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Commentary
Data politics
Evelyn Ruppert
1
, Engin Isin
2
and Didier Bigo
3
Abstract
The commentary raises political questions about the ways in which data has been constituted as an object vested with
certain powers, influence, and rationalities. We place the emergence and transformation of professional practices such as
‘data science’, ‘data journalism’, ‘data brokerage’, ‘data mining’, ‘data storage’, and ‘data analysis’ as part of the recon-
figuration of a series of fields of power and knowledge in the public and private accumulation of data. Data politics asks
questions about the ways in which data has become such an object of power and explores how to critically intervene in
its deployment as an object of knowledge. It is concerned with the conditions of possibility of data that involve things
(infrastructures of servers, devices, and cables), language (code, programming, and algorithms), and people (scientists,
entrepreneurs, engineers, information technologists, designers) that together create new worlds. We define ‘data pol-
itics’ as both the articulation of political questions about these worlds and the ways in which they provoke subjects to
govern themselves and others by making rights claims. We contend that without understanding these conditions of
possibility – of worlds, subjects and rights – it would be difficult to intervene in or shape data politics if by that it is meant
the transformation of data subjects into data citizens.
Keywords
Politics, fields, power, rights, citizens, professions
Introduction
Data enacts that which it represents. This deceptively
simple thought signifies two things. First, to collect,
store, retrieve, analyse, and present data through vari-
ous methods means to bring those objects and subjects
that data speaks of into being. Data sciences such as
statistics, probability, and analytics have emerged not
because they have merely quenched our curiosities but
because these sciences have been useful for the objects
and subjects they have brought into being for the pur-
poses of governing and/or profit. Second, to speak con-
stantly about data as though it either represents or
records subjects and objects and their movements inde-
pendent from the social and political struggles that
govern them is to mask such struggles.
If not for the rapid development of the Internet and
its connected devices ‘data’ would have probably
remained a relatively obscure concept or term confined
to these sciences. Yet, data has become a social and
political issue not only because it concerns anyone
who is connected to the Internet but also because it
reconfigures relationships between states and citizens.
Being connected to the Internet may conjure up images
of hipsters with shiny aluminium devices but just about
every device is now connected and generating vast
quantities of digital traces about interactions, transac-
tions, and movements whether users are aware or not.
What started as an ostensibly liberated space the
Internet rapidly became the space over and through
which governments and corporations began collecting,
storing, retrieving, analysing, and presenting data that
records what people do and say on the Internet. This
ranges from who communicates with whom, who goes
where, and who says what – and much more besides.
This is now being augmented with data that people
collect about themselves, especially their relations,
body movements, and measurements; the amount and
1
Goldsmiths, University of London, UK
2
Queen Mary University of London, UK
3
Sciences Po, FR
Corresponding author:
Evelyn Ruppert, Goldsmiths, University of London, Warmington Tower,
Lewisham Way, London SE14 6NW, UK.
Email: e.ruppert@gold.ac.uk
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range of data that has become available is, as everyone
now knows, staggering. There has never been a state,
monarchy, kingdom, empire, government, or corpor-
ation in history that has had command over such
granular, immediate, varied, and detailed data about
subjects and objects that concern them. What exactly
governments, corporations, and a whole series of agen-
cies and authorities collect, analyse, and deploy is com-
plex but it is now generally understood that data has
become a major object of economic, political, and
social investment for governing subjects. This develop-
ment has been captured by the term Big Data to mark a
departure from conventional forms of data and statis-
tical knowledge. While first coined by industry, Big
Data has come to have different meanings and uses
but significantly, and along with the increasing ubiquity
of data in everyday life, the term has become less prom-
inent. Notably, attention has started shift to a focus on
computation and analytics such as algorithms, machine
learning, and artificial intelligence. Yet, data remains a
key matter of concern as both the product and condi-
tion of computation and analytics.
Reactions to these developments have largely
focused on issues concerning surveillance, privacy, ano-
nymity, and types of conduct that the Internet culti-
vates about always connected, always measured
selves. Perhaps equal to the measure of the influence
of the Internet there has been a massive literature on
data ranging from warnings about its consequences
(surveillance, privacy, isolation) to types of conduct
(racism, misogyny, bullyism). Along with this, numer-
ous studies, reports, guidelines, regulations, and legis-
lation concerning data protection and the rights of data
subjects have proliferated. To summarize such a huge
literature and responses is beyond our remit but we are
convinced that dominant responses have three short-
comings that brought us to propose the phrase ‘data
politics’ as a field of power and knowledge.
The first concerns the focus on the politics of or in
data rather than data as a force that is generative of
politics. In this view, rather than settled in a database
or archive, data has potential force that can be realized
in myriad ways through its uptake and deployments.
Rather than thinking about data as inert representa-
tion, we consider it like language in the way elaborated
by Bourdieu (1993) and Butler (1997) to argue that data
has a performative power that is resignifying political
life. That is, data politics is concerned with not only
political struggles around data collection and its
deployments, but how data is generative of new forms
of power relations and politics at different and inter-
connected scales.
That data is generative of new power relations and
politics is evident in the recent controversies about how
Big Data was used in the US election and UK
referendum to create personalized political advertising
to influence how people voted. Referring to these elect-
oral uses, George Monbiot writing in The Guardian
noted that we must act now to own these new political
technologies before they own us. He was of course refer-
ring to the work of a company called Cambridge
Analytica, which is partly owned by US billionaire
Robert Mercer, who also happens to be a friend of
former UKIP leader Nigel Farage. It was widely
reported that the company helped to swing both the
US election and the UK referendum by mining data
from Facebook and using it to create profiles predicting
people’s personalities and then tailoring advertising to
their psychological profiles. While some of the claims
that this happened were brought into question including
denials from Cambridge Analytica, UK’s privacy
watchdog – the Information Commissioners Office –
has deemed there is sufficient cause to launch an inquiry
and it is doing so.
So, in the wake of already uneven power and influ-
ence over electoral processes – such as campaign finan-
cing and media alliances – we now have misinformation,
disinformation, and techniques such as bot-swarming
whereby fake online accounts are created to give the
impression that large numbers of people support a pol-
itical position. These are some of the threats that Tim
Berners Lee pronounced on the 28th anniversary of the
world wide web, which he is credited for founding. He
names these threats as the sharing of personal data,
misinformation, and political advertising. One of his
solutions is a call for new ways for people to own
their own data. He argues that the web was built by
all of us, and so we all can, and should, play a role in
defining its future. The Web We Want campaign is one
initiative that he has supported in this regard.
What these examples illustrate is that data and pol-
itics are inseparable. Data is not only shaping our social
relations, preferences, and life chances but our very
democracies. And that is how we want to speak of
data politics. However, a problem with these views on
data politics is the subjects who are constituted as the
addressee and are presumably the affected Internet sub-
jects. This is the second shortcoming that has led us to
articulate what we call data politics. It concerns atom-
ism: often such pronouncements address atomized indi-
viduals who need to protect themselves from the
dangers of the Internet and its manipulations. It is
based on the ontological premise of ‘hyper-individual-
ism’ whereby persons, events, and phenomenon are
treated as independent and ‘atomistic’ entities (Lake,
2017). Data politics that emerges from this reaction is
one of urging people to protect themselves as individ-
uals. It is almost as if the narrative says ‘yes, there is
collective work that needs done but ultimately it is up
to you to change your behaviour to protect yourself
2Big Data & Society
from the dark forces of the Internet’. The addressee in
other words is the atomized subject whose data is indi-
vidualized rather than understood as a product of col-
lective relations with other subjects and technologies
(Socialising Big Data Project, 2015).
A third shortcoming concerns the immediacy that
pervades these reactions or responses. They are pre-
dominantly exercised by the immediacy of a threat,
danger, menace, risk, or peril or insecurity or unease
that the Internet ostensibly engenders. Even those who
have fought battles with governments and corporations
to expose their data practices fall prey to a Messianic
creep in articulating political problems by decrying
their immediacy.
The obverse response to these reactions has been to
extol the virtues of the Internet and illustrate that if it is
not liberating it is at least making our lives better orga-
nized, measured, improved, whatever. Yes, there may
be dangers and insecurities but this is a small price to
pay for the benefits it brings. This response is still
riddled with immediacy and atomism. Its calculative
logic is from the point of view of the atomized subject
weighing the pros and cons of the Internet against the
threats of immediacy.
All this has led us to the conclusion that data politics
is yet to find its subjects. In this commentary, we step
back from the inertness, atomism, and immediacy of
the dominant points of view of the Internet and the
data it generates and ask questions about data politics
within a broad historical perspective. What do we then
mean by data politics?
We start with the assumption that the will to know-
ledge and the will to power are two aspects of how we
conduct ourselves and the conduct of others and thus
we approach data not as a representation (i.e., infor-
mation collected, stored, and presented without inter-
est) but as an object whose production interests those
who exercise power. This was at least one of the lessons
we have learned from Michel Foucault’s relentlessly
focused studies of the ways in which modern societies
come to depend on governing subjects with data col-
lected over not only their physical and social attributes
(life, language, labour) but also about the conduct of
their behaviour (Foucault, 2007). Our second assump-
tion is that the production of data is a social and often
political practice that mobilizes agents who are not only
objects of data (about whom data is produced) but that
they are also subjects of data (those whose engagement
drives how data is produced). Our question thus shifts
to social practices and agents. Data does not happen
through unstructured social practices but through
structured and structuring fields in and through which
various agents and their interests generate forms of
expertise, interpretation, concepts, and methods that
collectively function as fields of power and knowledge.
This was at least one of the lessons we learned from
Pierre Bourdieu’s studies on the ways in which fields of
knowledge constitute fields of power (Bourdieu, 1988)
that involve struggle and change, fragile moments, and
the emergence of new kinds of practices (Bigo, 2011).
Foucault and Bourdieu influenced a generation of
scholars who have taken up the relations between
power, knowledge, and fields and investigated the
ways in which states, agencies, organizations, corpor-
ations, and institutions – often assembled in different
combinations as governments – constituted their
authority, legitimacy, and legality by producing know-
ledge about objects and subjects through establishing
method and data regimes such as censuses, indexes,
indicators, registers, rolls, catalogues, logs, and arch-
ives. We now understand much better the relationships
between state formation and statistics, probability, and
data regimes (Desrosie
`res, 1998; Hacking, 1990; Porter,
1986). Statistics, from their very beginning, combined
‘the norms of the scientific world with those of the
modern, rational state’ (Desrosie
`res, 1998: 8). These
data regimes have now been extensively studied as his-
torical developments. The birth of objects of knowledge
such as the economy, population, society, and their sci-
ences – originally called political arithmetic and now
statistics — have also been studied extensively.
Although it would be impossible to summarize what
we now know about these data regimes and the state,
the overall insight we have gained can be stated as fol-
lows. While Max Weber’s argument that the sover-
eignty of the state consists in its monopoly of the
means of violence is often cited, following the studies
of Foucault and Bourdieu and the literature inspired by
them, we have come to recognize that this sovereignty
depends on numerous practices beyond the organiza-
tion of violence. Historically, the state performs sover-
eignty with control over and dependence on especially
education, fiscal, and cultural data regimes. This does
not mean that citizens in each state did not influence,
interfere, or intervene in the ways which data regimes
constituted them as data subjects. On the contrary,
scholars have also investigated and documented how
citizens have developed democratic practices to chal-
lenge social categories of data regimes and their effects
(Anderson and Fienberg, 2000; Kertzer and Arel, 2002;
Nobles, 2000). There are many cases that illustrate
how, for example, census categories such as race, eth-
nicity, gender, and other indexes have been called into
question, subverted, and transformed.
Nonetheless, the state, or rather organizations, insti-
tutions, agencies, agents, and authorities that make up
the complex field of government, maintained an effect-
ive monopoly on data regimes concerning whole popu-
lations. This is not to say that corporations did not also
generate data about their customers especially over the
Ruppert et al. 3
last century or so but this was largely limited to specific
population groups and in relation to narrow concerns.
Beginning in the early 20th century, opinion polling
and marketing research were considerable develop-
ments in corporate forms of population data generation
(Osborne and Rose, 1999). And although there have
been various international organizations that have
entered into fields of data generation and accumulation
such as the United Nations, the European Union,
OECD, OSCE, and ILO, the primary site and scene
of population data collection and its various regimes
remained the monopoly of the state for nearly four
centuries.
This monopoly of the state over data production,
collection, and even interception is increasingly chal-
lenged. Or, at least, state sovereignty over data regimes
is now shared by the birth of entirely new assemblages
of the production of data (Kitchin, 2014). Not least has
been the increasing accumulation and mobilization of
data by corporations (Thrift, 2005). It is tempting to
immediately single out the Internet and its connected
devices as the source of this challenge. But it is much
more complicated than that as our argument above
anticipates. It would be folly to assume that Internet
technologies develop independently from the interests
that constitute the fields through which various data
regimes have been invented. However, beyond techno-
logical developments, the sovereignty of the state in
accumulating and producing data about its population,
territory, health, wealth, and security is being chal-
lenged by corporations, agencies, authorities, and
organizations that are producing myriad data about
subjects whose interactions, transactions, and move-
ments traverse borders of states in new and complicated
patterns. Not least these traversals challenge the meth-
odological nationalism that has dominated statistical
thought and practice and their corresponding bound-
aries of population data, knowledge, and power for
centuries (Scheel et al., 2016). While Bourdieu’s studies
focused on the nation and in particular France, others
have taken up his conception to understand fields as
international and transnational (Dezalay and Garth,
1996; Madsen, 2011, 2014). For Bigo, the transnational
exists in the form of transnational networks and prac-
tices of professionals who ‘play simultaneously in
domestic and transnational fields’ (Bigo, 2011). In this
view, a transnational field is constituted by networks
and practices between and amongst professionals who
act at various non-hierarchically ordered scales of the
transnational, national, and local.
Through this broad framing, data politics is a con-
tribution to the tradition that intersects historical soci-
ology and political sociology. We not only draw
inspiration from major works such as Karl Polanyi’s
The Great Transformation (1944) and Norbert Elias’s
The Civilising Process (1939) but also more recent
work at the intersections of historical sociology and
political sociology such as Christophe Charle’s The
Birth of Intellectuals (1990) and Paul Veyne’s Bread
and Circuses (1975). Despite their different subject mat-
ters what these works share is the importance of placing
events in the present into historical series where we can
discriminate between contingent and transformative
events. We similarly aim to identify what is precisely
transformative of the regimes of data accumulation
that mark our present and which are generative of
data politics.
What are the conditions of possibility of data? And
relatedly, how are these conditions generative of data
politics? In what follows we articulate this broad fram-
ing through three interrelated conditions of the making
of data politics: worlds, subjects, rights. Our discussion
is schematic and principally poses key questions that
are not exhaustive of possible inquiries. Along with
the foregoing they are meant to set out political ques-
tions about the ways in which data has been constituted
as an object vested with certain powers, influence, and
rationalities.
Worlds
The Internet is an elaborate infrastructure composed of
objects, equipment, cables, routers, servers, switches,
and devices that constitute a unique technological
materiality. Unlike other massive material transform-
ations of industrial and post-industrial cities and their
transportation and communication infrastructures, the
materiality of the Internet is mostly out of sight and
located elsewhere. The data servers and data farms are
often in faraway and remote locations or nestled within
cities that are inaccessible and unknown to most
people. Its connectors are often buried under the
earth or sea. Its wireless communications are invisible
but routers, switches, and masts create strange yet rec-
ognizable objects within and outside cities. Without this
massive infrastructure and its maintenance and produc-
tion, the internet of things, communications, and
exchanges would be impossible. The material infra-
structure of the Internet not only generates logics of
borders and capacities of control that remain often
invisible but also protocols and platforms that make
people think the Internet is made up of a seamless
and invisible flow of information. How are these
worlds created and governed? What are the material
conditions of possibility, configurations, and stratifica-
tions of these worlds? How do these worlds straddle or
cross between actual and virtual spaces? To think of
worlds is to trace how material conditions of the
Internet are critical infrastructures that are generative
of politics and struggles.
4Big Data & Society
The Internet may depend on a massive infrastructure
of servers, devices, and cables but what brings them
together or more precisely what holds them together
and enables them to communicate with each other is a
special kind of language called code. But to understand
code is anything but straightforward because code itself
embodies various programming and communication
languages such as binary machine code to algorithms
(Galloway, 2006). The Internet has a language but it is
hardly visible or even comprehensible to those who do
not write such code. How does the language of the
Internet traverse both actual and virtual worlds of data?
Through the Internet a new space is being made – a
cyberspace perhaps – but understanding this space is
fraught with difficulties. The Internet has not only
blurred the boundaries between online and offline
worlds but it has also rendered the distinction between
the two spurious and perhaps untenable. With always-
connected devices it is impossible to say when people or
things are offline or online or indeed to separate embo-
died subjects from their operation. What kind of space
does the Internet generate? What is the role of data in
such a space and how does data make it possible? In
turn, how does the Internet and the space it generates
make data politics possible and with what effects?
The emergence of Big Data with its focus on pro-
duction, accumulation, mining, circulation, aggrega-
tion, analysis, and interpretation has engendered the
formation of various professions from data scientists
to data journalists. Each of these professions is engaged
in competitive struggles between each other and with
other professions and yet at the same time also rein-
force the broader practice of investing data with
powers. These emergent professions and their practices
have not only begun reorganizing existing fields of data
production such as the official statistics of states (state
and statistics share common etymologies) but also have
given birth to new forms of data accumulation and
valuation whose source of authority and legitimacy tra-
verse the boundaries of state sovereignties and produce
international effects.
In this light, data is not an already given artefact
that exists (which then needs to be mined, analysed,
brokered) but an object of investment (in the broadest
sense) that is produced by the competitive struggles of
professionals who claim stakes in its meaning and func-
tioning. They engage in struggles over the valuation of
different forms of capital conceived by Bourdieu includ-
ing cultural, economic, social, and symbolic capital
(Bigo, 2013). It is through the accumulation of these
various forms of capital that their relative positions
are established within the field (Bourdieu and
Wacquant, 2006). The emergence of data as a field
and data professionals as its custodians and gate-
keepers shapes competitive struggles not only in
defining an object but also the principles of how to
understand and intervene in data politics. At the same
time, algorithms increasingly call into question the very
expertise that data accumulation has spawned through
the automating practices of judgement. Who decides
whether to invest, what to listen to, where to eat,
where to stay, and where to go? How do algorithms
embed expert judgements and normative assumptions
without appearing to do so?
The accumulation of data procures not only cultural
capital but also economic capital. An economy of data
is founded on the ‘voluntary’ input of personal data in
exchange for Internet services. This creates the condi-
tions for the making of a stock market of data invol-
ving data brokers and profit shares generated by deep
data mining and data discoveries. How do individuals
contribute to this production and what is the political
economy of desire that generates a material economy of
services? What are the consequences of subjects giving
up data in return for so-called free services? What are
the legal conditions that enable and disable the circula-
tion of data within and across states? From questions
of data commons to data ownership, how are legal
regimes being challenged and remade by struggles
over data as property?
Subjects
The emergence of data as an object of government
engenders the emergence of subjects who take positions
in and through the various resignifications and chal-
lenges that it spawns. Rather than occupying already
existing positions, subjects are produced through vari-
ous digital interactions and at the same time their digi-
tal traces shape and organize their subjectivities and
how they are known and governed. How are subjects
part of the work and making of data through which
they then come to be known? Through procedures of
channelling, filtering, and sorting data, various devices
and platforms configure not only transactions and
interactions but the data they generate recursively
shapes and forms subjects in never fixed but modulat-
ing ways. With the increasing circulation, mining, and
combining of data, how are subjects and their affili-
ations, connections, and relations multiplied and gov-
erned via ever more dispersed micro data politics?
Data not only captures but also colonizes minds,
souls, bodies, and spaces. It subjectifies through prac-
tices of production, accumulation, aggregation, circula-
tion, valuation, and interpretation. These practices call
upon subjects who are not separate from but submit to
and are active in the various ways that data is made and
colonizes lifeworlds to constitute ‘data’s empire’ (Isin
and Ruppert, forthcoming). People govern their health
by making themselves data subjects of health.
Ruppert et al. 5
Measuring their own performances with Internet-
enabled devices and benchmarking their performance
against other performers, data subjects of health increas-
ingly calibrate a model body not through images circu-
lated by the advertising industry but by literally working
themselves out through their data performances and for
others. How is data part of the making and shaping of
bodies and the body a site of data politics?
Being a data subject entails the radically shifting
meaning of being a consumer from a subject making
choices to a choice-making and sorted subject. Being
constantly a reviewer, modern data subjects are caught
in a spiral of evaluations: they are evaluated and evalu-
ator all at once and all the time. Recommender plat-
forms and evaluation data generated by transacting
ever more sort subjects into categories of cultural pref-
erences that narrow and channel choices. How is con-
suming through the Internet generative of data politics?
Are we now witnessing the changing relations of
production in the generation of data and if so, then
who are its labourers? Are we moving from the logic
of having a job to a logic of contributing something to
the fulfilment of a task? The data-generated market of
global tasks has now created a vast meeting place for
those who need and will pay for accomplishing specific
and often micro tasks and those who can and need to
fulfil these tasks to make a living.
To consider the data subject also calls upon consid-
eration of the uncanny convergence between robots and
humans not in the way in which the cyborg manifesto
(Haraway, 1991) envisaged it but perhaps more in the
manner in which Star Trek anticipated. How does the
automated generation and analysis of data based on arti-
ficial intelligence and machine learning appear autono-
mous and yet inseparable from struggles and relations
between programmers, subjects, and technologies?
Rights
If the accumulation of data traverses subjects it also
constitutes them with claims to certain rights that con-
cern its accumulation: who owns, distributes, sells,
accesses, uses, appropriates, modifies, and resignifies
data become objects of struggles for claiming rights to
such modalities. The rights-claiming subject is the figure
of the citizen that we have inherited as a political subject
who is now making rights claims about being a subject
of data. How do subjects exercise and claim such rights
through what they say and do through the Internet?
How do they perform rights and claims about being
subjects of data through how they communicate, share,
express, and engage with digital devices and platforms?
How do they invent data practices that challenge and
subvert state and corporate forms of data and struggle
for rights through legal and regulatory mechanisms?
This third condition of data politics considers rights-
claiming subjects such as citizen data scientists as part
of material–political arrangements and struggles over
who generates, legitimizes, and has authority over
data and how data is mobilized to make claims for
environmental and other rights. It concerns how citi-
zens make data an object of transnational politics and
engage in struggles around free expression; privacy and
ethics; and the forums, practices, and networks through
which these struggles are being fought.
The relationship between the right to privacy and
that of data protection is illustrative of the transver-
sal relations and legal and political tensions that
make up data politics. On the one hand, international
human rights laws and obligations seek to secure and
universalize the former and various national regimes
have emerged to address the latter. How are rights
not only claimed through national and international
institutions and their regulations, laws, and protocols
but by citizen subjects who make claims and in turn
perform what is data politics through their everyday
digital acts? As such, how does this call for a figure
of a citizen that is different from the subject we have
inherited and instead one who can make rights claims
that traverse national borders? (Isin and Ruppert,
2015).
Conclusions
We have provided an outline of data politics as a field
of power and knowledge that traverses virtual and
actual worlds, produces subjects that come into being
through such worlds, and whose rights become objects
of struggles through such a field. We have specified
worlds, subjects, and rights as the conditions of possi-
bility of such a field of data politics. We want to argue
that without understanding these conditions of possi-
bility – of worlds, subjects, and rights – and their rela-
tions, it would be difficult to intervene in or shape data
politics if by that it is meant the transformation of our-
selves from data subjects into data citizens.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with
respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial sup-
port for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article: Funding from a European Research Council (ERC)
Consolidator Grant (615588) supported the writing of this
commentary. Principal Investigator, Evelyn Ruppert,
Goldsmiths, University of London.
6Big Data & Society
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