Moreover, these resources need to be frequently updated
due to the rate of technological change, shifting conditions of govern-
ment regulation, and the continuing arms race between personal privacy
and data dispossession. We focus on broad kinds of actions, both because
specific actions are highly contextual and in order to uncover new ways
to think about and enact resistance and solidarity, to move from what is
to what might be.

acceptance

It is almost impossible to not acquiesce to the creation and extraction

of data to some extent. Unsurprisingly, most of us do so: a 2018 Global
Attitudes Survey conducted by Pew Research estimated that “more
than 5 billion people have mobile devices, and over half of these con-
nections are smartphones” (Silver 2019). In other words, over half of
the global population are producing data that reveal their location and
travel patterns to some degree.4 But with an increasing number of social
functions (dating, eating, travel, and so on) mediated through mobile
applications, many, if not most, people simply check the “Agree” terms
of service box and move on with their day, perhaps grumbling about it,
but what can one do?
Clicking “Agree” is a crucial moment of acceptance that invokes an
end-user license agreement (EULA), shaping what is legally permissi-
ble by the company, even as the EULA itself is rarely read. In 2005, for
example, the company PC Pitstop altered its software EULA to include
a clause offering $1,000 to anyone who read the clause and contacted
it. It took five months for someone to claim the prize (Magid 2009).
Academic research, such as Lin et al. (2012), has also shown little actual
engagement with EULAs before their acceptance. And yet they mark a
pivotal moment in the creation, extraction, and control of the data we
produce. As Thatcher et al. wrote in 2016 (996):

Previously public—or, in this case, nonquantified—information

about daily life is quantified and privatized, not in the hands of those
who generated it, but of those who created the application; whether
the espoused motivations for quantification are to enhance the

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existing everyday resistances . 73

service or add value to the dataset being assembled, the transfer of

ownership remains.

Before a user clicks “Yes” on an EULA, a corporation is limited in how it

can collect data about people. In addition to any pertinent and enforced
government regulations and legal liabilities, it faces practical, technical
limits. It may not have access to a phone’s contacts or the device’s location
history. However, after checking that box, the company is limited by the
much broader terms set out in the agreement. EULAs are notorious
for granting access to wide swathes of data collection that isn’t directly
related to the service rendered as well as granting corporate ownership
of and the right to sell said data. In addition, many EULAs force users
into arbitration for any disputes and grant the company the right to alter
the terms of the agreement at any time. This asymmetric relation is so
well known that the crass, satirical American television show South Park
produced an entire episode mocking hidden terms in Apple’s EULA, and
yet users keep clicking “I agree.” Why? There are two major, underlying,
interrelated reasons.
First, EULAs are easy to ignore. It is easy to click the box and forget
about it. The extent of geographic data production and expropriation is
most visible not in the EULA, but in the media flash of a data scandal.
Due to scandals, the public know that their data are being collected
and sold, but the exact process and extent are often obfuscated in the
EULA in ways that make it difficult to parse out. For example, Aleecia
McDonald and Lorrie Cranor (2008, 563) estimated that “if all American
Internet users were to annually read the online privacy policies word-
for-word each time they visited a new site, the nation would spend about
54 billion hours reading privacy policies.” That is approximately ten days
per person per year.
This ignorance is purposeful and directly leveraged by technology
companies. The agreements provide legal coverage for corporations to
do what they want, buried in a morass of terms that require a law degree
to fully understand and act on. Thus, for the rest of us, ignorance is used
as a pretense of consent constituted by clicking “I agree.” However, as
more stories of data scandals in the news and calls for regulation emerge,
the utility of ignorance may be falling. Users may not fully understand
the legal terms and conditions, but such scandals build broad distrust
of data-driven companies, even those that stay within their stated terms
and conditions. Ignorance may have contributed to the growth of data-

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74 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

driven companies while they had untarnished reputations, leading to

the data landscape we have today, but not knowing or understanding
the contents of a EULA doesn’t work if consumers broadly distrust the
company offering the service.
Nevertheless, even in the current social landscape, the second, related
reason still holds: we aren’t really offered much of a choice, are we?

The reason people click “yes” is not that they understand what they’re
doing, but that it is the only viable option other than boycotting a
company in general, which is getting harder to do.
(Lanier 2014, 314)

Increasingly broad, fundamental swathes of our existence are

mediated through location-aware applications, from the romantic, such
as Tinder and Grindr, to the economically mandatory (imagine handling
your job without email). Tech companies offer an all or nothing choice.
There is no negotiation with an EULA, we cannot agree to only certain
parts or modify the terms. The benefits are immediate, such as the ability
to purchase a commuter train ticket or take a photo and share it with
friends, and the costs are hard to recognize. What does it mean to have
my location history now owned by this technology firm? What will they
do with it, when?
While there may be cracks in our trust of technology corporations, their
ubiquity has (so far) prevented large-scale rejection of their practices.
Particular moments, such as when the hashtag #deletefacebook trended
on Twitter, are less a rejection of the terms set by technology firms and
more about the shift between competing firms offering the same funda-
mental choice. In that case, it was leaving Facebook and announcing it on
Twitter. This does not, however, mean that we cannot and do not resist.

active resistance to geographic data collection

There are many reasons to acquiesce to the production and extraction of

our spatial data, from the perceived tradeoff being worth it—“Sure, my
location history is worth a free donut!” (Probrand 2019)—to the over-
whelming asymmetric nature of the relation—“I need email to find a
job, and the provider requires I accept these terms ….” While we may
countenance individual instances as small, data accrues over time, and
detailed profiles of our lives emerge, turning the balance in favor of the

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existing everyday resistances . 75

data broker. In contrast to the various ways of and levels at which we

accept the expropriation of our emerging data selves, active resistance
refers to attempts to directly impede the production or extraction of
personal spatial data through greater engagement with the technology
in question. Active resistance, in our typology, does not refer to efforts to
avoid generating or extracting data (that is escape), but rather to a range
of ever-shifting tactical practices that attempt to assert some control over
those processes.
Much as nearly all of us accept data extraction to some degree, active
resistance is similarly practiced in varying degrees, at different times, in
different places. Perhaps the easiest and most common way to compli-
cate geographic data production is to turn off the location services/GPS
feature of one’s smartphone. Location can still be tracked, of course, but
typically by indirect, less accurate methods. For example, applications
and the phone operating system itself will attempt to estimate location
from local cell phone towers and Wi-Fi networks.
While many do engage in active resistance at times, it remains less
common than simple acceptance for several reasons. First, resis-
tance entails a much higher degree of motivation and engagement.
Many motivations may spur an act of resistance, from disgust with the
latest data scandal to political or professional necessity for privacy, as
between protest organizers or journalists and their sources. But in each
case, active resistance requires action: we must choose to purposefully
depart the path of least resistance in order to (attempt to) reassert some
control over our data. Furthermore, active resistance tactics are neces-
sarily specific to technologies and their existing flaws and glitches. Just as
terms of service and data generation processes are constantly shifting in
response to these flaws, so must efforts to resist or subvert them. Today,
bandanas or surgical masks are a decreasingly effective means of evading
facial recognition algorithms. A decade ago, identifying someone in sur-
veillance footage required a human observer. A decade before that, it
was possible to avoid CCTV through careful travel in many cities.5 As
new technologies suffuse our daily practices, the cracks in which we may
leverage our resistance appear and recede from view.
Regardless of the specific technology, forms of active resistance tend
to involve complicating the production of data or obfuscating those data
to make them less precise or meaningful, or some combination of the
two. These acts can take many different forms, from the simple to the
highly technical. At one end, supplying fake, fabricated information, like

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76 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

providing a false postal code when registering for a grocery store loyalty
program or giving the email address of a politician you don’t support
when asked for one to receive a slight discount, are common practices
that don’t require additional technical familiarity expertise. Similarly, in
many places people can wear full or partial facial coverings when attend-
ing a protest or otherwise engaged in activities that fall under increased
surveillance. More technically complex measures include the use of end-
to-end cryptography for email communications, virtual private networks
for web browsing, data poisoning by providing a deluge of meaningless
data through an extension like AdNauseam, and spoofing GPS readings
on a smartphone to produce false location information.
Privacy advocates continue to release and support applications which
engage in a variety of these practices. At time of writing, ProtonMail,
run by Proton Technologies AG and with servers located in Switzerland,
outside both EU and US jurisdiction, offers free encrypted email. The
Tor network, run by the Tor Project, Inc. out of Massachusetts, uses a
variety of techniques to attempt to preserve anonymity online.
Despite these best efforts, there are two flaws in these tactics of active
resistance. First, they continue to rely upon the acts of individuals to step
outside norms of use. Tinder requires Facebook to function, Facebook
requires a verified email account, and so on. Individuals can step
outside these systems to escape, or they can tinker at the edges, perhaps
supplying a fake birth date, not using an email address tied to their name,
or cleverly obfuscating facial images of themselves.
Second, individual acts of resistance, even when aggregated, run into
an ongoing arms race between those who would extract data from users
and those who seek to resist it. The existence of and resistance to timing
attacks upon the Tor network demonstrates the limits of this approach
at present. Without diving into the technical details, Tor can best be
understood as working as an intermediary between a user and a website.
Patrick O’Neill, writing for Daily Dot explains it succinctly:

A user fires up the client and connects to the network through what’s
called an entry node. To reach a website anonymously, the user’s
Internet traffic is then passed encrypted through a so-called middle
relay and then an exit relay (and back again). That user-relay con-
nection is called a circuit. The website on the receiving end doesn’t
know who is visiting, only that a faceless Tor user has connected. An
eavesdropper shouldn’t be able to know who the Tor user is either,

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existing everyday resistances . 77

thanks to the encrypted traffic being routed through 6,000 nodes in

the network.
(O’Neill, 2020)

But, he goes on to illustrate a well-known flaw in the system. If an attacker

has a system large enough to control both the entry and exit relays, then
no matter how many nodes exist within the circuit, anonymity is com-
promised. This requires immense surveillance and computational power
and is likely possible only for large-scale security agencies, like the US
National Security Agency or China’s Third Department of the People’s
Liberation Army’s General Staff Department (3PLA). Such agencies exist
and are, in many cases, exactly the types of surveillance one might wish
to resist.
On a smaller scale and less technical in nature, many web browsers
now offer features to block ads and the cookies used for tracking web
use across sites. For several years, such efforts were broadly effective
means of avoiding the annoyance of ads and making it more difficult
for trackers to identify a single user across the web. More recently, many
sites now detect the presence of an ad-blocker and ask or require users
to disable it. Of course, ad-blocking tools are already beginning to be
redesigned to be undetectable by such sites … and so on. This is yet
another example of how this kind of resistance runs athwart ongoing,
asymmetric relations between technology users and creators. The indi-
vidual subject, particularly the individual user, is not well positioned to
resist the systemic efforts of the technological apparatus in which they
live, one which mediates norms, both social and professional.

making present

In contrast to tactics of active resistance which attempt to forestall the

production of data, prevent their extraction, and/or limit their utility,
making present refers to tactics which attempt to make the mechanisms
of data production, extraction, and analysis legible and understandable.
These methods counteract technology companies’ efforts to elide such
systems from consideration. Most often employed by artists, journal-
ists, activists, and scholars, tactics of making present render unseen data,
analysis, and even infrastructures visible to wide audiences, usually with
the intent of opening such systems up to a wider public debate of their
costs and consequences. Due to the intentionally communicative nature

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78 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

of this tactic, it has the most plentiful published examples to point to.
Furthermore, the range of practitioners and their motivations engage a
wealth of diverse audiences from highly theoretically oriented academic
research to a casually engaged general public.
As we’ve already seen, perhaps the most common kind of making
present is the work of journalists who raise questions and concerns
around data hacks, data collection, and/or legal proceedings involving
companies’ and law enforcement’s use of geographic data. While these
exposés too often take the form of breathless and ahistorical recount-
ings or reduce responsibility to the individual consumer, popular media
remain a powerful way to impact public discourse, capable of reaching
millions of people in a way that few scholarly articles do.
One powerful way to make things present is to call attention to the
physical infrastructure of data in everyday life. Perhaps the best example
of this is the work of artist-activist Ingrid Burrington on identifying,
mapping, and visualizing data centers and major data cables. Doing
so renders visible and understandable the material infrastructures on
which the internet relies (Burrington 2016b). By travelling in person
to data centers and creating guides to interpreting maintenance hole
covers, Burrington’s work calls these features out of banal invisibility and
shows how close and embodied data infrastructure and associated state
power are to each of us. In a similar move, the Internet Atlas attempts
to present a “comprehensive repository of the physical internet” (http://
internetatlas.org), but with a focus more towards academic research,
rather than direct, embodied political engagement. More recently, and
building directly on this and related works, both scholars (such as Lally
et al. 2019; Levenda and Mahmoudi 2019; Hogan and Vonderau 2019;
Nost 2020) and activist groups (such as Greenpeace’s Clicking Clean
report, Cook et al. 2016) have worked to make the intrinsic ties between
our digital worlds and the material impacts they have upon our environ-
ment and climate more present.
In practice, data and infrastructure rely on one another, so other
projects employ this connection to tie data imperatives to specific
material geographies. The early work of Matt Zook, one-time state
geographer of Kentucky, examined the geography of the internet as a
geography of industry, wherein the relationality of space had material
impacts (Zook 2005). One such example of the importance of “coloca-
tion” or “proximity hosting” in high-frequency trading (HFT) on stock
exchanges. While HFT set-ups often involve significant sums spent on

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existing everyday resistances . 79

hardware and algorithms that shave fractions of a second off trade

decision times, the physical, spatial relation between said hardware
and the trading exchange is also of significant value. “Colocation,”
provided by many exchanges, situates that hardware within the same
building and (ideally) on the same local network as the exchange, while
“proximity hosting” refers to third party vendors that sell hosting valued
in terms of its physical proximity to the exchange. In these cases, a few
inches along a fiber optic cable may be worth hundreds of thousands
of dollars. On a wider scale, Regional Advantage: Culture and Compe-
tition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 by AnnaLee Saxenian explicates
how the variegated geographies of peoples, places, environments, tech-
nologies, and things commingle to produce specific economic “hubs” of
activity around certain industries, such as the San Francisco Bay Area
and around Boston.
A number of artists use maps to better make present our current
relations between data and selves. Some efforts have focused on the
creation of maps of where surveillance cameras were located (see Figure
3.1), such as early efforts by the Institute for Applied Autonomy to
generate travel paths that avoided as many CCTV cameras as possible in
New York City in 2001. More recent collaborations, like The CCTV Map
project, attempted to map surveillance cameras in and around London
in 2012 (Zabou 2012). Other projects have attempted to map the paths
taken by national security surveillance planes, such as Trevor Paglen’s
Unmarked Planes and Hidden Geographies project (2006) (see also the
2016 Buzzfeed News report by Peter Aldhous and Charles Seife, “Spies
in the Skies,” for a popular press account on similar phenomena). These
efforts try to shift behaviors, or at least raise conscious thought on privacy
and personal security, through the creation of visual images and multi-
media installations that reveal what might otherwise remain invisible.
How often does one really consider whether the plane overhead is con-
ducting surveillance?
Although this is hardly a comprehensive survey of the work in this
area, these examples suggest a focus on top-down surveillance, predom-
inantly conducted by the state. These days, it’s impossible to move across
London or New York City without coming under the gaze of CCTV. It’s
also true that surveillance planes or drones are increasingly common both
in the United States and elsewhere, as responses to Black Lives Matter
protests made clear (Rose 2016; Aldhouse 2020). It is less obvious what
happens when the tracking occurs “from the ground up” through the

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80 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

Figure 3.1 A map of surveillance cameras in Times Square, Manhattan,

created by the Surveillance Camera Players in May 2005. This group drew
direct inspiration from the Situationists as they contested the increasing
surveillance of Manhattan after the attacks of September 11, 2001. We will
return to these ideas in Chapter 4. www.notbored.org/times-square.html
(last accessed July 2021). (No copyright)

willing acquiescence of a mobile device user. In the final entry in our

typology, we explore the tactic (or impossibility) of escape before, in the
next chapter, turning to potential strategies that may emerge through
collective, rather than individual, actions with respect to spatial data.

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existing everyday resistances . 81

escape

Throw out your phone. Use only cash. Wear masks everywhere …

While always wearing a mask may increasingly seem like a de facto norm
for society in a post-COVID-19 world, the other ideas begin a list of
possible steps to elude data creation and extraction. In many, even most,
cases, efforts to escape are always partial and contingent, and many rest
upon privilege and position within society. At times, escape is more per-
formative than substantive. In this final section, we articulate some of the
more common tactics individuals can use to escape while also noting the
ultimate impossibility of total escape within modern global capitalism.
Jim uses a flip phone, and has for several years now. Apparently, so
does Keanu Reeves (this is roughly where their similarities end), as
do a number of other celebrities, including, according to CBC, Daniel
Day-Lewis, Rihanna, and Kim Kardashian (Osler 2018). For many such
people, these phones are simply supplements to other smartphones. It
may not even be a conscious choice about data creation. For many celeb-
rities, the “dumb” phone is an accessory that complements a “smart” one.
The dumb phone acts as a more exclusive number only for voice calls or
simply a marker of the ability to conspicuously consume by choice rather
than necessity. For others, such as Jim and allegedly Keanu, the “dumb
phone” is the only phone they carry. Because they can.
Neither has a job that forces them to be reachable by email at all times,
much less requires them to carry a smartphone, as an Uber driver must.
Neither operates in a situation where finding a map would be particularly
difficult nor, as white men, is asking for directions terribly dangerous.
Both have the capital necessary to survive if something goes awry, be it a
broken-down car, missing a bus, or even simply deciding to walk into an
Apple Store and purchase the latest model iPhone.6 The ability to escape
from the myriad of ways that smartphones create, mine, and extract data
correlates directly with one’s existing privilege within society.
For those who do only use a “dumb” phone, it’s still not a full escape
from location tracking. First, as long as the phone is connected to a
network, location can still be tied to the closest cell phone tower (the
one to which the phone is connected). Further, geolocation abilities in
phones go back much further than many consumers realize. Starting in
the mid-1990s, the US Government’s Federal Communications Com-
mission (FCC) initiated a phased implementation of Enhanced-911 that

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82 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

included precise geo-location of all mobile phones.7 The policy required

that by the end of 2005, 95 percent of all phones on a carrier’s network
must be able to be located within 125 meters at least 67 percent of the
time. Carriers were allowed to determine how they would provide this
location information, whether through the inclusion of GPS chips
in phones, network-based triangulation (using cell towers), or some
hybrid approach. Carriers that missed deadlines, including Sprint and
US Cellular, were fined (Broache 2007). Likely due to the computational
cost of network-based triangulation, the FCC estimated that more than
75 percent of all mobile devices had GPS chips by 2011 (FCC 2011).
These mandates have continued to emerge and develop over time in
both the US and other nations. China, for example, has required many
commercial vehicles to use its navigational system, BeiDou, since 2013
(Wang 2013). In short, someone with a “dumb” phone, like Jim, is still be
being tracked, but it reduces the accuracy, both in time and location, and
it signals that they hold a status within society that does not require them
to be always, instantly reachable.
Credit cards, with their time- and place-stamped records of spending,
are another major source of spatial data tracking. Every purchase is
logged and then (re)sold to vendors and advertisers to build a profile of
predictable consumption habits, a smooth pattern of sales that can be
targeted across platforms (email, mail, text, and so on). Of course, credit
cards are also well established as to be nigh a necessity within systems of
credit. How can one build the credit score necessary to secure a mortgage
or even a lease without a credit card? These systems are intentional, and
much has been written on the debt-based economy.
Again, the ability to escape exists at somewhat opposite ends of
societal spectrums. On one side, if one possesses the capital and privilege
to never need a loan, then a credit rating becomes far less important. On
the other, where most of the world falls, to completely avoid systems of
credit requires an abdication of many of the expectations and norms that
allow one to function in society, such as leases for apartments or agricul-
tural land, car loans, mortgages for houses, or loans for university study.

the limits of the individual

Even before COVID-19, masks had become a flashpoint for resistance

to surveillance in spaces like Hong Kong, where masks were banned
in the fall of 2019 due to their use in pro-democracy protests (Elegant

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existing everyday resistances . 83

and McGregor 2019). Masks had served as a means of avoiding (or at

least making more difficult) facial recognition surveillance by the state.
A clothing firm, Adversarial Fashion, has developed an entire line of
clothing meant to resist and escape efforts for surveillance; providing
everything from hoodies meant to confuse license plate monitors to
masks for facial recognition (http://adversarialfashion.com). In addition,
many groups, like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, provide individ-
uals with guides for how to safely secure their identity while protesting
(or simply moving through daily life). And yet such active resistance and
escape tactics rely upon individuals to engage in asymmetric acts against
forces that sit very clearly on the other side of Andrejevic’s big data divide
(2014). Those with access to the data and means of analysis to draw con-
clusions (even spurious ones) from it are separated from those without.
Barring a few exceptions, the majority of readers of this book, as well as
its authors, do not have practical access to the mobile phone location
data for time/location stamped photos of millions of individuals.
For those technologically empowered subjects sitting on their side of
this divide, it doesn’t matter if one individual, one time defeats a facial
recognition algorithm. It matters that the algorithm is able to look
through and process as many other facial images as it takes until it is no
longer defeated. There is an invisible arms race between every individ-
ual engaged in resisting data extraction and the incredibly well vested
firms and state organizations that seek such data and the analyses they
facilitate.

So, then, for the rest of us sitting on the other side of the chasm, with
limited access to the data and the systems necessary to analyze them,
what is to be done? In the final two chapters, we argue for collectiv-
ized practices, strategies, that produce affinities between individuals.
We suggest a move from the neoliberal subject to the collective group,
a move done through new systems of communication and data exchange,
and done in a way that supports a radical, liberatory politics, rather than
data capitalism.

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Pluto Press

Chapter Title: Contesting the Data Spectacle

Book Title: Data Power

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4
Contesting the Data Spectacle

No telephone. Write or turn up: 32 rue de la Montagne-Genevieve,

Paris 5e.
(Internationale Situationniste no. 1, June 1958)

asymmetric power and moving beyond the individual

At this point, it should be fairly clear that whether we like it or not, and
even whether we’re aware of it or not, the technologies of modern society
are part of constant attempts to create, extract, and derive value from
data produced through our daily actions. Many choose to accept the
terms and conditions of use with little to no contestation, whether due to
lack of consideration, calculated acceptance of costs and benefits, more
immediate concerns, or because they have no choice. We aren’t here to
judge others on this: sometimes you just want Yu Xiang Qie Zi delivered
and UberEats will give you 20 percent off if you tie your account to
Facebook. But even those who choose to resist actively, passively, or
attempt to escape data generating systems are ultimately caught in an
asymmetric game where the vast majority of power is exercised by
private, for-profit corporations for which users and their data are a means
to an end. Our senses are flooded with data-driven spectacles, artificially
shaping what can be known and what can be imagined in such contexts,
and thereby foreclosing what might be done. Even when we look up from
our devices and take out our earbuds, our lived environments are still
suffused with the data collection and extraction processes that signal
the core conditions of data capitalism. Once we are separated from
our dataselves, they are fed back to us as affective sensations intended
to produce specific actions, to sell specific commodities: Gregg’s data
spectacle (2015). But what happens to the data in the interim, how they
are processed and classified, is not visible, much less available, to most of
us. Technology companies separate individuals not only from their data,
but also the tools with which to aggregate and analyze their data on their
own terms (Andrejevic 2014; see also Wark 2004 and 2020). This separa-

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contesting the data spectacle . 85

tion of both data and the means to analyze them is not an accident, and it
did not come about in a day. Such data dispossessions reflect the founda-
tional social priorities that gave rise to these technology companies, and
understanding that suggests some means by which these relationships
may be challenged and changed.
In the last chapter, we focused on resistances practiced by individu-
als amidst their everyday lives. As actions of individuals, those tactics
are inherently limited, with little prospect for broader systemic change
(de Certeau 1984). One reason is that such actions are always-already
incomplete, lacking the tools with which to confront and contest the
structural power and associated strategies and technologies of large
companies. Those tools, at work in Google search results, Facebook
newsfeeds, and Apple’s app store, allow those companies to operate at
a different scale, combining and analyzing data from tens of millions
or even billions of users. In most cases, these tools of data analysis, the
very means by which data are rendered into actionable information,
are closed to those outside the company. This is not just to retain the
trade secrets of analysis, though that’s part of the reason, nor is it simply
a matter of expertise, though that’s also part of the picture. Above all
else, it is because those data processing tools are the means by which
the company reaps the value of data, making the tools essential to the
company’s enterprise. Contesting these data relationships or refocusing
them to more productive social ends therefore requires work not just
on data themselves, but also how data are synthesized, analyzed, and
classified on scales larger than what is possible for the self-valorizing
individual consumer within the neoliberal order. This turf requires col-
lective modes of resistance, a political praxis.
In this chapter, we’ll first explore how the separation of ourselves from
our data developed at Twitter. Twitter is an illustrative example of the
separated, asymmetric nature of the relations between individual and
platform-owning corporations. It also shows how the drive to colonize
new moments of life as data in order to scale up profits developed and
shaped what can be known across time and space. Second, building
from the individual tactics described in the previous chapter and the
theoretical works explored in Chapter 2, we propose and describe shifts
towards collective, solidarity-building modes of resistance that could be
employed to contest the data spectacle. These don’t necessarily operate
at the same scales as Twitter or other technology company platforms,
but they nonetheless forge broader engagements for systemic change. We

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86 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

broadly classify these collective modes of resistance as data regulation,

data drifting, data détournement, and data strikes.
But first, the curious case of Twitter’s fire hose.

twitter: public knowledge versus capital growth

Twitter’s revenues primarily come from two interrelated sources: adver-

tising on Twitter’s platform and selling users’ data to better target
advertising both on and beyond the platform. Direct advertising is the
predominant source of income, making up approximately 84.5 percent
of all revenue, or $682 million, in the first quarter of 2020. “Data
licensing and other revenue,” the only other category in Twitter’s Investor
Fact Sheet, accounted for an additional $125 million in revenue for that
quarter (Twitter 2020b). While less than advertising sales, $125 million
in three months is still quite a lot of money, especially for a revenue
stream that emerged gradually over time. The case of how the sale of
Twitter users’ data by third parties became worth that much illustrates
how data capitalism works to limit both what can be known and who can
know it amidst an environment of ever-increasing profit seeking.
Less than three months after the first tweet in July 2006, Twitter
released its first public API, which provided third parties access to Twitter
content at a large scale in an effort to spur third-party app development
to grow the platform and the company.1 Early adoption of the API by
third-party developers was strong, as a variety of applications began to
make use of it to expand the functionalities of Twitter’s services. This
effectively allowed the company to externalize innovation and develop-
ment of additional uses for Twitter, thereby attracting more users and
leading existing users to spend more time with Twitter’s services.
Researchers quickly began engaging with users’ Tweets via the
company’s API as a new source of data. Efforts ranged from the Floating
Sheep collective’s playful Church vs. Beer map (Burn-Murdoch 2012)
to more somber research to reveal hidden truths about the world, such
as plaintive attempts to examine the impact of Twitter bots on the 2016
US presidential election. Among geographers, perhaps the best-known
example of this was DOLLY (Digital OnLine Life and You), which built a
massive repository of all geolocated tweets and provided initial indexing
to make querying and analysis for other researchers easier. Under the
technical direction of Ate Poorthuis, the project built a library of billions
of tweets and made them available to researchers around the world.2

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contesting the data spectacle . 87

At first, Twitter’s API provided free access to the entire continually

renewed global stream of all user-generated Twitter data. This allowed
third-party apps to copy and store all such data or subsets thereof, such
as the attempt to copy and store every geolocated tweet using DOLLY.
Then, after introducing a new API, Twitter began to segment access to
its global stream of user-generated data. Over the subsequent years, the
exact number of APIs and levels of access have changed repeatedly, but
the company has always maintained a distinction between what’s collo-
quially known as “sprinkler” (a.k.a. “garden hose”) access, which provides
a sample of tweets, and “fire hose” access, which provides full access to
the entire stream. Initially, researchers could petition for access to higher
“hoses” free of charge. In 2010, Twitter began making agreements with
other companies to allow third-party reselling of Twitter data. Then in
2015, it acquired one of those companies, GNIP, and made GNIP the
sole source for procuring large-scale Twitter data (Bryant 2015). While
press release language focused on “inspir[ing] deeper analysis of tweets”
(Van Grove 2010) and “promises to make data more accessible” (Bennett
2014), these actions by the company effectively locked guaranteed access
above 1 percent of the tweet data stream behind paywalls.
At first glance, this is a niche, esoteric concern among socially priv-
ileged, technologically empowered stakeholders—“Oh no, researchers
are having a harder time tracking down where people are talking about
Keeping Up with the Kardashians more than Terrace House!”3—but the
underlying impact on what can be known, by whom, and how they
can know it is of much wider and substantial concern. This is textbook
accumulation by dispossession, foundational to the processes of data
capitalism. First, users generate the data through their everyday actions
and Twitter leverages it to sell advertising.4 Second, the company initially
made the full extent of the data freely available to spur external innova-
tion and grow the market. Third, when the external innovations were
successful, it cut off the free data stream, enclosed the market, and added
the revenue to its own profit margins. This makes sense for Twitter, as it
is a publicly traded company required to file quarterly reports and show
continued, sustained growth within a capitalist system.
And that’s exactly the point. For researchers, what could be known
through Twitter was initially structured by the technical character-
istics of the company’s APIs and subsequently by enclosure in pursuit
of profit.5 Today, Twitter’s top-level API, “Enterprise” (or GNIP 2.0) is
for “large-scale, well-resourced projects” (Twitter 2020a). Who gets to

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88 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

know what, when, and where is delimited by funding. Of course, within

capitalism, this has been and likely will always be the case. Oxford and
Harvard maintain libraries with more books and journals than either of
our own home institutions.

data spectacle as a mechanism

Twitter’s use of data to colonize and exploit everyday practices through

analytics and opportunism is unsurprising amidst a capitalist system, but
interpreting the company’s actions is not enough. The point is to change
these data-imbued relationships. In Chapter 2, we proposed the concept
of the spectacle as one of the paths by which we might (re)assert our
humanity within the technological relations of data capitalism. Here, we
continue along that path, approaching data and associated analyses as a
kind of spectacle, and therein plotting a course for collective resistance.
For Debord and the other Situationists, modern society was a series
of spectacles, “a frozen moment of history in which it is impossible to
experience real life or actively participate in the construction of the
lived world” (Plant 1992, 1)—human experiences separated from each
of us and fed back to us as commodified images. As stand-ins for actual
human experiences, these images shape our understandings of the world
and each other, both defining what is, as well as delimiting what we
can imagine could or might be. The modern spectacle represented “the
autocratic reign of the market economy which had acceded to an irre-
sponsible sovereignty, and the totality of new techniques of government
which accompanied this reign,” a world controlled by images in pursuit
of profit, defining and delimiting what is and what might be (Debord
1998, 2).
This approach draws from Walter Benjamin’s observation that the
alienation involved in the material production of society, its base, was
seeping into its superstructure as capital found ways to exploit culture:6
“[T]he dialectic of these conditions of production is evident in the
superstructure, no less than in the economy” (Benjamin 2008[1936],
19). Debord develops this further: “The spectacle is not a collection of
images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images”
(Debord 1967, Thesis 4). Within spectacular society, time, culture, and
social relationships are stripped from actual lives and cast as a disjointed,
perpetual present of consumptive, commodified images, such that indi-
viduals are alienated “from their own experiences, emotions, creativity,

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contesting the data spectacle . 89

and desire” (Plant 1992, 1). The spectacle is not just what is desired, but
all that can be desired: “The spectacle turns the goods into The Good”
(Wark 2013, 5).
The idea of the spectacle, particularly as a totalizing system in which
all life occurs, is not without its critics. We’ve noted elsewhere that:

the totality of the spectacle overstates nuances of lived experience

and therefore weakens its conceptual utility, reducing it to an obvious
intellectual fetish by which critical theorists may toss water balloons at
the armoured tanks of capitalist modernity.
(Thatcher and Dalton 2017, 137)

We argue that these views mistake “a totalizing tendency for a static

totality” (Thatcher and Dalton 2017, 137). The spectacle seeks to
colonize all aspects of life in all places and at all times by separating the
possible from the permitted (Debord 1967, Thesis 25), but that doesn’t
mean it succeeds. As spectacle colonizes everyday lives, slipping into
daily routines such as commuting or picking up the kids from daycare,
it appears as targeted genre audio entertainment while you drive or a
calendar that accounts for traffic delays. While siphoning off our data
and feeding parts of them back to us, it shapes and optimizes the status
quo, a more pleasurable commute or better optimized travel for daycare
pickup. Spectacle will not facilitate more fundamental change, even if it is
otherwise possible, such as different work patterns or paid family leave,
unless it can find some way to capitalize on them as well. Alternatives
must leverage that divide between what is actually possible versus what
actions, beliefs, and imaginaries the spectacle attempts to limit us to.

spectacle as more than individual

Such a conception of data, daily life, and what can be imagined runs the
risk of being too centered on a single concept. If we’re trying to resist the
relations of data technologies today, why not center upon the work of
Marx? Or Weber? Or Gramsci? Or why not abandon the dead white men
and structure resistance around the ideas of Audre Lorde, bell hooks,
Donna Haraway, Ruha Benjamin, Catherine D’Ignazio, and others?
Without in any way overwriting such work and while encouraging our
readers to seek out and follow the scholars and practitioners they find
most useful, we offer one set of potential strategies for resistance focused

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90 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

on building solidarities in the face of asymmetric power relations. We

frame the problem in terms of the spectacle for two intertwined reasons,
while drawing inspiration, particularly in specific modes of resistance,
from all of the above voices.
First, the idea of the spectacle is predicated upon dynamic commu-
nication and industrial technologies, but it also recognizes that the
most effective ways to resist go through those very same technologies
(Debord 1967, Thesis 24). For the Situationist International, the milieu
of relations between the human and the technical was the site for resis-
tance, for thinking and acting through alternatives to the given world
(Wark 2011). Finding instances of that gap between the possible and
the permitted and then leveraging them will inherently take place in the
contemporary technological context and utilize technical means. Two
examples include their experiments with détournement and the dérive,
both of which we’ll engage with in detail later in this chapter.
Second, and closely related, media theorist and scholar of the Situ-
ationist International McKenzie Wark suggests that the Situationists
mark:

the last of the historic avant-gardes. As such, they are something of

a heretical formation within modernist culture, cross-pollinated with
Marxism, and who proposed innovations not only in critical theory
but in organization, everyday life, and communication as well.
(Galloway et al. 2014, 158; emphasis ours)

It is at this confluence where new spatial data technologies work. This

is where those technologies structure social organization, everyday
experiences, and how we communicate with each other and ourselves.
As such, the Situationists offer a unique opportunity for response, an
untaken off-ramp from the expressway of the modern capitalist world
(Wark 2011).
The question of why the Situationists keep returning is hardly a new
one. Wark notes that “They stand in for all that up-to-date intellec-
tual types think they have outgrown, and yet somehow the Situationists
refuse to be left behind” (Wark 2013, 13). Derided even during their
existence, there is a power behind their goal to “be at war with the whole
world lightheartedly” (Debord, in Wark 2013, 15). Their refusal to live in
commodified “dead” time and injunction to constantly seek pleasure in

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contesting the data spectacle . 91

daily life are powerful ones that have echoed through the decades, even
if their antics and infightings have made them a ripe target for mockery.

contestations

How can existing relations of data be resisted and changed to forge more
equitable societies and empowering uses of geographic technologies?
The measures of active resistance, making present, and escape we’ve
covered thus far are small in scale. They make a difference on that scale,
but are limited in their ability to provoke systemic change. Confronting
and altering the data spectacle we face today requires larger actions, col-
lective modes of resistance.
We outline four types of collective actions which hold promise for
realizing systemic change, whether singly or in combination: data reg-
ulation, data dérive, data détournement, and data strikes. As with the
typology of individualized tactics, our scope here is not to comprehen-
sively engage every existing instance or case. Rather, our intent is to
survey a range of promising possibilities and grounds for potential soli-
darities and empowerment through, rather than somehow against, new
mobile and spatial technologies. With each mode of resistance, we seek
to find ways by which these technologies can be made to speak for people
in ways of their own choosing.

Data Regulation

Regulatory measures meant to protect personal data, including geo-

graphic data, have proliferated across multiple continents in recent years.
The most prominent example is the European Union’s General Data Pro-
tection Regulation (GDPR), which places legally enforceable limits on
the collection, storage, processing, and transfer of individualized data.
It also specifies non-anonymous or individually focused location infor-
mation as a form of protected personal data within the regulatory terms.
Thus, location data processing and analysis also fall under GDPR rules
(Intersoft Consulting 2016). In practice, the GDPR requires active,
informed consent to collect location data and combine them with other
streams for targeted, non-anonymous purposes. This is very promising,
and when fully enforced, changes the landscape of location data collec-
tion and how such data are used. Such regulation can limit the range of
potential actions for major data companies, shaping the very design and

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92 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

coding of data-driven services to be more limited and responsible with

users’ data. The GDPR also shapes and delimits modes of data collection
and handling in practice, normalizing such actions for whole popula-
tions, not just those invested in this topic. GDPR-compliant practices
have become regular, everyday, even expected by data professionals and
users alike across the European Union. Beyond the EU’s borders, the
GDPR has spillover effects as users in other jurisdictions utilize services
hosted in the EU or built to GDPR specifications. As residents of the
United States, Jim and Craig regularly encounter GDPR-compliant terms
in the services we use. Finally, regulation such as the GDPR has a role to
play in setting conditions favorable for other collective resistances.
For all these benefits, the GDPR’s full scope, and thus its effects,
are still under debate. As of this writing, the actual degree of enforce-
ment is still being ironed out in court, both by technology companies
and through class-action lawsuits from users. Even as these debates play
out, the GDPR acts as an inspiration for similar regulations elsewhere.
The new California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) imposes compara-
ble restrictions, as do regulations in countries like Brazil, South Korea,
and Japan. There is also discussion of similar legislation in the US federal
government and some other countries.
Beyond the specific regulation of users’ data, there are also increas-
ing signs in multiple countries of antitrust regulatory actions against
major technology companies, including Google and Facebook. The
possible results of these actions are not just financial; an antitrust ruling
could force a major technology firm to break up, and the subsequent
implications for users’ control of their data would be complex. Less
centralization at a single company would make it harder to combine
multiple data streams, which could make data somewhat less valuable,
and thereby de-incentivize data collection to some extent, particularly
in a GDPR-type environment that restricts data transfers between firms.
Moreover, multiple smaller companies would likely be easier to regulate
under a GDPR-style regime as they would have fewer resources to fight
or find ways to circumvent the rules. At the same time, the multiple
companies coming out of a breakup could proliferate the number of
companies getting into the location data market or establishing their
own data streams, complicating the experience of those attempting to
better control their data. Furthermore, antitrust actions, even resulting
in the breakup of major companies, do nothing to provide users tools to

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contesting the data spectacle . 93

better analyze their own data for themselves, much less build solidarity
between them.
Even with the promise of the GDPR and similar laws, regulation alone
will not save us. It’s not that regulation never works (it clearly can), but
that regulation on its own is insufficient, even as it is the only systemic or
collective form of resistance to current data regimes widely discussed in
the popular press. While regulation has an increasingly promising track
record in providing data subjects better control over their data, we need
to keep in mind the limitations of what it can do.
Regulation of current data capitalism faces two broad limitations, one
political, one cultural: First, regulations tend towards maintenance of
the status quo of the spectacle. Structural change generally is not the
intention so much as maintaining existing relations in line with contex-
tual social standards and the demands of weighty political and financial
stakeholders. Because formal regulatory policy inherently operates
through governmental means, it is thus subject to disproportionately
powerful corporate stakeholders. Technology companies employ armies
of lobbyists and truckloads of campaign donations. In the United States,
Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, and even TikTok all had lobbyists
making The Hill’s 2020 “Top Lobbyists” list (Hill Staff 2020). As a result,
getting substantial regulations passed into law is difficult. Moreover,
once law, there is always the risk of regulatory capture or evasion. Such
corporate strategies can hollow out a law, rendering it meaningless, such
as through revised terms of service or arguing that a law simply does not
apply to them, as Uber is notorious for doing. In extreme cases, powerful
stakeholders may even reverse the law, say if a different political party
takes power or through massive spending on a voter proposition. For
example, in 2020, California Assembly Bill 5 took effect, ensuring basic
labor protections such as minimum wage and sick leave for gig-econ-
omy workers. Later that same year, firms like Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash
successfully collectively spent over $185 million on California Ballot
Proposition 22,7 which removed those protections, reclassifying gig
workers as “independent contractors” (O’Brien 2020).
Second, regulations are governmental, which is good for crafting
policy, but less effective in shaping culture and associated social change.
The data spectacle works not only through economic and legal means,
but also how data subjects see and understand the world and how they
interact with one another. This cultural realm is where the limits of
imagination and social acceptability are set, defining not only what is

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94 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

reasonable common sense, but also identifying problems that need to

be dealt with. Cultural ideas of what conditions people should or will
accept and endure don’t tend to come from policy or regulations, nor do
organized political movements that initiate structural change. As social
movements have shown throughout history, these sorts of changes do
not simply happen or begin through passage of a law. Effective regula-
tions can shape everyday practice, as with actions that conform to GDPR
rules, but there must be some social incentive to create and maintain a
law like the GDPR in the first place.
Taking control over our data is far too important to be left exclusively
to policymakers. More equitable data relations require cultural work that
also falls outside the realm of governance and regulation. For geographic
data, this means turning to additional collective modes of resistance that,
while weird, are more creative and exploratory, working through cultural
and grassroots means to impact how data subjects see, understand, and
engage the world.

Data Dérive (Drifting)

Moving beyond regulation, we first turn to drifting, an exploratory

practice to better understand individual and collective data regimes
amidst the cultural geographies of daily life. Dérive (in English, “drifting”)
is a way of being aware of and learning about the structure and possibili-
ties of a space while moving through it in a semi-intentional, exploratory
manner, even if it is already familiar. This psychogeographic method
provides reflection on the spaces, places, and practices of everyday life
with the intention of identifying promising sites and modes for change,
both social and material. In that way, drifting within the context of geo-
graphic data provides a promising way to understand and develop sites
of collective resistance to current data regimes.
The concept of a dérive was first developed by the Letterist Inter-
national (soon to be re-founded as the Situationist International) in
response to the plans to redevelop Paris in the 1950s to include high-
speed expressways. Discontent with this trajectory led a small group
of leftist artists and activists to investigate and promote the pedestrian
experience of the city’s geographic structure:

The world we live in, and beginning with its material décor, is discov-
ered to be narrower by the day … this world governs our way of being,

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contesting the data spectacle . 95

and it grinds us down. It is only from its rearrangement, or more

precisely its sundering, that any possibility of organizing a superior
way of life will emerge.
(Khatib 1958)

Following in the literal footsteps of Walter Benjamin’s flâneur, they had

the then revolutionary—today, utterly conventional—vision of an urban
form that centered on the experience of pedestrians. As they walked, that
experience could render the entire city as a single work of art (Chtche-
glov 1953). Building from concepts found in Benjamin’s The Work of Art
in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (2008[1936]), the social sig-
nificance of such art was not simply aesthetic beauty, it was political, and
in the Situationists’ case, revolutionary (Debord 1955 and 1956). While
they were uniformly ignored by the authorities in the 1950s redevelop-
ment of Paris, this idea was not as far-fetched as it may seem to modern
eyes given the amount of revolutionary activity on Paris’ streets for the
previous 200 years. In fact, parts of it were borne out in the later 1968
rebellion, in which the Situationists played a starring role.
While urban form from the perspective of a pedestrian may seem
run-of-the-mill in an era that valorizes “20-minute neighborhoods,”
the Situationists were responding to dominant, modernized views
of the ideal city in that period.8 Perhaps the paradigmatic example of
such visions would be Le Corbusier’s vision of whole planned, uniform,
sanitized cities viewed from a distance (Figure 4.1). In contrast, the Sit-
uationist psychogeographic perspective was that of someone actually
living in the city as it already existed. Specifically, they conceptualized
the material city itself as a series of interconnected places they called
“unities of ambiance,” both planned and unintentional, that a pedestrian
would experience emotionally and would be apparent in their behavior.
These unities of ambiance were connected to one another by walkable
streets, and that network structure literally encouraged the movement of
people within and through them to particular streets and other unities,
where they would feel and act, for good or ill, in ways befitting that place.
The dérive was a way of identifying unities of ambiance and the geo-
graphic network of connections and flows between them. It helped serve
as the on-the-ground data collection behind maps such as The Naked
City, The Psychogeographic Guide of Paris, and the related collage Life
Continues to Be Free and Easy (Figure 4.2). In their thinking, by better
understanding how the structure of a city worked, both as a material

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96 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

Figure 4.1 Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin model for the redevelopment of Paris,
displayed at the Nouveau Esprit Pavilion in 1925, is the sort of vision the
Situationists we working against. (Wikimedia commons/SiefkinDR, licensed
under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International, https://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/, last accessed July 2021)

environment and as human experiences and behaviors in it, the urban

geography could be better leveraged to realize revolutionary outcomes.
In practice, a Situationist dérive had no specific destination or planned
route. Rather, it involved allowing the city structure and architecture to
serve as a guide. It was similar to the urban walks of a flâneur, but the
intention was revolutionary potential, not leisurely, refined consumer
capitalism. Furthermore, the Situationist dérive was not random
wandering. Rather, there was a specific method, a brutal commitment
to a praxis of attempting to uncover the otherwise hidden structure and
movements of the city directly. A drift could last a few hours or several
days, and those performing it would record their experiences (Debord
1956). Abdelhafid Khatib provided the clearest account in his descrip-
tion of a dérive of the Les Halles district:

Considered from the viewpoint of the unity of ambiance, [Les Halles]

differs only slightly from its official limits, and principally from an
extremely large encroachment on the second arrondissement to the

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contesting the data spectacle . 97

Figure 4.2 Guy Debord’s Life Continues to Be Free and Easy (1959).
This piece, sent as gift (potlatch) to Constant Nieuwenhuys, features
a collage of images placed upon a portion of the iconic The Naked
City map. Simon Sadler uses it for the frontispiece of his book The
Situationist City (2010), noting that “[i]ts layering of allusions—to
colonialism, war, urbanism, situationist ‘psychogeography’ and
playfulness—was dizzying.” The original is preserved at the Rijksbureau
voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie, The Hague. (No copyright)

north. We observe the following boundaries: the Rue Saint-Denis to

the east [and so on] ….
… The architecture of the streets, and the changing décor which
enriches them every night, can give the impression that Les Halles is
a quarter that is difficult to penetrate. It is true that during the period
of nocturnal activity the logjam of lorries, the barricades of panniers,
the movement of workers with their mechanical or hand barrows,
prevents access to cars and almost constantly obliges the pedestrian to
alter his route (thus enormously favoring the circular anti-dérive) ….
… The essential feature of the urbanism of Les Halles is the mobile
aspect of pattern of lines of communication, having to do with the

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98 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

different barriers and the temporary constructions which intervene

by the hour on the public thoroughfare. The separated zones of
ambiances, which remain strongly connected, converge in the one
place: the Place des Deux-Ecus and the Bourse du Commerce (Rue de
Viarme) complex.
(Khatib 1958)

For all their best attempts, this original Situationist form of drifting
suffered from a serious conceptual failing. In their formulation, unities
of ambiance were real, material things experienced in the same way
by everyone, but as anyone who has ever walked through a city might
realize, such drifting was highly subjective. They went out looking for
unities of ambiance, but what they found as much reflected their own
gendered privileges, racialized standpoints, and critical theory-informed
perspectives as the material form of the city itself. In fact, an editorial
note states that Abdelhafid Khatib was repeatedly harassed by police and
arrested while drifting in Les Halles because at the time, North African
men were forbidden from the streets at night (Khatib 1958). Despite this
conceptual failing, parts of the Situationists’ psychogeographic work now
appear prophetic. Today, much urban design focuses on the experiences
of pedestrians, and in 2012, Paris permanently closed the expressway
along the Seine, making that space walkable once again.
In a broader context, the dérive has served as a basis for many subse-
quent geographical engagements with urban life and continues to offer
hope as a collective means to resist current social relations. To us, the
most significant of these sprang from an unlikely context given the priv-
ileged perspectives of many of the original Situationists and the ancestral
connection to the flâneur. Precarias a la Deriva (“Precarious Women
Adrift”) was a feminist activist collective founded in Madrid in 2002.
Sparked by calls for a general strike that year, group members confronted
a question: how could they as gig/temp workers, domestic caregivers,
self-employed workers, and similar feminized, precarious laborers go on
strike? Excluded from site-based, male-dominated formal unions, they
had no access to support like strike pay or other structures of formalized
solidarity. Thus, in their “First Stutterings,” they asked themselves, “What
is your strike?” (Precarias a la Deriva 2003b). What would a strike for pre-
carious, feminized (and often reproductive) labor involve, and what would
winning look like? Building on the Situationists’ dérive, they developed
their own form of drifting designed to facilitate self-care and mutual aid

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contesting the data spectacle . 99

in the places of their everyday lives as a way to address the situated chal-
lenges of precarious, feminized work and the multiple places where it
occurs:

We opted for the method of the drift as a form of articulating this

diffuse network of situations and experiences, producing a subjective
cartography of the metropolis through our daily routes.
(Precarias a la Deriva 2003b)

By focusing on precarious labor amidst everyday life, Precarias a la

Deriva’s drifts (see Figure 4.3) were more socially reflexive than those
of the Situationist Internationale. Precarias refashioned the subjective
nature of drifting into a strength: a way to better investigate, understand,
and empathize with participants’ situated subjectivities for the purpose of
nurturing new, radicalized subjectivities in solidarity with one another:

In our particular version, we opt to exchange the arbitrary wandering

of the flaneur [sic], so particular to the bourgeois male subject with
nothing pressing to do, for a situated drift which would move through
the daily spaces of each one of us, while maintaining the tactic’s mul-
tisensorial and open character. Thus the drift is converted into a
moving interview, crossed through by the collective perception of the
environment.
(Precarias a la Deriva 2003b)

Each of Precarias’ drifts tagged along with a precarious working

woman, at times one of themselves, through the practices, espe-
cially multiple forms of work, in their daily lives, often across multiple
locations and contexts because precarious labor frequently is not limited
to a single workplace (Casas-Cortés 2014).
This practice allowed all the drifters, including the person at the center
of that drift, to pause and reflect on the conditions of their (often hidden)
labor, the spaces in which it occurred, and ways to cope, resist, and
build support networks and solidarity with others in similar positions.
As a geographical practice, drifting allowed participants to trace these
movements in space and thereby identify intersections and convergences
as sites for resistances and forms of striking, confronting the social and
material structures that otherwise keep such women isolated, separated,
and less able to resist. By walking with migrant workers and asking them

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100 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

Figure 4.3 Map showing one of Precarias a la Deriva’s drifts

through the daily lives and practices of domestic workers in
Madrid. (Used with creator’s permission)

“What is your strike?”, Precarias found those moments and places in

daily life where said strikes could emerge, where solidarity could be built
and leveraged in a situated manner (Precarias a la Deriva 2005).
Subsequently, other groups have adapted this Precarias-style drift in
their own efforts. In North Carolina, members of the Counter-Cartog-
raphies Collective (3Cs) adapted it for the staff and graduate students
of American universities and corporate research campuses. These drifts
focused not only on the precarious labor conditions hidden by official
university documents, but specifically emphasize how precarious labor
plays an integral role in institutional knowledge production within higher
education. What is and can be scientifically known and published, much

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contesting the data spectacle . 101

less what knowledge is actionable for technical innovation, is frequently

based on the precarious data-crunching labor of students, post-doc-
toral researchers, and adjunct faculty. Drifting provides a way to build
solidarity with and among them in the spaces of their everyday lives
(Casas-Cortés and Cobarrubias 2007).
Drifting, then, can play a profound role in building situated, placed
solidarities and mutual understandings around places and data. It con-
stitutes a collective mode of resistance to the data spectacle, and thereby
data capitalism. Drifting confronts and re-frames the second part of
Gregg’s data spectacle, providing a way for users themselves to examine
quantified representations of their dataselves and producing such geo-
graphic representations more on their own terms.
We propose engaging in data drifts, critically reflective examinations
of the geographic data of everyday practices. A data drift repurposes
data to better understand data geographies of daily life, their limits, and
potential alternatives to the geographic visions of capitalized spectacle.
Building on the original definition of dérive provides a place to start.
A data drift is a method of exploring the structures and possibili-
ties of geographic data by moving through them, both physically and
digitally. Doing so involves a mindset open to learning about the struc-
tures of such data, their connections with the social and material world,
and the inherent limitations to such arrangements. This may involve
spaces and data that are already familiar, so it requires careful attention
to things and actions that are normalized or hiding in plain sight. Where
the quantified self movement encourages self-tracking for individual-
ized improvement, a data drift necessarily involves critical reflection and
evaluation. It involves finding moments of solidarity with others, not a
faster 10 kilometer running time. Data drifters can go where the data
takes them through everyday actions, and thereby better understand
themselves and those shaped by similar data processes.
Data drifts are directly inspired by the Situationists’ dérive by focusing
on the geographies of everyday practices. These are spaces and places
from the perspectives and actions of those living in and moving through
them, rather than an externally empowered view through digital data
with a supposed global scope. It embraces the situated, reflective nature
of Precarias a la Deriva’s drifts, embracing the situated considerations
of economic relations, cultural context, and particularly the gendered
subject positions of participants as a means to better understand and
empathize, and thereby to build solidarity. Furthermore, Precarias’ drifts

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102 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

emphasized the role of forms of labor that are overlooked because they
have disappeared into plain view: reproductive labor, care work, and the
frequently precarious relations of those involved. So 3Cs extended this
to knowledge-producing labor, which while more valorized, is directly
connected to the creation of data. Data production is labor, even if it is
unpaid or paid only by providing a service, because data are valuable
within data capitalism (Fuchs 2014). However, much like the labor
Precarias focused upon, the labor of such data tends to be ignored or
overlooked as it occurs in the banal moments of everyday life.
So how does one actually do a data drift, what does it mean in practice?
At its heart, a data drift involves moving through everyday geographic
data and/or space paying special, critical attention to how data are
collected and structured, their limits, their effects, and above all sites
or openings for different kinds of data practices and associated social
relations of data. Like other forms of the dérive, it inherently depends
on the situation, participant(s), and the type(s) of data involved. It may
be literally stationary, as some of 3Cs drifts were, and entirely mediated
through devices, employing maps and tables to explore the data in
question. Alternatively, it may involve moving through the spaces in
question with a device and drifting mindset, akin to the Situationists,
or employing the drifting mindset while going through the geographic
practices of daily life as Precarias a la Deriva did. Likewise, the number
of people involved will depend on the situation and focus of the drift. As
Debord observed and others have replicated, while it is possible to drift
alone, groups of two to four people are often the most fruitful. This is
not for greater objectivity or inter-rater reliability, but rather, as Precarias
demonstrated, to best build interpersonal solidarity and trust. This is
also a vital difference from regulation as a collective mode of resistance.
Drifting does not attempt to work at the national or state/provincial scale.
Its exploratory focus is everyday geographies and solidarities, though the
geographic insights, openings, and promising sites for resistance may be
further leveraged by other collective actions. A drift’s duration may be
a few hours, a day, or as the Situationists did, even a series of days. The
exact time spent drifting is less important than reaching familiarity or
saturation with the data geographies in question.
That does not mean there is no material praxis to follow. The two
indispensable aspects of a data drift are first, data situated in a context
through which to drift, and second, the critical, investigatory drifting

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contesting the data spectacle . 103

approach. A data drift will likely involve multiple interconnected data

sets, though a single sufficiently large data set may serve. Not all the data
sets need be spatial, but we find it helps to have geographic data or some
kind of location-based index to help keep the drift cohesive.9
What might be learned by revisiting or cross-visiting where our phones
believe we have been? (See Figure 4.4.) The best type of data is focused
on the tasks and actions of daily life. Examples could include accessing
the location history of a phone or an account with a major data platform
such as Google, Apple, or Facebook. Accessing these kinds of data can be
assisted by data regulations that require companies to provide users with
the data the company has on them. Data tangentially connected to loca-
tions may also be helpful, such as ratings/reviews of places or sites. Still
other kinds of relevant data may be accessible through less consumer-
oriented firms such as credit rating agencies, and government records
of property, registrations, or legal proceedings. What can be learned by
walking from the most to the least expensive house in a real estate data-
base of one’s home town? For both reflective and ethical reasons, much
data ought to be the participant’s own. Moreover, data drifting in a group

Figure 4.4 Walking route, Thursday, September 1, 2016. In late 2017,

Jim recreated the path his phone had recorded for him that day, this time
intentionally attempting to follow diagonal lines. This route brought
him through new neighborhoods, past new businesses, and altered his
understanding of the point-to-point relations between his work and his
consumptive practices. (Created by the authors, data permissions in image)

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104 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

with such intimate data ethically requires not only trust, but discussing
and agreeing about expectations of confidentiality, ideally ahead of time.
Identifying the most useful or helpful data also depends on the second
component: a critical approach to the situation. This involves both a
reflexive mindset and purposeful actions, including how participants
work with the data and what writing or making occurs as they think
through the data. Engage the data, play with them! Move through the
data physically and digitally, move through time with the data. Rank
order items. Plot them on a map. Turn the map upside down. Run more
advanced statistics if need be. How frequently did drifters walk down a
certain street, on what days? Through that, pose and attempt to answer
critical questions about what appears (and what doesn’t), where those
are (and aren’t), and why? The data dérive is a means of opening for
consideration the contours of the data spectacle, the very processes of
data capitalism. Are there subjective unities of ambiance? Where are the
contradictions and limitations? Where and what is a real material expe-
rience in light of and through the data? Where and what is spectacle?
And above all, where are potential sites for solidarity, for disrupting
the spectacular cycle of data creation, extraction, and analysis? Where
are the moments, spaces, and times for resistance? In addressing these
questions, we find that it helps to encode the experience of the drift to
facilitate critical reflection. This may take the form of notes and subse-
quent written papers (as with the Situationists), making a map (as with
the 3Cs), or even filming the process and creating a documentary, as
Precarias a la Deriva did (Precarias a la Deriva 2003a).
For example, in one data drift in 2017, Jim examined the limitations
and even patently absurd assumptions of his smart device’s location
history. It shows several locations he visited, including work and a coffee
shop, but the vision of this spectacle also shows its farcical aspects.
His apparent path through the day appears to have involved travelling
only along Euclidean lines, diagonally across city blocks and straight
through walls.
This sort of data drifting reveals not just the limitations of GPS
waypoints, but also poses questions about what sites do not appear in
this fun-house mirror reflection of a day’s movements. Where is this
system of data collection vulnerable? What sites and experiences are
missing, not just because of technical glitches, but because they are not
important to Google’s data collection regime? Where is labor (of all

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contesting the data spectacle . 105

kinds) happening? At what sites might different kinds of relationships be

possible? It begins to ask: Where is our strike?
The drift is art, politics, and technology unified, the Situationist joyful
struggle continued. Whether through personal reflection or solidarity,
it holds value as a means to contest the data spectacle. That said, it is
also inherently a small-scale, exploratory mode of research. What more
can be accomplished at the sites identified in a drift? The Situationists
and others provide more inspiration on this question, specifically with
détournement and strikes.

Data Détournement

Détournement is a French term meaning rerouting, hijacking, and

diversion, though not diversion as distraction in this context. The Situ-
ationists, particularly Asger Jorn, Jacqueline de Jong, René Viénet, Guy
Debord, and Gil Wolman, conceptualized and practiced détournement
as art, activism, or both simultaneously. According to the definitions
published in the first issue of their bulletin, Internationale Situationniste,
it is:

Short for “détournement of preexisting aesthetic elements.” The

integration of present or past artistic productions into a superior con-
struction of a milieu. In this sense there can be no situationist painting
or music, but only a situationist use of those means. In a more elemen-
tary sense, détournement within the old cultural spheres is a method
of propaganda, a method which reveals the wearing out and loss of
importance of those spheres.
(Situationist International 1958)

In practice, this involves modifying or disassembling/reassembling

a piece of art or media for revolutionary purposes, typically in absurd
or intentionally ironic ways that are more culturally savvy than tradi-
tional state propaganda or political campaign materials. In an age of
mass media, much less today’s easy media editing and internet distribu-
tion, this is a cheap way to make culturally salient political material, and
thereby apply the capitalist spectacle against itself. Debord and Wolman
cite Duchamp’s mustache on the Mona Lisa and Berthold Brecht’s cuts of
Shakespeare’s plays as precursors (Debord and Wolman 1956). A period
Situationist example is La dialectique peut-elle casser des briques? (“Can

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106 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

Figure 4.5 “Cat and Girl are Situationists,” by Dorothy Gambrell. http://catandgirl.com/cat-and-
girl-are-situationists/ (last accessed July 2021). (Shared with author’s permission)

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contesting the data spectacle . 107

Dialectics Break Bricks?”), a dubbed version of the 1972 Hong Kong

martial arts action film Crush, in which the audio has been replaced
with a Marxist, Situationist narrative and references.10 More recent
examples include the many détourned works of Banksy, who integrates
not just popular cultural iconography and political themes, but also loca-
tion-based physical infrastructure, such as light poles, grates, and even
the Israeli border wall into his street art.11
As opposed to just any piece of media modified for political purposes,
Debord and Wolman outline two aspects of specifically Situationist
détournement that are useful in forging modes of data resistance. In
their A User’s Guide to Détournement, they outline a double negation:
first, calling out or removing the sense in which art serves as a com-
modity, then second, negating that negation, creating something that
works towards positive political ends (Debord and Wolman 1956). This
aligns with Walter Benjamin’s earlier call for political purposes in art in
his The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (2008),
but the manner of Situationist détournement is more directly applica-
ble to data. Détourning does not require producing wholly new things,
but something more like a collage: adding elements or stitching differ-
ent elements together so they mean something different, something
more empowering.

Figure 4.6 A billboard in San Francisco détourned by the Billboard Liberation

Front (BLF), a group devoted to “improving outdoor advertising since 1977.”
Its satirical press release, it reads: “‘It’s a win-win-win situation,’ noted the BLF’s
DeCoverly. ‘NSA gets the data it needs to keep America safe, telecom customers
get free services, and AT&T makes a fortune. That kind of cooperation between
the public and private sectors should serve as a model to all of us, and a
harbinger of things to come.’” (“Billboard Liberation Front’s take on AT&T
Case” by dob, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0, https://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by/2.0/#, last accessed July 2021)

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108 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

We propose a broadened and modified Situationist détournement

inspired by these ideas, but that extends beyond art to data. Like art,
data are powerful ingredients in forging new and different knowledges
and understandings of the world. Moreover, it is harder to dismiss data
on purely aesthetic grounds. While communicating data may involve
aesthetic considerations, data can also facilitate material, evidence-based
reasoning. This allows for more empowered subjects, provides grounds
for building solidarity, and may even inform policy in wider contexts. To
détourn data, we must first negate or at least set aside data’s role as com-
modities. Then, those data may be repurposed or remixed, positively
producing something new and different. Combining data in new ways
can be both relatively easy and powerful—which, of course, is much of
why it is so valuable as a commodity.
Data, especially geographic data, are useful outside commodity ex-
change. They have many applications for both broad strategic planning,
such as environmental preservation and urban planning, as well as
everyday actions, such as how to best travel to a friend’s home. Further-
more, geographic data, whether a GPS coordinate or a mailing address,
can serve as a shared index, a key with which to connect multiple dif-
ferent unrelated data sets in space, and often in time as well. For those
attempting to use data to accumulate capital, this is how the individual
that data capitalism can see is built: a credit card’s billing address is
tied to a cell phone number which in turn is tied to the subscription
address for a loan servicer. A quantified profile emerges: this person
buys speculative fiction audiobooks and owes student debt. As we’ll see,
data détournement can also leverage these characteristics through its
double-inversion of relations.
In addition to focusing on data, the détournement we outline here
differs from that of the Situationists in that we set aside their “laws on
the use of détournement” (Debord and Wolman 1956). We argue that
what is and isn’t effective is contingent on cultural and social context.
The right data for the topic, question, or purpose depends on contex-
tual social processes and relations and their many manifestations such
as language or the kinds of technical tools (or data!) available. Moreover,
taking a page from Haraway (1988), it is vital for practitioners to proceed
in a situated manner, aware not only of their own standing in relation to
the data, but the people and living entities those data encode. Finally,
the analyses and knowledge produced must be situated amidst these
particular perspectives. For example, sousveillance data and even some

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contesting the data spectacle . 109

appropriated surveillance data, such as police body cam footage, is ripe

for data détournement.12 Images, short videos, and memes from Black
Lives Matter make clear the power of repurposed, remixed, data in
building a popular movement.

Figure 4.7 A détournement of corporate statements made in support of Black

Lives Matter, created by Chris Franklin, (@Campster) and posted to Twitter
on May 31, 2020. https://twitter.com/Campster/status/1267183124582215680/
photo/1 (last accessed July 2021). (Shared with author’s permission)

At a glance, data détournement resembles those creative hacking

moments that produce innovative technical fixes or software coding
practices that pull code from multiple sources such as GitHub repos-
itories. Not all hacking and coding practices would qualify as data
détournement, but some undoubtedly would. Hacking and coding
projects that do not attempt to commodify the data involved and that
instead creatively apply those data towards productive political or social
outcomes can be understood as forms of data détournement. In addition
to the powerful, political examples above, less serious, playful détourne-
ments of data also exist. For example, the Twitter account @Marxbot1
will respond to any tweets directed towards it with text generated by a
Markov chain trained on Marx’s works.13 This is hardly a serious inter-
vention, but a playful one that explores the entanglements of modern
artificial intelligence and the works of Karl Marx.14
Among geographic data and practices, mapping provides fertile
ground for data détournement. Professor John Pickles of the University

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110 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

of North Carolina at Chapel Hill argues that all mapmaking projects, at

least as we understand maps today, are a sort of collage of data points and
information, assembling multiple data sets and putting them together
to serve a contextually defined intent or purpose (Pickles 2004). For
example, even a relatively straightforward tourist guide map combines
data of the location and characteristics of roads, political boundaries,
topography, water bodies, protected lands, and many other themes. Even
gas stations, McDonald’s, and other corporate sponsors often find them-
selves in ostensibly state-created maps. Each of those kinds of data in a
given area may come from a different source, such as government data
sets or users’ location histories. Only in the visual database of a map are
all of these data sets assembled together in a manner useful for visual
interpretation.
This is not to imply that all mapping is data détournement. For most
of the last five centuries, mapmaking has tended to serve the purposes
of large social institutions, such as governments and corporations,
whose interests often do not align with people on the ground. Examples
include colonial expansion, redlining to facilitate housing discrim-
ination, and demographic profiling. But not all mapmaking facilitates
such processes. Counter-mapping, for example, attempts and succeeds
in flipping these relations: the people who have traditionally been on
the receiving end take control of cartographic tools in order to make
maps for and of themselves (Peluso 1995; Counter Cartographies Col-
lective et al. 2012). As such, many counter-mapping initiatives can be
described as data détournement. Its practitioners tend to work outside
capitalist social relations, combining and remixing data to map in ways
that explore alternative social or environmental possibilities and that can
seek to make those possibilities reality (Dalton and Stallman 2018). In
this way, counter-mapping projects can accomplish more than an exposé
or the actions of a single person. They put data to work to positively
initiate change rather than simply revealing their scandalous existence or
trying to better control the data extracted from individuals.
Counter-mapping projects provide great examples of data détour-
nement and what can be accomplished through it. Some kinds of
counter-mapping attempt to educate readers, building interest, and
possibly a movement, and therein influence cultural formations and pol-
icymaking. This is similar to the individual tactic of making present, but
here operates collectively, both in the data/mapmaking practice and the
broader context of a social movement. One powerful case of such count-

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contesting the data spectacle . 111

er-mapping as data détournement is Inside Airbnb. This small collective

reveals the impact of Airbnb’s gig-economy business model on housing
prices as part of the push for more affordable housing in the United
States and around the world. Specifically, the concern is that as more
landlords list more houses and apartments on Airbnb’s short-term rental
listings, that housing is removed from the residential market, exacerbat-
ing housing shortages and driving up rents. Inside Airbnb confronts this
by scraping all the listings from Airbnb’s website in major world cities
and mapping them. Then it goes on to estimate how often each listing is
occupied, to indicate how much housing is removed from the residential
market by neighborhood.

Figure 4.8 A screenshot of Inside Airbnb’s web map, created by Murray Cox
and Inside Airbnb. (Shared with author’s permission)

These efforts have directly impacted policymaking aimed at better

regulating the Airbnb company. In 2015, Airbnb released a data set of
its New York City listings as part of a public relations campaign. By
comparing that data to its own scraped copy, Inside Airbnb revealed
that the company had removed over a thousand illegal or embarrassing
listings before releasing the data set to the public. The company admitted
to removing the listings, and the New York State legislature subsequently
passed more restrictive regulations aimed at short-term rentals and
Airbnb (Dalton 2020; New York State 2016). This episode is not just
a clear case of détournement, it also demonstrates what data détour-
nement can accomplish in the right situation. Inside Airbnb used the
company’s own data against it by utilizing the data not as a commodity,
but as a political tool.

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112 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

Other counter-mapping cases show how flexible data détournement

can be in this sort of overall strategy. The data-driven organization
Mapping Police Violence collects and maps every death at the hands of a
law enforcement officer in the United States because there is no compre-
hensive governmental database of these deaths.15 The Federal Bureau of
Investigations keeps a list, but additions from other branches of govern-
ment, including local police, are presently voluntary. By assembling all
available information on deaths into a single national database, Mapping
Police Violence and other allied organizations doing similar work show
both the geographic distribution and racialized nature of killings by
police. A similar worldwide case was Civic Media’s 2015 map of tear gas
use. Again, there is no official comprehensive data set, so Civic Media
Hub assembled one to better illustrate the use of this “less than lethal”
crowd control weapon. Perhaps the most prolific group employing this
approach in the United States is the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project
(AEMP), which was first launched to make the wave of evictions in San
Francisco visible and legible. Over time, the collective has expanded to
map a wide variety of topics and places in the struggle for affordable
housing and communities facing gentrification (Graziani and Shi 2020).
AEMP employs a huge variety of data sources, from the US Census and
city records to court proceedings on evictions to stories told by people
who were evicted, ultimately creating their own data through collabora-
tions with allied organizations and communities.
Other counter-mapping groups that engage in data détournement
focus on direct action. In many cases, these kinds of maps are protest
tools, whether as a paper guide for protesting the Republican National

Figure 4.9 A screenshot of the Anti Eviction Mapping Project’s Mapping

Relocation map. (Shared with creators’ permissions)

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contesting the data spectacle . 113

Convention in 2004 or later phone-based map applications. These

kinds of actions can be very powerful on-site, but their impact tends to
fade quickly in the continuing technological arms race of protest and
policing. One influential early application was Sukey, which allowed
student protestors in London to out-flank police efforts at kettling and to
continue protesting based on geographic suggestions from app admins
off-site.16 More recently, pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong used
a crowdsourced, decentralized map application, HKmap.live, to better
coordinate their responses to increasingly militarized police responses.
The Chinese government deemed that map to be such a threat that they
forced Apple to remove HKmap.live from the company’s app store (He
2019), something the company would only do for noted white-suprema-
cist app Parler after some of its users stormed the US Capitol building in
an attempt to overturn a democratic election.17
Like drifting, data détournement is not suitable in all situations or all
cases. In particular, those who use it need to be careful of privacy, given
that such data aren’t necessarily about themselves. Détourning some
data about other people, even in groups, may not be ethically possible
(Dalton and Stallman 2018). In contrast, the last data-derived collective
mode of resistance we’ll cover here starts with one’s own, personal data.

Data Strikes

Strikes are perhaps the most conventional collective mode of resistance

we address here, and yet the least developed in actual practices concern-
ing data. By “strike,” we mean an adapted version of a traditional workers’
strike: denying labor, in this case data-producing practices, to extract
concessions from management and ownership. In this case, the man-
agement and “ownership” are major data companies and those involved
in capitalist pursuits through the acquisition, analysis, and trade of said
data. A data strike involves coordinated withholding of data sufficient to
endanger data companies’ profits to force them to make changes in how
they conduct their business and its impact on the lives of the people from
whom they extract data. One user denying their labor is too minor for
companies to notice, but a coordinated mass of users can spell serious
trouble for such firms.
Admittedly, there is a gray area here between a data strike and a
boycott. An actual data strike could borrow boycott-style elements, such
as ways of organizing to define demands. Nevertheless, we use the word

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114 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

“strike” to emphasize the role of data-producing labor performed by

so-called users and as a call-back to the efforts of Precarias a la Deriva
and their inspiring question: “What is your strike?” Boycotts have a
great history of success, from busing in Montgomery to ending South
Africa’s Apartheid to the labor behind Taco Bell’s tomatoes, among
others (Friedman 2017). Nevertheless, due to users’ role in producing
data value, they play a different role than the word “boycott” tradition-
ally suggests. They create data, and the data are extracted from them,
rather than simply acting as a consumer who pays money for goods or
services such as riding a bus or purchasing a sweater. Professor of digital
media and critic of capitalism Christian Fuchs describes in detail how
everyday digital practices, in particular activity on social media, are
forms of labor. Reading, much less posting on Facebook, searching for
pizza on DoorDash, and using turn-by-turn Google Maps directions
are all actions that directly or indirectly produce data. As we discussed
earlier, data are valuable, which is why companies collect and use them
for their own services and targeting of ads or sell them as a commodity
to other companies. For our purposes here, the crucial point lies in the
value produced through using those services, transforming that usage
into a form of data-producing labor (Fuchs 2014). That, in turn, raises
the possibility of a strike—that moment when enough people withhold
their labor in concert with one another, thereby stopping or restricting
the flow of valuable data enough to force a company to respond. Fur-
thermore, casting users as data-producing workers provides a basis for
building solidarity with other workers in different roles within the tech-
nology industries, such as Twitter interns, Uber drivers, Google coding
contractors, Facebook content moderators, and even full-time Microsoft
software developers.
Among users, withholding labor can take several forms. The most
straightforward is users limiting or even stopping their usage of a
data-driven service, thereby reducing not only that company’s current
business, but its potential growth through that user. Moreover, due to
the socially networked nature of much digital data, users withholding
labor have knock-on effects as it subsequently reduces the performance
and thus the value of data of still-active users. Moreover, the very data
services themselves can become a basis for building solidarity between
strikers and maintaining the strike (Arrieta-Ibarra et al. 2018). Users
can inflict still greater damage by not only withholding their current
and future labor, but by deleting all of their past contributions as well,

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contesting the data spectacle . 115

thereby leveraging the cumulative nature of the value of personal data.

For example, Craig could not only stop using Facebook, he could delete
his account and all associated data as well. This method comes with
greater costs for both the company and the users, for it would make
it harder to start using the service again afterward. Companies tend
to make it difficult for a user to delete all of their data in a service,
presumably to ease re-activation and because even the data of former
users are still valuable. Thus, the potential of this mode of striking by
deleting accounts depends in part on a regulatory environment that
forces companies to actually delete a user’s data when the user requests
it. The EU’s GDPR and California’s CCPA include such requirements,
indicating both the importance of such regulatory regimes and also their
insufficiency without additional collective action. Finally, in certain
cases, even just a well-coordinated threat of a data strike may prompt
concessions from a company under the microscope of potential venture
capital or Wall Street investors.
Even with these strengths, a data strike faces distinct challenges. First,
withholding data from some companies is extremely difficult in today’s
society. Data brokers, credit rating companies, security contractors,
analytics firms, and similar corporations have minimal “consumer”-fac-
ing services and tend to procure data from publicly available sources
and other indirect, hard-to-avoid means. That’s not to say a data strike
against Acxiom, Equifax, or Palantir is impossible, but it will be more
difficult than against Facebook or Twitter. Second, as with a traditional
strike, there are costs for the strikers. A data strike means going without
or finding alternatives to the digital tools and services of everyday life.
That may be easy for Pokémon Go or even Facebook, but services like
Gmail or online bill payment services would be rather more difficult
to set aside for many. Some contractors and gig workers rely on cheap
email, and their businesses are often closely connected to such accounts.
In such cases, it may be necessary to minimize, rather than end, the use
of a given company, for example to bring intentionality back into Uber
Eats orders. Third, a strike requires coordination to get the word out,
build solidarity, encourage adherence, and for negotiation. The everyday,
contextual nature of data labor makes this difficult, but not impossible.
Most scholarship on the potential for data strikes to date focuses on the
idea of a union of users as the mechanism for organizing a strike and
negotiating collectively (Arrieta-Ibarra et al. 2018; Posner and Weyl
2018; Vincent et al. 2019). Building such a union would undoubtedly be

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116 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

a challenge, though quite possibly a fruitful way to extract concessions

from major technology firms. However, cases as diverse as the Situa-
tionists, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Precarias a la
Deriva, Occupy Wall Street, and Black Lives Matter indicate that a union
is not necessary per se for a coordinated social movement to have sig-
nificant effects. Moreover, strikers can employ other internet services to
build solidarity during a strike as long as it isn’t a strike against all data
companies simultaneously. Combined, these factors mean that a data
strike may be difficult, but no strike is easy.
What does a data strike look like? To date, data strike actions are rare,
but both modeling and a few cases provide inspiration for what is possible.
Research by Nicholas Vincent, Brent Hecht, and Shilad Sen attempts to
model the impacts of a strike on algorithmic recommendation systems
for movies, such as Netflix’s suggested viewing. In their initial findings,
a strike in which 30 percent of users deleted their accounts halved the
performance of the recommendation system, and if 37.5 percent of users
participated, the recommender algorithm’s performance for non-strik-
ing users degraded the accuracy of such systems down to what they were
in 1999. Moreover, due to the design of the recommendation algorithm,
some demographics could exert an outsized impact in a strike. For
example, fans of horror movies and users under the age of 18 could cause
disproportionate damage to the system (Vincent et al. 2019).
In practice, data strikes and similar actions thus far are rare, but
not unheard of. One case that hints at the possibilities of a data strike
emerged in early 2021, when WhatsApp announced a new privacy
policy allowing third-party businesses to store WhatsApp chat logs on
the servers of WhatsApp’s corporate owner, Facebook. Moreover, the
update, appearing as a pop-up, was required in order to continue using
the service. Many WhatsApp users reacted negatively, believing this to
be a new violation by Facebook, which already had a shoddy reputa-
tion on privacy. In fact, WhatsApp had long shared some information
with Facebook, such as user phone numbers, while it claimed to not
share the contents of encrypted messages sent on the service. Neverthe-
less, there was a widespread public outcry, including celebrities tweeting
to promote competing messaging services not owned by Facebook. Of
those competitors, Signal became one of the most downloaded apps
on the Android and iOS app stores overnight and its new-user verifi-
cation system crashed under the load. Telegram, close behind, added
25 million new users in the first three days (Statt 2021). WhatsApp and

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contesting the data spectacle . 117

Facebook executives scrambled to contain the damage, postponing the

new privacy policy for months to revamp the rollout, though it was ulti-
mately still mandatory. While not a full data strike, this case provides
some indication of just how fearful major technology companies are of
losing their stream of user data.
#DeleteUber provides another promising case. It was a campaign,
largely on social media, to stop using Uber services, primarily the
rideshare/taxi service, because of objectionable actions by the company.
The hashtag first appeared on January 28, 2017, when President Trump
suddenly announced a new ban on travelers entering the United States
from seven majority Muslim countries, sparking protests, most famously
at New York’s John F. Kennedy airport. Unionized taxi drivers in the city,
in solidarity with the protests, stopped providing service to JFK, but
Uber and Lyft continued to provide airport service and Uber removed
surge pricing, making those rides cheaper. Many rideshare users, eventu-
ally numbering in the hundreds of thousands, reacted to the company’s
apparent acquiescence to the president’s new policy by deactivating or
uninstalling the Uber app from their phones and sharing that action on
social media with the tag #DeleteUber. Although it was estimated that
only 0.5 percent of Uber’s active user base participated at the time, it
grew into yet another negative narrative for the venture capital-backed
company as it prepared for its initial public offering (Shen 2017). While
it is impossible to isolate the full impact of the campaign from Uber’s
other scandals of the period, #DeleteUber was certainly a contribut-
ing factor to CEO Travis Kalanick’s exit from the company in June of
that year. Furthermore, during the campaign, Lyft’s new app downloads
outpaced Uber’s for the first time, even as Lyft also continued to provide
service to JFK and didn’t remove surge pricing, meaning it likely profited
more than Uber from airport service that night (Lee 2017). No strike is
perfect.
A data strike is difficult because of the way data companies exploit not
only formal labor, but also our reproductive labor practices, and even
our play. They are part of our communications, our calendars, our nav-
igation, and our shopping lists. Confronting that takes creativity. The
flights from WhatsApp and #DeleteUber were spontaneous, decentral-
ized, and short-lived, but still had some impact. Not all data strikes need
follow this form. Some could incorporate tactics such as active resistance
practices of blocking data collection and coordinate them in a more col-

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118 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

lective, concerted, campaign. What could be accomplished with more

organization or clearer demands?

Precarias a la Deriva asked, “What is your strike?”, and in so doing, pow-

erfully demonstrated that the positive outcomes of a collective mode of
resistance need not be a collective bargaining agreement or contract.
Through their struggle, they built solidarity, mutual aid, and shared
survival strategies, making their situation more livable together. Con-
fronting data capitalism is much the same. Voluntary changes by major
firms would be great, and actual, enforced regulations even better. But in
practice, collective resistance to the relations of data will be realized in
everyday life through methods such as drifting, détournement, strikes,
and likely through other creative means impossible to imagine now.
Initiating change is far too important to be left to policymakers and
corporate boards. In Precarias a la Deriva’s words:

[T]he strike appears to us as an everyday and multiple practice: there

will be those who propose transforming public space, converting
spaces of consumption into places of encounter and play preparing a
“reclaim the streets,” those who suggest organizing a work stoppage in
the hospital when the work conditions don’t allow the nurses to take
care of themselves as they deserve, those who decide to turn off their
alarm clocks, call in sick and give herself a day off as a present, and
those who prefer to join others in order to say “that’s enough” to the cli-
ents that refuse to wear condoms … there will be those who oppose the
deportation of miners from the “refuge” centers where they work, those
who dare—like the March 11th Victims’ Association (la asociación
de afectados 11M)—to bring care to political debate proposing mea-
sures and refusing utilizations of the situation by political parties, those
who throw the apron out the window and ask why so much cleaning?
And those who join forces in order to demand that they be cared for as
quadriplegics and not as “poor things” to be pitied, as people without
economic resources and not as stupid people, as immigrants without
papers and not as potential delinquents, as autonomous persons and
not as institutionalized dependents. There will be those who …
(Precarias a la Deriva 2005)

… put down their phones and share real, unmediated human contact.
There will be those who together make their data their own. There will
be those who …

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Pluto Press

Chapter Title: Our Data Are Us, So Make Them Ours

Book Title: Data Power

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5
Our Data Are Us, So Make Them Ours

In their designs and assumptions, algorithms shape the world in

which they’re used. To decide whether to include or exclude a data
input, or to weight one feature over another are not merely technical
questions—they’re also political propositions about what a society can
and should be like.
(Amoore 2020b)

[Y]our scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could

that they didn’t stop to think if they should.
(Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park, 1993)

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, both technology boosters and

many politicians turned towards spatial data as a potential savior. Given
all that our phones can do, how could they not save us from this too?
The promise of technology burned ever brighter as multiple govern-
ments rolled out applications that would use spatial data to track when,
how, and if users came in contact with anyone with the virus. Of course,
as is so often the case, these didn’t work. Privacy concerns shunted some
projects into the dustbin, lack of adoption sank others. Regardless of the
reason, ultimately the applications simply didn’t work. As we consider
the pandemic, it’s worth recognizing why these systems failed and will
continue to do so into the future.
Yes, mobile phones track our daily movements at certain temporal
and spatial scales, and yes, services on those phones facilitate shifts in
how we move through and come to know the spaces and places of our
lives. However, even as these data come to stand for us in a variety of
algorithmic and data-based systems, the fundamental goal of these data
are not to fully capture our experiences, but rather to render us calcula-
ble within systems of capitalist consumption. The temporal and spatial
accuracy of these systems are designed to better target users for adver-
tisements or predict major purchases, to decide when and if someone is
ready for a mortgage (and at what rate), to evaluate potential job appli-

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120 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

cants … and none of these intrinsically capture the nature of intimate,

physical contact by which a disease spreads.
Elsewhere, we have called this “the epistemological leap of big data”:
from a calculated representation of an individual meant to sell them
socks to the full, lived experience of that individual’s life (Dalton and
Thatcher 2015). The individual our spatial data can see is the individual
capital wants to see, an algorithmically sorted consumptive bracket able
to be called forth in a predictable manner. This is not the full social life
of humans, nor does it seek to be, and as such, attempting to force one to
represent the other will inevitably fail.
COVID-19 gave the world an opportunity to confront this failure, to
see the stark gulf that exists between the representation of an individ-
ual through their spatial data sorted through various algorithms, and
the full serendipitous practices that make up daily life which constitute
our selves. In this chapter, we tie together the threads woven throughout
the book to present one means of seizing this opportunity, of making the
data that are us into our own.

(not quite) against the algorithm

Unable to have students sit their A-level exams due to the pandemic,1
the UK government turned to Ofqual, an exams regulator, to provide
an algorithm to assign grades to pupils in England. Ofqual, in an unsur-
prising move, kept the majority of its algorithms’ inner workings as
proprietary secrets.
As anyone reading this far into the book can guess, a fiasco ensued.
Without diving fully into the technical workings of Ofqual’s algorithm,
the crux of the issue revolved around how the algorithm used students’
circumstances to automatically adjust grades. These circumstances
included aspects outside the students’ control, such as the achievement of
students from their school in previous years. Ofqual’s algorithm decided
on the most likely highest and lowest grades for each class, then force-
fitted students’ scores across that range. No matter how hard a student had
studied or how hard teachers had worked to improve a school, Ofqual’s
algorithm would not (and by design could not) take these factors into
account. Predictably, students from disadvantaged areas were assigned
lower scores. Ofqual also, naturally, removed students’ ability to dispute
grades.

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our data are us, so make them ours . 121

At time of writing, the uproar continues to swell and the UK govern-

ment has promised to reverse course and use an approach based upon
individual teachers’ estimations of likely scores for their pupils. Never-
theless, the damage is done. University acceptance letters have already
been sent out. Oxford University, for example, has stated it is “unable
to offer further places to state school applicants affected by the grading
fiasco because of a cap on numbers imposed by the government” (Adams
and Stewart 2020).
Regardless of how this issue is ultimately (not) resolved, Durham
University Professor of Geography Louise Amoore writes that protests
against it illustrate a shift in how society understands the danger of algo-
rithms and data:

Resistance to algorithms has often focused on issues such as data pro-

tection and privacy. The young people protesting against Ofqual’s
algorithm were challenging something different. They weren’t focused
on how their data might be used in the future, but how data had been
actively used to change their futures. The potential pathways open to
young people were reduced, limiting their life chances according to an
oblique prediction.
(Amoore 2020b)

This echoes the call found in Virginia Eubanks’ Automating Inequal-

ity (2018) to heed how data and algorithms are used on the poor and
non-white populations, not only for the sake of justice, but also because
they already live in the future. How those without the means to resist are
forced to accept data extraction and algorithmic governance is a stark
template for how it will and already has crept into wider daily discourses,
particularly in light of a pandemic that’s best addressed through con-
tact-tracing (tracking). The A-level fiasco is simply one more in a litany
of examples of algorithms and the data through which they operate
failing to recognize the particular in light of the general. As is so often
the case, this burden fell disproportionately upon those who were already
disadvantaged. If a student was from a poor school, they were likely to
be graded downwards.
Yet we seek a different path than Amoore’s claim that “‘Ditch the
algorithm’ is the future of political protest.” We instead call for a politics
that resituates data and algorithms within the purview of liberatory expe-
rience and solidarity. Neither algorithms nor data are ever neutral, but

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122 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

nor do algorithms intrinsically “clos[e] off spaces for public challenges

that are vital to democracy” (Amoore 2020b). Rather, we find that their
current uses within discriminatory, capitalist, profit-seeking systems
lead to that dark end. In these concluding moments, we summarize three
key themes that begin to resituate spatial technologies within the radical
praxis of the everyday.

informed daily use, a practice-based perspective

Ultimately, this book asks: what are the liberatory ideas and actions, the
politics of emancipation, that can or might occur with new spatial tech-
nologies? In An Essay on Liberation, Marcuse (1969, 12) asks:

Is it still necessary to repeat that science and technology are the great
vehicles of liberation, and that it is only their use and restriction in the
repressive society which makes them into vehicles of domination?”

First, it is necessary to acknowledge that the very premise of this

question is not, nor has it ever really been, universally accepted. Whose
science and whose technology matter not simply in the abstract,
utopic sense of communal control, but also in the very ways that epis-
temology and ontology demarcate violence against alternative ways of
knowing and being-in-the-world. There is much to be said about the
(potential) incompatibility of western scientific rationality and other
ways of knowing.2 At the same time, such scientific rationality is in part
built from other knowledges. As Professor of American Cultures Lisa
Nakamura has eloquently argued, the very construction of these tech-
nologies has leveraged both the imagery and bodies of indigenous and
other peoples (see, for example, Nakamura 2014).
We return to Marcuse’s question with some sincerity, détourning it a
bit, to ask how we might remake systems of technical exploitation into
vehicles of liberation—not against the algorithm, but a politics with it.
We opened this book by suggesting that we live within the ruins of a
technocapitalist system that has denied our humanity and destroyed our
environment, and throughout it we have demonstrated how that system
continues to instantiate itself as perpetually new and forever unfore-
seen as a means of obscuring critical inquiry and avoiding meaningful
regulation.

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our data are us, so make them ours . 123

Where brilliant legal scholars, like Frank Pasquale (2015) and others,
see a path forward through regulation and legislation, we see that as
another utopic approach to a declaration of “science and technology” as
inherently liberatory in potential. Within existing capitalist systems, the
asymmetric relations between individual people and tech firms are such
that piecemeal approaches, while obviously laudatory, will fail across
and between the scales at which these firms operate. Uber, for example,
is well known to purposefully ignore existing laws and regulations that
would adversely affect its operations up until (and even after) it is legally
challenged and forced to comply. The massive spending on California
Proposition 22 in 2020, which effectively removed the right to minimum
wage, sick leave, and other basic protections from gig-economy workers,
demonstrates how regulation can and will be subverted by large, monied
interests (see Chapter 4 for greater discussion).
While continuing to press for regulation and legislation, we suggest
also turning towards other practices—practices that reshape how we
engage with spatial data in our daily lives and simultaneously use said
technologies to push towards wider-scale radical political change. The
first step, we’ve argued, is to inform our daily device use with a radical
praxis.
Geographer Greg Downey (2002) used the history and plight of
telegraph messenger boys within the United States to illustrate the long
history of labor exploitation that always undergirds technologies. More
recently, the work of internet geographer Mark Graham and his col-
leagues has well illustrated how similar processes continue within the
so-called gig economy (Graham et al. 2017). In light of this, in Chapter
1 we leveraged the works of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
thinkers to demonstrate how new sociotechnical regimes are entwined
with capitalist development and exploitation. Our goal in focusing on
Heidegger, Debord, and Marcuse as “paths out” is not to suggest that they
are the only notable scholars in this area, but instead to draw forward
through the intervening decades a specific set of pertinent theoretical
questions and critiques.
This informs our action. At its most fundamental, these ideas simply
refuse to allow Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, or any others to
obfuscate spatial data exploitation. We can and do know, and through
that knowing are able to make informed decisions on, how we do (and
do not) make use of spatial data. This is the first call to action of this

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124 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

book: pause and be intentional in your use of digital technologies to

the degree that you are able. As Chapter 3 outlined, “escape” is mostly
a fiction offered to the elite, a conspicuous marker of (in)consumption;
but, intentionality in use is open to all.

back to a (data) future

The second call to action for our practices of informed use is for a (re)
turn to détourned, digitally informed practices. Following from the work
of Precarias a la Deriva’s question, “What is your strike?”, we must also
ask ourselves (and our data selves) “Where is our strike?” Within the
situated entanglements of a data-suffused world, where are the places
and moments for potential resistance, for the building of solidarities?
If we can intentionally understand our use of devices and our produc-
tion of data through considerations of acceptance, resistance, making
present, and escape (Chapter 3), then emergent strategies of resistance
can begin to be formed via new acts of dérive, détournement, and ulti-
mately, strikes (Chapter 4).
Such actions begin with the exploratory, such as the dérive. By inten-
tionally opening for consideration the data that constitute ourselves
within larger systems, we are able to unpack the moments, spaces, and
even peoples that are elided in said systems. Whether this is something
as banal as the path to a coffee shop or as profound as the oft-unmarked
sites where large-scale computation occurs, the dérive unifies technol-
ogy, politics, and self for consideration and contestation. Détournement
takes data both from the drift and other sources and repurposes them,
subverting the spectacle back upon itself in a way that calls attention
to and inspires resistance. From creative hacking of corporate APIs
and the creation of maps like Inside Airbnb to the reflexive, situated
politics of groups like the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, data détour-
nement draws much from the practices of counter-data.3 These efforts
lead us back to the question, “Where is our strike?” Where Precarias
a la Deriva found ways to mobilize without traditional forms of labor
support, data strikes call us to do the same in the face of technical
systems imbricated with many of our daily practices. If moments like
#DeleteUber demonstrate the potential power carried in intentional
use of technology, dérive, détournement, and strikes can help us realize
them more.

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our data are us, so make them ours . 125

already-existing politics and techno-utopianism

Even as digital technologies reshape society, a popular theoretical stance

within the western critical tradition over the last 30 years has been to
suggest that we live within a “post-political” world. In a simplified form,
these arguments take Margaret Thatcher’s4 insistence of “no alterna-
tive” to heart: the end of the Cold War signaled a radical curtailing of
what can be thought and what can be done as a broad politics of (neolib-
eral) consensus emerged. Post-political theorists argue that true politics
exists only in moments of rupture from what already is, offering radical
alternatives that, in a post-political frame, are always, if not already, inev-
itably co-opted.
To a degree, there is much value in such thinking. Occupy Wall
Street was a moment of rupture that has become a slogan purchasable
on t-shirts. But these ideas go too far in insisting on a purity test for
what counts as political, one that relies upon a fundamentally antago-
nistic relation between what is and what might be. As geographer James
McCarthy (2013) has quipped, “We Have Never Been ‘Post-political.’”
To suggest that current society and culture are non-political mistakes
western state-scale power relations for a universal, hegemonic politics
while simultaneously eliding the very real, daily practices that constitute
politics across multiple scales and through multiple times.
Spatial data and the algorithms which analyze them clearly operate
asymmetrically on users in ways which enable and constrain what can be
known and done with and in the world. Cynical readings of data and their
analyses can easily place them as yet another tool delimiting political
possibilities, organized predominantly under the banner of multina-
tional corporations and myriad apps in lieu of traditional state actors.
However, they can also facilitate emergent means to subvert, control,
and contest current regimes and relations. That is, after all, the point of
this book—not simply to interpret, but to change our relations to spatial
data and technologies. Such changes occur through daily practices and
emergent strategies.
Geographic technologies can surely be used in moments of political
rupture, such as when pro-democracy protestors in Hong Kong used
mesh networks to avoid kettling efforts by security forces. Under such
circumstances, certain technologies can serve profoundly liberatory
roles by allowing for communication and coordination beyond the
limits of participants’ bodies and in the face of overwhelming use of

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126 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

force by the state. Nevertheless, as important as these uses are in specific

moments, we cannot lose sight of the influences upon and uses of spatial
data and technologies in everyday contexts. Within the banal moments
of our lives, we can and must also put geospatial data to work in ways
that move towards and further the causes of radical political change.
There is a certain brand of technological optimism, even solutionism,
that looks to technological advances, and often the industry titans behind
large tech firms, as potential saviors. Who will stop climate change? Elon
Musk’s solar-powered houses! How will we defeat COVID? Apple and
Google have an app for that! Of course, as the failures of COVID-19
tracking apps across the world demonstrate, this brand of techno-utopi-
anism is a form of magical thinking. An Apple Watch cannot accurately
replace human contact-tracing efforts for COVID-19 because it was not
materially designed to do so. The ways in which it represents the body,
the ways that it tracks it, are ways designed to enable and encourage
certain forms of consumptive practices, not to represent the whole self
and the many physical, embodied entanglements of daily practice. Once
more, the gap between the individual that capital can see and the indi-
vidual’s being-in-the-world presents an insurmountable problem for
technology designed to produce profit.
Rather than turn towards the magic of technologies and the billion-
aire titans that currently steer them, we must turn to one another, to
our shared humanity, and to the politics of the everyday. We live in the
ruins of a world wrought by the global pursuit of capital accumulation,
a world still beholden to the extraction and consumption of fossil fuels
even as every indicator suggests this will cause social and ecological dev-
astation at heretofore unseen scales. Climate change, white supremacy,
toxic masculinity, and infectious diseases push at the limits of neoliberal
concepts of personal responsibility as, over and over again, fantasies of
individual control fall in the face of such systemic crises. But that doesn’t
mean there are no alternatives. Rather, intentional individual actions, as
we note above, must link together to form something larger; an emergent
politics that builds different kinds of data regimes from the ground up.
We must find our strikes and exercise them.

we5 live in the gaps

It may seem counterintuitive to insist on both the asymmetrical

relationship between individuals and large technology firms as well as

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our data are us, so make them ours . 127

the need to foster intentional use and therein emergent technological

solidarities. Threading that needle is not only possible, but necessary.
Without losing sight of how data tools are currently designed to predict,
exploit, and delimit daily life, we must also recognize the profound
opportunities they can open for us.
The processes of capitalism require an ever-expanding market, and
that currently includes corkscrewing inwards, ever-increasing marketi-
zation of our thoughts, our attention, and our bodies. This process has
an expansionist, totalizing tendency; it is not a static, complete totality.
New technologies suffuse outwards across space and inwards into bodies
and daily movements, attempting to capture ever more personal time
and energy, attempting to guide and shape daily experiences. Nev-
ertheless, due to its nature as a dynamic, imperfect process, there are
still gaps and cracks. There are still moments of privacy, moments of
personal serendipity. Yelp may guide us to the nearest Thai restaurant
and recommend a certain dish, but it does not yet control how we greet
a friend we meet there nor how much we tip our server. Perhaps it will
nudge the latter, and certainly apps have emerged that attempt to do so
(Uber Eats, Instacart), but even as these technologies attempt to establish
norms, some gaps remain and new ones open. What’s counted counts,
but that is not and can never be all that is. A mesh network to avoid
kettling, a counter-map that facilitates affordable housing—technology
can be détourned, it can be repurposed. We live in those cracks, in those
gaps between what is and what might be.
This builds to our third call, to find and live in the cracks, to widen
them, through acts of intentionality, repurposing, and resistance. First,
we must be intentional in our use of digital technologies. In part, this
means conscious decision-making in how we do and do not use devices,
an understanding of the stakes and a knowing attempt to delimit our own
exploitation. Intentionality also means refusing to allow just-so stories of
techno-utopianism to efface the underlying motivations and very real
histories of failure. “Who could have known?” has been used far too long
to abdicate from any responsibility by technology firms even as, in the
same breath, they promise a new suite of solutions to problems of their
own creation. “Download our ad-blocker!” Second, our intentionality
should be aimed towards the active deconstruction and reconstruc-
tion of spatial data in our lives. We must find our strikes, whether they
be deleting an app to highlight Uber’s complicity in strike breaking
(Siddiqui 2017) or building coordination and mutual aid among pre-

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128 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

carious users and gig workers. We must explore and better know our
own data to make them ours, to repurpose them in ways that build sol-
idarities with others. Greater regulation may help, but the methods of
dérive, détournement, and strikes are directly useful, even as they are not
intended to be the only techniques.
Putting the first two calls into practice helps produce the spaces and
places of the third. Living in the gaps is not a total escape. It is situated,
always incomplete and temporary, and yet it does provide benefits. It
facilitates greater agency, not only over data, but through those data to
a broader being in the world. After all, the value of going places to relax
on a day off is not just the production of a location history; it is the expe-
rience of being there. It can also allow for greater solidarity, rather than
the constant gamesmanship of marketized relationships, particularly in
personal relationships of the everyday.
Living in the gaps is not a call for everyone to learn how to code as
some sort of panacea for public good. Being able to program is only one
of many means of living in the cracks. While it can be useful to learn
to write code, far too often it is forced into curriculums and careers as
some modern-day tonic to cure the ills of rampant data capitalism. In the
politics of resistance to spatial data, there is no room for a techno-elit-
ist vanguard. Rather, there are a panoply of situated means by which to
act with, through, and against spatial data and the algorithms which sort
daily life.
One example is part of this book. We developed and will continue
to maintain DataResistance (https://github.com/DataResistance) as
a collaborative public repository. It is a space for both ourselves and
readers to share not just code and computational tools, but also tech-
niques and stories of life in the cracks. From the ability to create maps of
public running routes in a city to guides for personal data dérives (both
available at time of writing), the repository is not an arcane location for
cryptic Python code, but a living, breathing document of our struggles.
While we encourage every reader to consider participating, that’s hardly
necessary. It is but one space of consideration, one example of a praxis
that must run through all of life.

our data are us, so make them ours

Multiple subcultures indicate a growing interest in making the data that

surrounds us tangible and visceral. One craft-based approach is knitting

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our data are us, so make them ours . 129

temperature blankets, blankets in which the color of each row of knitted

yarn represents the temperature at a geographic location over a time
period. Table 5.1 specifies a range of colors for a temperature blanket
for Tacoma, Washington, USA.6 Each color corresponds with a tempera-
ture range. The blanket emerges by knitting one or two rows of yarn each
day for a year in the color determined by the closest weather station.
After a year, or other period of time, the blanket reflects the shifting
patterns of weather in the region, with each row of color recording a day
of temperature data. This is but one example of a larger trend in which
individuals and groups use physical crafting to represent, visualize, and
interpret data produced in their lives. Alice Thudt, Uta Hinrichs, and
Sheelagh Carpendale have termed this practice “data craft” and see it as
“a way to create meaningful physical mementos based on digital records
of personal and shared experiences” (Thudt et al. 2017, 2). It is meant
to both integrate and make present digital data in everyday life and to
inspire reflection upon the creation and interpretation of these data.

Table 5.1 Suggested yarn colors for a temperature blanket based on Tacoma, WA

Temperature (°F) Color

>101 Crimson
91–100 Raspberry
81–90 Tropical Pink
71–80 Radiant Yellow
61–70 Mint
51–60 Forest
41–50 Sea Blue
33–40 Orchid
<32 Mixed Berry

These sorts of projects embody a personal intentionality and reflective

practice around digital data, but they also highlight the selective nature
of data. Why this color for that temperature? Why track calls to one’s
parents instead of one’s lover(s)? How many days to record? In the case of
a temperature blanket, these are all personal decisions made by a friend
of the authors who knits, but they also reflect the limits and importance
of quantification. In these projects, the crafters choose, within the limits
of the technology, what to record and how to visualize and interpret it—
in short, how to carry it with them in daily life. In regimes of spatial
data, those decisions are predominantly made by large, profit-seek-

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130 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

ing corporations in ways that reduce lived experience into a stream of

exchangeable commodities. Data on individuals that like pro wrestling
and kittens are worth $1 per 1,000 email contacts, whereas data on indi-
viduals who like monster truck rallies and opera are worth $2.
In both the case of the blankets and the tech companies, the data are
individualized. But only in the crafter’s case does the individual choose
what data and how they are represented. The spectacular individual that
spatial data constructs is an individual made of the data produced by and
for the generation of profit. However, they are produced through much
of the same sorts of data that data crafters use to make far more personal,
reflexive objects. Data crafting projects, data hacking projects, data
dérives, and other opportunities to explore and take control of the data
produced through our digital devices hold promise for improving our
lives and making society more equitable. Spatial data technologies are
impoverished by a one-dimensional pursuit of profit. They have much to
offer, for they allow us to reach beyond the limits of our senses to expe-
rience and come into contact with new knowledges, places, peoples, and
ways of living. The data we produce are us, and the future demands that
we make them ours.

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Pluto Press

Chapter Title: Epilogue

Book Title: Data Power

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Epilogue

The precise algorithms, apps, and data formats through which we engage
the world are constantly evolving, as noted throughout this book. A
tactic that works today may be co-opted into a value-producing act of
data dispossession in the future; an app or API may disappear or change
its terms of service in new and unexpected ways. Even now, despite
claims of the end of moving fast and breaking stuff, venture capitalists
continue to bet on the ability of any given startup to successfully disrupt
and envelop existing modes of living and social relations.
This book was conceived of during the summer and fall of 2019, and
written predominantly during the long pandemic-inflected months of
2020 between periods of no childcare. As such, it necessarily focuses on
moments and examples that came before that time; but the fundamen-
tal relations between spatial data, individual, and society remain. Apple’s
new (at time of writing) iOS 14.5 helps to illustrate this point. iOS 14.5
introduces a new feature that requires all applications to ask for explicit
permission from the user in order to track any data between applica-
tions or websites. In response, Facebook and Instagram have begun to
warn users that only through allowing tracking can they “help keep [the
services] free” (Haslam 2021).
While this beautifully illustrates what “free” means in the context of
the social media giant, it’s also rather beside the point with respect to
larger structures of data dispossession. First, there’s the obvious tension
between Apple’s attempts to keep users and their data within Apple’s
monopolistic ecosystem and Facebook’s requirement to extract that
self-same data for its own profits. It’s not that Apple devices aren’t gen-
erating huge swathes of data, it’s that they aren’t letting their competitors
access that data without your consent. Second, even as Apple nominally
steps up its transparency with respect to data privacy, new services like
Amazon Sidewalk come online to offer exciting new moments of data
dispossession.1 The technologies change, the capitalist imperatives don’t.
This is why, again and again, we cannot allow the terms of our engage-
ment with technology to be solely dictated by profit motives. In Dear

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132 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

Science, professor of Gender Studies and pillar of black geographies

Katherine McKittrick outlines the importance in no uncertain terms:

[Algorithms] are anticipatory computations that tell us what we

already know, but in the future. If we want different or better or
more just futures and worlds, it is important to notice what kind of
knowledge networks are already predicting our futures.
(McKittrick 2021, 116)2

While we have not focused explicitly on race, the tendency of current

algorithms and data to simultaneously perpetuate and elide exploitation
and injustices bears repeating. Better, more equitable alternatives are not
built-in or guaranteed. If we allow what is to determine what might be, we
are simply reinforcing an existence defined by the ability to consume and
predicated upon denying humanity to those who do not conform to that
white, patriarchal, wealthy norm. We must do better. The priorities that
drive the design and structure of technology and data are social choices.
They could reflect other social imperatives and fulfill users’ needs differ-
ently. The use of technologies, while more limited, also allows for limited
considered choice. And through resistance and consideration, not just in
theory or isolated moments, but through everyday life, we can do better.

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Pluto Press

Chapter Title: Notes

Book Title: Data Power

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Notes

introduction

1. In this book, we consider data as a generic concept to be plural, but specific

ideological instantiations—such as “big data”—to be singular. Grammati-
cally, we have followed professor Anna Lauren Hoffman’s suggestion of
replacing every instance of data with “giraffes” to aid in number agreement.
Any remaining mistakes are our own.
2. This interpretation of the Frankfurt School is not universally accepted even
with respect to its use with geospatial technologies (see, for example, Eades’
(2010) response to Kingsbury and Jones). We return to and develop this
complicated intersection of ideas in the first chapter.
3. For more on this case, see Chapter 2.
4. XML itself is an application of the Standardized Generalized Markup
Language (SGML), developed in the 1980s, which is, in turn, derived from
IBM’s Generalized Markup Language (GML) first created in the 1960s, the
point here not being some pedantic, arcane walk through the histories of
markup languages for digital documents, but to once more stress that the
roots of a given technology are often much deeper and far more entangled
than popular narratives might suggest.

1 life in the age of big data

1. Parts of this chapter may be found in Thatcher’s 2014 dissertation “Mobile

Navigation Applications: Hidden Ontologies, Epistemic Limits, and Tech-
nological Teleology,” but the contents here have been heavily expanded and
altered for accessibility by a general audience.
2. In his work, a new Satanic Mill can be found in the “computerized prison”
which promises “prison[s] managed like an orderly factory” in which
subjects are driven from point to point within the system to produce a pre-
dictable, orderly system of “great efficiency and scale” (Jefferson 2020, 78).
Here, we extend this analogy in line with the ways in which data capitalism
attempts to structure, predict, and control everyday life through processes
of data dispossession. Any misapplication of his precise and excellent point
is our own.
3. For an excellent discussion on Technological Determinism and Karl Marx,
see Bimber (1990). After surveying how others have written on Marx’s
views, Bimber concludes that Marx’s view of technology does not make an
ontological claim on the universal laws of nature and therefore is not truly

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134 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

deterministic. Sayer’s Capitalism and Modernity: An Excursus on Marx and

Weber (1991) also explored this area.
4. See also Weber (2008 [1891]).
5. This view puts him at odds with some of the writings of Engels and, much
later, Althusser (see, for example, Althusser 1962). This concept will become
far more important as we begin to discuss the emergent logics of algorith-
mic approaches to big data.
6. In the same paragraph of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism as
the previous quote (Weber 2005[1930], 123), Weber wonders whether the
world and those who live within it might remain so trapped “until the last
ton of fossilized coal is burn[ed].” In his own oblique way, Weber nods at the
second contradiction of capitalism as environmentally unsustainable as a
passing note (see O’Connor 1998).
7. While we retain the original language’s gender within citations, we use
“they” as a gender-neutral third-person singular and plural pronoun in our
own text.
8. Although outside the purpose of this work, readers familiar with the
Frankfurt School might note that a major point of contention between
Benjamin and Theodor Adorno lay in their disagreement over the impor-
tance of popular versus avant-garde art as revolutionary tools. Adorno
insisted that Benjamin overstated the significance of the proletariat as
producers of works of significance. Letters between the two directly address-
ing this can be found in Adorno et al. (2007 [1977]).
9. This can be found perhaps most clearly in Marx’s discussion of the dual
character of labor embodied in linen and coats in Chapter 1 of Capital
Volume 1 (Marx 1990 [1848], 131).
10. The key theoretical movement here is to see the “culture industry” as equiv-
alent to a factory in terms of what it produces and how it organizes labor.
However, instead of widgets, it produces an increasingly standardized set of
cultural goods such as movies, magazines, radio and television shows, and
so on, producing, as Bruce Springsteen notes, a situation in which we have
57 channels, but nothin’ is on.
11. A more general lament for the reduction of science to neoliberal counting,
and a plea and pathway to alternatives, can be found in Isabelle Stengers’
Another Science Is Possible: A Manifesto for Slow Science (2018).
12. Although the exact number and nature of the contradictions of capitalism
are debated (see, inter alia, O’Connor 1991; Harvey 2015), the “first” one
identified by Marx refers to the fact that as capital exercises power over labor
in order to increase profits (for example, by lowering wages or reducing the
number of employees), workers are increasingly unable to purchase those
very goods.
13. Listing these separately is in no way meant to imply they are not intercon-
nected, entwined braids of the same processes.
14. See Mitchell and Trawny (2017) for an engaged discussion on the uses and
meanings of Heidegger’s philosophy in light of its anti-semitism.

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notes . 135

15. It is a foundational part of Feenberg’s thought on technology that we covered

earlier in this chapter.
16. Writing for MIT Technology Review, Karen Hao (2020) has an excellent
summary of the matter.
17. Picking apart this quote has become something of a shibboleth amongst
those writing critically on data and technology, yet—at the same time—its
underlying ideology remains popular amongst mainstream data scientists.
For more discussion on the role this quote has played in critical discourse,
see the introduction of Thatcher et al.’s Thinking Big Data in Geography
(2018).
18. In The Ticklish Subject, Žižek (1999, 62) provides a surprisingly succinct
definition of being-in-the-world as an individual’s existence within a
“concrete and ultimately contingent life-world.”
19. In Chapter 4, we develop the techniques of data dérive and data détour-
nement, suggesting their importance in practices that build shared
solidarities with and through the data spectacle.
20. And that of his students (Feenberg 1999).
21. Ruser later corrected that it was based upon 3 billion GPS points: https://
twitter.com/Nrg8000/status/957488086144892928 (last accessed July 2021).
22. https://twitter.com/nrg8000/status/957318498102865920 (last accessed
July 2021).
23. For non-British readers, the Home Office is the government agency/
ministry charged with immigration enforcement within the United
Kingdom’s borders, akin to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)
in the United States.
24. Data on non-EU nationals were not published.
25. We introduced this term in “Data Colonialism through Accumulation by
Dispossession” (Thatcher et al. 2016), drawing on Morgan Robertson’s “The
Nature that Capital Can See” (2004).
26. An API is a standardized means by which one software program can incor-
porate data or services from another. For example, weather forecasting
websites often include an embedded Google Map (provided through the
Google Maps API) with the forecaster’s weather data plotted within Google’s
map. As the name suggests, it provides an interface through which code
from different sources can communicate. An API specifies both what can be
asked and the format in which the answer will come. It is a means of abstrac-
tion through which an individual program doesn’t need to know how an
analysis is conducted, just what the results are. Common analogies include
the menu in a restaurant (an order usually does not specify all of the ingre-
dients or how they are cooked) or managing a bank (a customer often does
not know the password to the vault, but can access their money from it).
27. The full report has been referred to as “The Drone Papers” and is available
at https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/ (last accessed July 2021).
28. In an interesting twist, the change to the Foursquare API affected other
Foursquare-based applications. For example, Assisted Serendipity, an early
application that simply displayed the ratio of male-to-female check-ins at

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136 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

nearby establishments was also disabled by this change. Assisted Serendipity

had previously been specifically mentioned by Foursquare’s Chief Executive
Officer (CEO) as precisely the type of application they wished to see built
using their API. See Thatcher (2014) for a more intensive look at the impli-
cations of this process, but don’t feel too badly for the developers of Assisted
Serendipity, as their next start-up was purchased by Airbnb.

2 what are our data, and what are they worth?

1. This does illustrate the ineffective nature of arguments for corporations
paying individuals for their data, so-called “data dividends.”
2. Grand View Research, a market intelligence firm, has placed the geospatial
analytics market at north of $50 billion per annum in 2018, and growing
rapidly (Grand View Research 2018).
3. We say “people,” not just “users,” because many companies, from Facebook
to Palantir, extract and analyze data even from those who do not use their
services.
4. In a piece in The Atlantic, Ingrid Burrington (2016b) similarly observed:
“Networks build atop networks.”
5. In a 2015 study, Durairajan et al. found that co-occurrence of fiber-optic
cable with road or rail infrastructure was high throughout the network, but
highest was co-occurrence with both road and rail. In other words, where
highways and rail lines converge, so too does fiber-optic cable.
6. In an interesting, informed piece, Chuncheng Liu (2019), a PhD candidate
in Sociology and Science and Technology Studies at University of Cali-
fornia San Diego, argues that the social credit systems of China are best
understood as symbolic systems of performative power that are best contex-
tualized within the political and social histories of the People’s Republic of
China.
7. Nebulous “terrorist no-fly lists” exist in many western countries as well,
often with the exact criteria for being placed upon or removed from them
shrouded in state secrecy and bureaucracy.
8. Carpenter v. United States (2018) and United States v. Jones (2012).
9. One of the more insidious ideological moves by the Chinese state was
reframing its surveillance for COVID-19 in terms of a war against the
disease. A Reuters report by Cate Cadell (2020), features quotes emphasiz-
ing a “war situation” and the need for “war-time thinking.” In the US, “war
on terror” can stand in as a “black mirror,” making clear how such frames
allow for the normalization of increased surveillance with an enemy that is
both invisible and unvanquishable.

3 existing everyday resistances

1. For collective actions, see Chapter 4.
2. These three examples follow the tale of British Airways’ 2018 data breach.
First, the breathless explanations of “how,” then the regulatory authorities’
action, and finally the consumer class action lawsuit. Rinse, repeat.

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notes . 137

3. Brook Gladstone’s 2013 On the Media interview with George Washing-

ton University law professor Daniel Solove on Erich Schmidt’s quote is
an excellent discussion of the dangers of reductive, teleological thinking
regarding privacy: www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/260644-
if-youve-got-nothing-hide-youve-got-nothing-fear (last accessed July
2021).
4. Even without a “smart” phone, any cellular device produces temporal geo-
spatial data, the simple act of connecting to a provider’s network records
the phone’s ID, the closest tower, and the time of connection. Tied together,
these “dumb” data (as in not generated through any “smart” features)
provide startlingly granular time-travel patterns for individual (or at least
their phones) and constitute billions of dollars in data sales annually for
network providers.
5. Defunct (and impossible) now, the Institute for Applied Autonomy created
iSee, a tool for avoiding surveillance cameras, in the early 2000s. This inter-
active web map provided directions meant to avoid the 2,400 surveillance
cameras the group identified in New York City. Even then, as Erik Baar
noted in Wired in 2001, “[a] 12-block walk down Park Avenue becomes a
35-block trek when you avoid the surveillance cameras.”
6. Another noted flip phone user, Warren Buffet, upgraded to an iPhone in
2020 (Bursztynsky 2020).
7. 911 is the emergency number in the United States.

4 contesting the data spectacle

1. At release, one of the cited examples of the need for an API was a map of
tweets called “This world is small!” The original announcement can be
found here: https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/a/2006/introducing-the-
twitter-api.html (last accessed July 2021).
2. A complete description of the technical specifications of DOLLY may be
found here: http://www.floatingsheep.org/p/dolly.html (last accessed July
2021).
3. RIP Hana Kimura.
4. In a slightly bemusing bit of corporate speak, in its 2019 fiscal year report to
the Securities and Exchange Commission (Twitter 2019, 5), Twitter eschews
the term “user” in order to show “empathy” for those that make use of its
platform. We apologize for our lack thereof.
5. What data are stored, how they are communicated, and so on all have epis-
temological effects—see Thatcher (2014) for more discussion.
6. Without belaboring the point, the “base” for Marx would be the relations
of material production, a factory making cars or the like, while the “super-
structure” would be, roughly, everything else, the realm of ideas and culture.
For Marx, the base determined the superstructure (for more, see Williams
1973).
7. Then a record for spending on a California voter proposition.

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138 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

8. The ‘20 minute neighborhood’ is a neoliberal fantasy of urban planning

in which equity and sustainability are achieved by living in an area in
which most (though not all) needs can be met through a 20 minute walk,
bike, or public transit ride. Perhaps most famous for its implementation
in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia (Stanley and Hansen 2020), it has also
gained traction in other cities such as Portland, Oregon, USA and even
been endorsed by the American Association of Retired Persons (Walljasper
2017).
9. We’re geographers. Spatial data are our stock in trade. A successful non-geo-
graphic data drift may be possible: If you see a way, go for it!
10. At time of writing, the film is readily available on many streaming sites, such
as YouTube.
11. Though Banksy has his own particular critique of art and commodification.
12. Sousveillance was first defined by Mann (1998), and refers to the processes
by which individuals may turn normally surveillant technologies back
upon those in power—for example, filming and uploading police officers.
More recently, works like Kitchin (2014) have broadened the term to refer
generally to data collected by individuals.
13. A Markov chain refers to a mathematical system that models all of the
potential states of the system and the probability of moving from one state
to another. As Powell and Lehe (2014) explain, a Markov chain model of a
baby’s behavior might include “playing,” “eating,” “sleeping,” and “crying”
with the model telling you the probability of moving from one state (eating)
to another (sleeping). In the case of @Marxbot1, the model records the
probability for one word to follow another within a given corpus.
14. @Marxbot1 is run by Jim Thatcher, the code is available in the book’s online
repository of code at https://github.com/DataResistance. We particularly
encourage users to combine works by various authors, such as Ursula Le
Guin and Guy Debord, to produce new creations.
15. Links to a variety of police violence and other mapping projects can be
found at the book’s GitHub repository (and living appendix), DataResis-
tance (https://github.com/DataResistance).
16. Kettling refers to the practice by police forces of confining protestors into
a small, controlled area, often to arrest them. Ostensibly for crowd control,
in practice such techniques often result in tensions boiling over (like a tea
kettle on a flame), providing police forces the legal justification for violence.
17. Facing intense backlash, Apple restored the HKmap.live app shortly after its
removal, and eventually issued a corporate statement on human rights in
August of 2020.

5 our data are us, so make them ours

1. The A-level exams are a set of college qualification exams offered in England.
They are not mandatory, but are a major factor in the university admission
process.

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notes . 139

2. Sarah Hunt’s 2014 piece on the ontologies of indigeneity offers a powerful

examination of the “ongoing (neo)colonial relations that shape geographic
knowledge production” and their limits (Hunt 2014, 27).
3. Our purposes here are not to suggest that these terms define the projects
listed, but rather to give examples of exemplary projects that, in ways, align
with the core techniques.
4. Thankfully, no relation.
5. Any use of “we” should raise the immediate question of who is included
in such a construction and, consequently, who is or might be excluded.
Here, our intent is a generalized call to action for those who find themselves
within the data spectacle.
6. Yarn colors provided by archaeologist and knitter Madelynn von Baeyer.

epilogue

1. Installed on all Echo devices produced since 2018 and in many Ring surveil-
lance and doorbell products, Sidewalk is a bandwidth-sharing technology
that creates a mesh network allowing for other devices to access the internet
through your internet connection, unless you opted out before the June
2021 deadline.
2. In her book, McKittrick eloquently pushes against extractive academic
citational practices; here, we have included a portion of her much larger
thoughts as an attempt to think with while acknowledging; a necessarily
imperfect practice within an academic discourse that still prizes citation
counts and impact factors. For an in-depth discussion of citational practice
and its impacts, we recommend Carrie Mott and Daniel Cockayne’s
excellent article “Citation Matters: Mobilizing the Politics of Citation toward
a Practice of ‘Conscientious Engagement’” (2017).

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Pluto Press

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Book Title: Data Power

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Index

#DeleteUber 117, 124 big data divide 48, 83

20 minute neighborhood 95, 138 biopolitics 2.0 39, 56–57
Black Lives Matter 58–59, 109, 116
abstraction see data representations of boycott 113–114
ourselves Burrington, Ingrid 78, 136
acceptance 5, 7, 71, 72–74
accumulation by dispossession 49, 87 California Assembly Bill 5 93
Acxiom 18, 40, 115 California Consumer Privacy Act
AdNauseam 76 (CCPA) 92, 115
Adorno, Theodor W. 134; see also California Proposition 22 93, 123
Horkheimer, Max Cambridge Analytica 2, 67–68; see
adversarial fashion 83 also Facebook scandals
advertising (targeted) 1, 4, 9, 39, Capital
119–120 capital accumulation 2, 4, 6, 14,
AirBnB 111; see also Inside AirBnB 18–20, 30–31, 47–57, 61–62,
algorithm 86–88, 119–120
algorithmic bias 2, 18, 40–41, 43, corporeal corkscrew inwards 30, 51,
53, 55, 57, 58–59, 120–122, 132 127
algorithmic decision making 7, see also data capitalism, accumula-
40, 42, 55, 58–59, 62–64, 70, tion by dispossession
120–122, 132 carceral state 36, 40, 58
Alibaba Sesame Credit 57 CCTV 24, 40, 59, 75, 79
alternatives 2 Chaplin, Charlie 13, 15
Amazon 40, 47, 52, 93, 123 China
Amazon Sidewalk 131, 139 social credit 57–59, 136
Amoore, Louise 18, 119, 121–122 orientalist black mirror 59–61
Anderson, Chris 28–29, 46–47 see also HKmap.live
Anti-Eviction Mapping Project Civic Media 112
(AEMP) 112, 124 Clearview AI 59
Apple 43, 52, 73, 81, 85, 86, 131 collective resistance see data contes-
Automating Inequality 63, 121 tations
Colonization of everyday life, of
BeiDou 82 lifeworlds see data capitalism
Beller, Jonathan 51 contact tracing apps see COVID-19
Benjamin, Ruha 4, 17, 40, 52, 63–64 Counter-Cartographies Collective
Benjamin, Walter 4, 13, 15, 18–19, 100–101, 102, 103, 104
20–22, 24, 25–26, 32, 53, 88, 95, counter-mapping 110–113
107, 134 COVID-19 10, 43, 60–61, 81,
big data 29, 54, 120, 133; chapter 2 119–120, 126, 136

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160 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

Daily life see everyday life Data Feminism 10

Data data spectacle 7, 36, 54–56, 62, 84–85,
Data (combining) 4 88, 101, 104
Data (living with) 5, 10, 43, 122 data strike 9, 86, 113–118, 124
Data (stand for) see data represen- Debord, Guy 6, 26, 30–31, 33, 53, 88,
tations of ourselves 90, 95–98, 102, 107–108, 123,
Data abuse narratives see data 138
scandals dérive (drift) 8, 9, 21, 31, 94–105, see
Data as commodity see data as also data derive
value détournement 9, 105–113, see also
Data as labor 9, 41, 48, 54–55, 87, 102, data detournement
113–116 dialectic of hope and fear 2, 5–6,
Data as value 9, 22, 39–40, 47–50, 18–20, 22, 26
54–55, 85, 87–88, 102, 113–115 Digital OnLine Life and You
Data capitalism 3, 14, 39–42, 47- 57, (DOLLY) 86, 137
61–62, 66, 67–69, 84–85, 86–89, Disruption 2, 4, 5, 11, 50, 52
119–120, 127–128, 131–132 DoorDash 93
Data classification 5, 9, 23, 25, 29, 32 Drift see dérive and data derive
Data colonialism 49–50
drone strikes 2, 22, 42, 135
Data contestations 91, see also data
dystopian accounts of technology see
regulation, data dérive, data
dialectic of hope and fear
détournement, data strike
Data craft 129
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
data dérive (drift) 8, 9, 86, 101–105,
2, 83
124, 138
End-user license agreement (EULA)
data detournement 9, 86, 108–113,
72–74
124, 127
data, fabrication 75–76 enframing 29, 31–32; see also
data, faith in 6, 46–47, 52 Heidegger, Martin
data, location 1, 49, 91 Equifax 115
data, obfuscating 75 Escape 6, 8, 66, 71, 81–82, 84
data regimes 3, 7, 10–11, 55, 94, 129 Escape privilege 66, 81–82, 124
data regulation 8, 46–47, 55, 67, 72, Eubanks, Virginia see Automating
73, 91–94, 111, 115 Inequality
data, representation of ourselves Everyday life 1, 3, 15, 21–22, 51, 53
1, 4, 12, 22, 34, 39–40, 41–43, Everyday resistances see tactics;
46–47, 50–51, 53–64, 87, 88–89, resistance; making present;
119–120, 130 escape
data scandals 1–2, 9–10, 35–38, Experian 58
40–43, 120–122, 136, see also
Facebook, scandals, Strava, Facebook 3, 26, 40, 43, 47–48, 66, 76,
Home Office 84, 85, 92, 93, 103, 115, 123, 131
data, speaking for see data representa- Scandals 1, 2, 41–42, 67–69, 74,
tions of ourselves 116–117
data, speaking with 46, 50, 61–62, 64, Facial recognition 1, 2, 59, 75
67–69, 122 Fear see dialectic of hope and fear

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index . 161

Federal Communications HKmap.live 113, 138

Commission (FCC) 81–82 Home Office (U.K.) 10, 37–38, 135
Film 16–18, 135 Homelessness 10
Foucault, Michel 39, 56, 65 Hope see dialectic of hope and fear
Foursquare 41–42, 43, 135–136 Horkheimer, Max 23–25, 33, 34
Frankfurt School 5, 15, 23–25, 31–33,
133, 134 IBM 18
Franklin, Benjamin 34 Individual that capital can see see data
Friedman, Milton 24 representations of ourselves
Infrastructure 50–51, 78
Gabrys, Jennifer 39–40, 56 Inside AirBnB 111, 124
Gandy, Oscar Jr. 40–41 Instacart 127
García Martínez, Antonio 47 Instagram 24, 62, 131
Gaskins, Nettrice R. 25 Institute of Applied Autonomy 79,
General Data Protection Regulation 137
(GDPR) 8, 91–92, 93, 94, 115 Internet of things (IoT) 33
Gebru, Timnit 28
Genomic profiling 2 Jefferson, Brian 17, 18, 36, 133
Geodemographics see data classifi-
cation Kalanick, Travis see #DeleteUber
Gig-economy 18, 6, 93, 98, 111, 115, kettling 125, 127, 138, see also Sukey
123, 128, see also precarious Khatib, Abdelhafid 94–95, 96–98
labor Kimura, Hana 137
Girls Around Me 41–42
Github 12, 44, 109, 128, 138 La dialectique peut-elle casser des
Glitch 1, see also technology, roles of briques? 105–106
users LinkedIn 16
Global Positioning System (GPS) 1, 2, Lived cultures of technology see
27, 35, 36, 41, 53, 58, 66, 67, 70, everyday life
75, 76, 82, 104, 108, 135 Living in the cracks 9, 126–128
GNIP see Twitter Living with data see data, living with
God 29–30, 31 Lobbying 93
Google 2, 28, 69, 85, 92, 93, 103, 104, Lyft 93, 117
115, 123
Artificial intelligence 28, 52 Making present 6, 8, 71, 77–80
Maps 12, 17, 43, 51, 65–66 Malcolm, Ian 119
Gregg, Melissa 36, 54–56; see also data Mapping Police Violence 112
spectacle Marcuse, Herbert 14, 26, 31–33, 122,
Grindr 42, 74 123
Margin of maneuver see technology
Hacking see resistance roles of users
Halpern, Orit 39 Marx, Karl 6, 14, 18–20, 23, 24, 109,
Haraway, Donna 3, 4, 13, 18, 23, 108 133, 134
Heatmap 1; see also Strava Marxism 6, 14, 18–20, 30, 31
Heidegger, Martin 26–30, 31, 32, 33, Superstructure 23–25
123, 134 Media cycle see data scandal

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162 . data power: radical geographies of control and resistance

Microsoft 1, 47, 93, 114 Security vs. privacy see surveillance

vs. privacy
National Security Agency (NSA) Signal (app) 116
42–43 Silicon Valley 5, 6, 7
Noble, Safiya 63 Situationist Internationale 8,9, 30–31,
53, 83, 90–91, 94–98, 99, 104,
Occupy Wall Street 116, 125 105–108, 116; see also Debord,
Ofqual 120–121 Guy
Oil, as metaphor for data 46–49 Snapchat 12, 43
One-dimensional man see Marcuse, Snowden, Edward 42, 43
Herbert Social credit see China, social credit
Solidarity 99–101
Palantir 115 Sousveillance 108
Parler 113 Spatial data regimes see data regimes
Partnership on AI 2 Spectacle 30–31, 53, 88–89; see also
Pokémon GO 115 data spectacle
Policy 2–3, 93 Springsteen, Bruce 23, 134
Post-political 125–126 Strava 1, 35–37, 38, 43
Praxis 3, 9, 102–103, 110–113, 122, see Strike 9; see also data strike
also resistance (active), making Student Nonviolent Coordinating
present, escape, dérive (drift), Committee 116
détournement, data strikes Sukey 113
Precarias a la Deriva 8, 9, 98–100, superstructure 137; see also Marxism,
101, 102, 104, 105, 114, 116, 118, superstructure
124 surge pricing 117
Precarious labor 98–100 Surveillance
Prediction 4, 52, 132 By police 58–61
Press coverage see data scandal Vs. privacy 66, 69–71
Privacy see surveillance vs. privacy
Privacy-washing 66, 67–69 Tactics 65–67, 71, 75–76, 82–83, 85
Profiling see data classification Technological determinism 15, 19–20,
Profit-seeking see capital accumula- 26, 133–134
tion, data capitalism Technological neutrality 15–16, 27
Psychogeography see dérive (drift) Technology
And capitalism 13–14, 30–33
Quantification 5, 14, 23–24, 32, 34, Hope and fear of see dialectic of
39–40, 61 hope and fear
Roles of designers 13, 16–18, 69
Ranking see data classification Roles of users 16–18, 43, 69–71
Reeves, Keanu 81 As standing-reserve 28–29, 32, 39;
Regulation see data regulation see also Heidegger, Martin
Resistance 3, 4, 5, 65–66 Telegram 116
Resistance (active) 5, 7–8, 71, Telephone 13, 18, 20–21, 84
74–77, 84 Temperature blankets 128–129
TikTok 12, 93
Schmidt, Eric 52, 69, 136 Tinder 40, 41–42, 74, 76

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index . 163

Tor Project 76–77 Utopianism and technology see

TransUnion 58 dialectic of hope and fear
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt 1, 3
Twitter 4, 74, 86–88, 109, 115, 123, 137 Wark, McKenzie 3, 90
Typology of responses to data Weber, Max 19–20, 23, 24, 134
capitalism 71–83; see also Weckert, Simon 65
acceptance, resistance (active), WhatsApp 116–117
making present, and escape Wilson, Matt 34

Uber 2, 18, 40, 81, 83, 93, 117, 123; see Yelp 27, 127
also #DeleteUber
Union Pacific 50 Zuckerberg, Mark 2, 26, 68; see also
Unities of ambiance see dérive (drift) Facebook, scandals

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Data Power - Radical Geographies of Control and Resistance-Thatcher

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Chapter Title: Front Matter

Book Title: Data Power

This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-

Jim E. Thatcher and Craig M. Dalton

Copyright © Jim E. Thatcher and Craig M. Dalton 2022

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

ISBN 978 0 7453 4007 4 Paperback

Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England

Chapter Title: Table of Contents

Book Title: Data Power

This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-

List of Figures and Tablesvi

Introduction: Technology and the Axes of Hope and Fear 1

Chapter Title: List of Figures and Tables

Book Title: Data Power

This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-

1.1 The Lackawana Valley, by George Inness 14

4.9 A screenshot of the Anti Eviction Mapping Project’s

3.1 A typology of responses to data capitalism 71

Chapter Title: Series Preface

Book Title: Data Power

This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-

The Radical Geography series consists of accessible books which use

Danny Dorling, Matthew T. Huber, and Jenny Pickerill

Chapter Title: Acknowledgments

Book Title: Data Power

This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-

cannot imagine this book without your unwavering emotional support,

Chapter Title: List of Abbreviations

Book Title: Data Power

This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-

3Cs Counter-Cartographies Collective

Book Title: Data Power

This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-

Our first step is to bring back curiosity.

We are the most fantastic and beautiful mistake.

This is a book about what we can do to change that.

Non-fiction narratives about technology tend to be either utopian

tronic Frontier Foundation, employ lobbying and lawsuits in attempts to

so what? why this book matters

the rest of this book: a dialectic tension

In the past, we’ve written about the ongoing framing of technology as

response to spatial data regimes. Finally, Chapters 4 and 5 build from

data we produce. From there, we demonstrate the near-theological,

Resistance therefore constitutes tactics that contest the data production

through a living repository where readers are encouraged to contribute

who speaks for whom?

The contours of data accumulation are uneven in both existing and

online resources (or the digital appendix)

New technologies are rarely as “disruptive” as they seem and never as

Putting aside the alphabet soup of acronyms, we can’t answer now

Chapter Title: Life in the Age of Big Data

Book Title: Data Power

This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-

It matters which stories tell stories, which concepts think concepts.

How is technology impacting society? How can we live amidst tech-

myth-makings within capitalism. The questions of how data are used

One of the first to evaluate such technologies in conjunction with

the (neo)liberal myth of technological empowerment

When technology isn’t referred to as an external, natural force, one

However, this formulation entirely misses the social and material

create a framework of activity, a field of play, but they do not determine

A small screwdriver may be used on screws, or as a lockpick, but it is not

The biases of a technology cannot be fixed unless the circumstances

In sum, technologies are part of situated, recursive processes between

political economy and technology as determination

In an age when large corporations, such as Google, attempt to track

of labour from the steam-mill,” a phrase perhaps best known in its

123).6 For Weber, seizure of the means of production is insufficient

Walter Benjamin inherited Marx’s conception of distinct historical eras

nology. But Benjamin focuses not on modes of production and broad

of things through the intermediary of the laboratory is forever dissoci-

I bought a bourgeois house in the Hollywood hills

Publishing after Benjamin’s death and the defeat of fascism in Germany,

List of Figures and Tablesvi

Introduction: Technology and the Axes of Hope and Fear 1

1.1 The Lackawana Valley, by George Inness 14

3.1 A typology of responses to data capitalism 71