 Something big is going on with data. Data is not just big in terms of volume as reflected in the phrase big data. Something transformative is happening with data. Now we've known this since at least the revelations of Edward Snowden in summer 2013. The real story of those revelations was not the one emphasized in the media about the surveillance by NSA and GCHQ of ordinary and sometimes, as in the case of President Merkel, less ordinary citizens. The real story was how much data corporations were already collecting from us, from which governments simply sought to benefit. A story about the public-private surveillance partnership as U.S. security expert Bruce Schneier calls it. And in this lecture, I want to look deeper into what's going on with data. And I'll be drawing on my forthcoming book with a Mexican U.S. scholar, Ulysses Mejías, called The Costs of Connection. Now the core point of our book is that what's happening today in digital societies where data harvesting seems such a natural, such a basic feature of everyday life is not just a development or even a new phase of capitalism, as many writers have claimed. It's something even bigger. It's a genuinely new phase of colonialism that will in time provide the fuel for a later stage of capitalism whose full shape we cannot predict yet. And this is what we start to see if we shift the time scale from the past 30 to 40 years, in which for sure capitalism has become embedded into ever more sectors of daily life, to the past 500 years over which the relations of capitalism to colonialism have played out. We're thinking about colonialism here in terms of its fundamental historical function. As the appropriation of resources on a vast scale. In 1500 and for the next 400 years it was territory that was acquired. It was the resources of the land and of course the bodies for a long time, those of slaves, needed to extract value from those resources. Today the resources being appropriated are us. Human life in all its depth extracted as value through the medium of data. But Ulysses and I, when we talk about data colonialism, we do not mean it as a metaphor. We are claiming instead that what is going on with data today represents potentially as far reaching an appropriation of resources as the conquest of gold and territory in historic colonialism. A land grab in digital territory that is likely to have as far reaching implications as historical colonialism did. A colonial reality, not a metaphor, which we are living and to which we need to wake up. Think of the terms of service to which we sign up every time we install an app, every time we join a platform. That's my phone by the way. In normal times, I don't mean the few days after the Cambridge Analytical scandal broke. In normal times no one reads the terms. We just click accept because we want to get on and use the app or the platform. Sometimes our acceptance is just assumed, no questions asked, though the GDPR has tried to disrupt that assumption. Sometimes our employer encourages us to use a Fitbit to monitor our health which requires us to accept Fitbits terms and conditions, whether we like them or not. Or we may be required to accept terms and conditions of data extraction by an insurer or by the supplier of a smart appliance in our home. But by that act of acceptance, actual or implied, we enter into a whole set of what Ulysses and I call data relations that unfold in ways we understand only very partly. It sometimes seems a mystery how we can accept so much with so little resistance. But let's think historically through a colonial lens. Let's think back to a document used in the early days of the Spanish conquest of Latin America called the requerimiento or demand. Almost exactly 500 years ago, the document was drafted in 1513 at the Spanish court. Conquestadors were right up to a mile or two outside a village whose gold they wanted. And read out this document. In the middle of the night, in Spanish, a language they knew the locals did not understand. Here's a little of it. But if you do not submit, I accept, I certify to you that with the help of God, we shall powerfully enter into your country and shall make war against you in all ways and manners that we can and shall subject you to the yoke and obedience of the church and of their highnesses. We shall take away your goods and shall do you all the mischief and damage that we can. The next morning, they will ride into the village and take the gold that they wanted using whatever violence they needed to do so and usually more. Now you'll notice immediately a difference that we really do click accept. And so no violence is needed to take our gold as we use the platform or app whose terms appear to us. I'll come back to why that is in a moment, but first let's try to map more precisely the key features of historic colonialism onto data colonialism today. The fundamental moves and historic function of original colonialism can be understood in terms of four levels. The appropriation of resource, the creation of new social relations to stabilize that appropriation. The extreme concentration of wealth that flowed from that appropriation and finally the ideologies that were used to tell a different story of what was going on, most notoriously the ideology of civilization. And we see exactly these same four levels at work with data colonialism. First, there is the appropriation of resources. I've said human life itself, human experience and action become a direct input to capital. This is often told to us as a cliche, the idea that it's just worthless human exhaust that is taken. Something just naturally there anyway for the taking, which conveniently forgets all the mechanisms that are needed to gather, format, extract and process this supposedly natural resource. Second, social relations are being colonized by data processes as all social relations increasingly take the form of data relations that maximize data extraction for value. Third, the economic value that's extracted is hugely concentrated in the vast wealth of new colonial corporations, what Ulysses and I call the social quantification sector, Facebook, Google, Amazon and so on. And finally, there are new colonial ideologies that seek to disguise what is going on, not the idea of civilization exactly yet, but the idea that we must always stay connected, that everything must be put into data form so that for example we can get more personalized messages and products and the idea that all of this including the tracking is somehow inevitable. So we can see all four dimensions of historic colonialism at work in our life with data today, but there's one crucial difference. And like in 1500, when colonialism emerged without the background of two or three centuries of capitalism, today's new colonialism builds on top of the already existing social order of capitalism, which is why it does not generally need violence to be effective. Let's not suppose however that this massive transformation of social knowledge will play out equally for everyone. As important research by Virginia Eubanks and others has shown, it is populations who are already vulnerable and poor that are most likely to be harmed by hidden data driven judgments made against them by government departments, service suppliers, credit raters, insurers and so on. By the same token, these same people are the least likely to be able to resist. It costs money to mount a legal claim. And when they look for work, the low paid work that they can get is likely to come with the compulsion to accept still more surveillance than is normal in higher status work. A social world then is emerging where vulnerability to forced acceptance of continuous surveillance is likely to become a leading dimension of inequality. Is there a risk that in this critique, we're idealizing the past quietly? When of course populations were victimized, stereotyped, excluded silently from resources. I don't think so. Provided we are precise about what is in danger of dropping out of our picture of the social world as this new former social knowledge installs itself. And there are at least three answers to that question. First, and most directly, we are in danger of losing hold of those older models of social knowledge and the categories that they generated. For example, the idea of poverty as a socially caused phenomenon that can only be understood by attention to all the socioeconomic factors that are statistically correlated with it. As Marion Foucard, an earlier speaker in this lecture series, wrote, older rationales for giving the poor more favorable terms because they were poor, that is socially disadvantaged in ways we understood, have now in America largely been replaced with the idea that the terms of credit ought to depend solely on one's prior credit-related behavior. That is, on the risks those people pose within commercial risk systems, as tracked, of course, by impersonal algorithms. Second, we risk losing hold of older forms of expertise and judgment that are not respected by the new model of social knowledge. So American legal theorists who've studied algorithmic processes in local governments and the courts conclude that opaque algorithms risk, as they put it, hollowing out the decision-making capacity of public servants by creating a distance between their decisions and the evidence-gathering on which those decisions still have to rely. Third, perhaps most dangerous of all, we risk all of us losing the habit of expecting that our knowledge of the world around us should be grounded in what people say and how people, not machines, actually interpret the world. That is, it should be grounded in our voices. And because it is only that view of the social world that makes it rational to think democracy is worth striving for, we may lose touch with the value of democracy itself, at least as an everyday reality, something we know. There's no accident, therefore, that in a country which is not a democracy, China, huge emphasis is being placed on gaining global leadership of artificial intelligence by 2030. So perhaps we should take seriously Zhu Bo, a member of China's Academy of Military Science, when he proposed in the Financial Times this September that, quotes, the road to prosperity no longer runs only through liberal democracy. It may also be no accident that there are links reported by some journalists between leading US figures associated with the exploitation of artificial intelligence, such as Peter Thiel, the founder of Palantir, and extreme right-wing thinkers who've abandoned all loyalty to democracy. There may be counter-examples too, of course, such as Estonias, much-sighted vision for a digital society, where it's the state that guarantees this management of personal data, whose ownership, but perhaps not control, remains with the individual. But the Estonian vision only covers the individual's relations with the state. It doesn't cover the wider market for data, which is a feature of the corporate sector in Estonia, as in most other places. And finally, as an academic, I must acknowledge the social sciences' strange complicity today in these developments. I mean the new research from behavioral economics to cultural theory, which is often more interested in challenging, even mocking, the idea of the irrational human subject than defending it. Not many steps from this to the frequent claim of marketers through artificial intelligence to know their customers better than they know themselves. So the message that I want to leave you with tonight is this. That the digital social world is being reconstructed all around us, not through an evil conspiracy, but through a practical combination on the ground of a new corporate rationality and the changes that this rationality encourages and often compels in how we live our daily lives. We are complicit in this transformation until we choose not to be. Is this the future for digital society that we had imagined and that we actually want? If not, then we must start to imagine a different future. And this is not easy. I agree with historian Yuval Harari who wrote recently that opposing, opposing the ideology of dataism is quotes not only the greatest scientific challenge of the 21st century, but also the most urgent political and economic project. The challenge in fact is even greater because the social transformation as I brought out that's going on, that's driving it, is largely hidden. It risks to quote one of my favorite German authors W.G. Zebold, it risks becoming a silent catastrophe that occurs almost unperceived. So now is the time for our eyes to be wide open about what is going on with data and that is why Ulysses and I have written our book, Building on Much Great Work by Many Other Writers. It is indeed a time to work and think together to face these profound challenges. But time is short. Thank you for listening.