 Ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure to introduce you or to welcome you to the next evening of our lecture series, Making Sense of the Digital Society that is hosted by incorporation by the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society and the German Federal Agency for Civic Education. In this lecture series, we are trying to grasp the ongoing digital transformations and try to make sense of how we can discuss, interpret and see the changes for this inviting prominent speakers from Europe to present their thoughts, their ideas, their analysis and turn down my own phone. I'm very sorry for that. Just a second. Yes, and are trying to to figure out a European perspective on digital transformations. So welcome to you. This tonight, we are going to have a lecture by Nick Koldry, whom I'm especially welcome here, right on time, and he is going to be properly properly introduced by our moderator, Tobi Müller. Thank you. Thank you, Sasha Scheier, from the Federal Agency for Civic Education for having me. Thank you, Sharnet Hofmann from Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society. Before I introduce you a little bit more to our guests tonight, let me just point really quickly to the structure of the evening. I see many familiar faces. Many of you probably know how this will enroll. So there's going to be in a minute the lecture of our prominent guest tonight. Afterwards, maybe for about 20 minutes, we'll have a conversation. The two of us here on station. It's your turn. There's going to be one or two microphones in the audience. There's also a sort of invisible Twitter wall. Hashtag digital society. You can see it here on stage where you can ask questions. So maybe after 10 minutes into the audience discussion, we'll ask what's going on on Twitter. And we're also being filmed tonight. There's two cameras. So if you opposed to that, well, let's not get into that. That's Nick's topic of tonight, I guess. He'll tell you more about that. Our guest today from London is here to teach us, among other things, something that is rooted in England, so to say, by way of the city of Trier, Germany, I might add. We do not have the exiled Karl Marx with us tonight, but a scholar of media and social theory that draws from Marx, the notion that history is man-made, that capital works through social forces, and nothing ever was natural without alternative. That is, which also means nothing ever will be without alternative. This notion may be very basic, I know, but I think it plays a central role in this lecture tonight, in that it looks awry at things many of us think of being natural. For example, data harvesting in the private sector. Let me quote from the website of our distinguished guest, very excellent website. I think, by the way, I quote, throughout my career, I have tried to confront a basic paradox that information and communication technologies, because they present us with a reality every day, can easily come to seem like a second nature. As a result, which should always be contestable, can end up seeming beyond challenge, a structure of power that is too hard to move or break through, end quote. This certainly rings a bell when we think of the topics this series has covered, the shift in what we mean by saying democracy and public sphere under digital capitalism, artificial intelligence, predictive algorithms, the rise of the smart city, and as an undercurrent surveillance. Tonight, we can add to the list dataism or dataification as colonialism. The proper title of the lecture, you can probably read it behind me, colonized by data, the hollowing out of digital society. Our guest is professor of media, communications, and social theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE. He's a sociologist of media and culture who was also written widely on the ethics and philosophical implications of media. His most recent article is called, Deconstructing Datification's Brave New World, with you, of LSE also, which draws on their recent price of connection funded research project. His last book, The Mediated Construction of Reality with Andreas Hepp, won the German Communication Association's biannual theory prize. He's the author or editor of 12 books and more than 100 journals and book chapters, including Media Society World, Social Theory and Digital Media Practice in 2012, Why Voice Matters in 2010, Media Rituals, A Critical Approach and Inside Culture. Tonight's topic is also kind of a preview of his next book, which he co-authors with Ulysses Mejias of New York, and which will be out in spring or summer next year at Stanford University Press. The Costs of Connection, it is called, How Data is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism. Now, the stage is yours. Please, a very warm welcome to Nick Koldry. Well, thank you very much for that introduction, Toei. I'm very pleased and honored to be speaking in this wonderful lecture series. 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 that's 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 Mejias called The Costs of Connection, which comes out next year, but is already available for order if this lecture doesn't put you off from ordering it. That's the end of the marketing, I promise. Now, the cool 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 timescale 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. This possibility that we're entering a genuinely new phase of colonialism where human beings are the target is as the cliche goes, the bad news. But there's also some good news. First, that this cycle of colonialism is only just starting by just, I mean, in the past 20 years. Second, we have today a memory of what historic colonialism did and how over centuries it fueled industrial capitalism. And in the West, we would do well to listen to those whose memory of colonialism's impact is much sharper than ours. And third, we certainly know what capitalism is having lived much or all of our lives under it. Remember that the initial victims of historic colonialism did not have those last two advantages. To give you a sense of what we might gain by interpreting our present relations with data on this longer timescale, let's think back to earlier this year and another key moment in the collective realization that something big is going on with data. And I mean the Facebook Cambridge Analytica scandal, which broke in mid-March 2018. This scandal prompted many to check what data was being routinely collected from and about them via platforms such as Facebook, via search engines such as Google. Many of them were shocked, though many already knew this. As the scandal heightened, the Edward Snowden of this moment, Christopher Wiley, a former employee of Cambridge Analytica, commented on Twitter about Cambridge Analytica's plans for expanding its operations to India. This is what modern colonialism looks like, he wrote. Now you might say, hang on, that's just too easy. Yes, the legacy of older colonialism lives on, we all know it. In the geography of global capitalism, in the dominant power to this day of American culture, in the racial divides in the US, Brazil and many other countries, in the dynamics of migration. Almost every form of power imbalanced today can in some way, of course, be related back to the legacy of historic colonialism. And so has been called neocolonial by one critic or another. And perhaps the sort of power that Facebook has sought to exercise in Africa through its Facebook Free Basics platform is best understood as a neocolonial move, benefiting from the historic asymmetry between Africa and American capital. But you would say that of itself doesn't mean that what is going on today is a new type of colonialism. And you will be right. It is too easy to use the word colonialism as a metaphor, including in relation to all things digital. 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 goal they wanted. And read out this document in the middle of the night. In Spanish, a language they knew the locals did not understand is 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 she'll 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. How should we think about this emerging social order? Karl Marx showed that industrial capitalism social order was based on labor relations, and our deep relations to commodities, which make our labor relations seem natural. But Marx was such a remarkable social theorist, that if we interpret him right, we can see that he allowed for another possibility, that capitalism social order might at some time in the future be built on other forms of abstraction than labor relations. Perhaps these same data relations that as I just noted, we already enter into every day of our lives, a habit that is becoming so regular that it doesn't seem like appropriation much at the time, just convenience. Perhaps then the most important thing going on with data today, the heart of data colonialism is something so big that it almost escapes us. Perhaps it is the new corporate strategy, the new corporate dream you can hear from every boardroom in most countries, that Ulysses and I believe underlies most of the details of datification. The dream of annexing to capital every point in space and time of cloning social relations on digital platforms and elsewhere, so that this annexation to capital seems just natural. And through this building a social order that capitalizes human life without any possible limit. The annexation of human life then our lives by to the forces of capital, a land grab without precedent in human history. An annexation that to be effective does not need the violence that prized the goal from Latin America because a vast and all encompassing network of social relations is already in place on the foundations of which new forms of data relation can be built provided we agree. And yes, we are used to the idea that there is no alternative to capitalism in general. But the key question is, is there an alternative to capitalism of this datified sort? Let's remember that until 20 years ago or so, there was. We were living it. So to make these general remarks a little more concrete, I want for the rest of my lecture to focus on one of the key domains where data colonialism is being worked out, the social world. Marx, again, may very clear that capital does not just succeed by being imposed upon the world, it works through social relations, such as our relations to the commodity, what he famously called the commodity fetish, and via the social order built through those relations. Calpolanyu, the economic historian showed how the emergence of industrial capitalism in the 18th and 19th centuries was not possible without a profound change in the social fabric. Or as he put it vividly, a market economy can only exist in a market society, which must literally be created through highly artificial stimulants administered to the body's social. And this happened, Polanyu argued, through a huge institutional reorganization in the 19th and early 20th centuries of the areas of work, land and finance, which over time turned almost all transactions into money transactions. And gradually over time as well, there emerged a counter movement, which introduced social reforms to make the cruel order of industrial capitalism a little more human. Today with data, we're in the middle of just the first stage of a parallel process. The counter movement has not yet happened. We're already making ever more transactions into data transactions, that is, transactions configured, so as to optimize the extraction of economic value through data. The basic data relations I mentioned earlier are just the simplest form of this. And these new forms of social relation could be introduced without so far much resistance, not just as I said, because they build on the discipline that capitalism already requires of us, but also because of a change in how we know and understand the social world, the world made up of our relations to each other. For there is a second truly unprecedented thing about what's happening with data, and it relates to knowledge. Think about it. In all previous eras, knowledge, the tools through which we know the world around us, while it might have economic value, was in principle separate from economic value. But now, as countless corporations and institutions of big data are telling us, a new form of social knowledge, a new form of human knowledge even, will be made up of the very same stuff from which capitalism also makes economic value data. The data that we give up as we enter into data relations. And if this transformation proceeds to its conclusion, which may take a few years, knowledge and economic value, society and market will become fused so that strategies for extracting economic profit can be presented without dishonesty as simply proposals to expand knowledge. Let's look at this in more detail. It's always hard to get into view the wider processes through which social knowledge is produced. A special difficulty, though, today is that we're still living with the legacy of an older vision of how to produce social knowledge, forged in the 19th century, partly in response to the horrors of early capitalism. This old model of social knowledge was based in the collection of public statistics gathered generally by nation states through survey questions answered by human beings and interpreted by human beings. And when this emerged in the 19th century as the new model for understanding the social world, perhaps for the first time discovering the social world, this use of statistics was highly controversial. As a model of social knowledge, however, it had the following features, which, as we shall see, are not shared by big data. First, it was publicly funded and collected. In most countries through the census, though, I realize that that was a little more controversial in Germany. Secondly, it was publicly analyzed and put to use by governments and by civil society organizations that wanted social reform. This, for example, was how, by statistical analysis, we gained our understanding of poverty as a socially caused phenomenon, rather than, for example, as a terrible affliction somehow accidentally caused by God to which charity was the answer. Thirdly, this knowledge was publicly debated. Even Charles Dickens entered the debate about whether statistical predictions prove that human beings have free will or not. And it was more or less publicly accountable and contested. Now, I would not suggest for one moment that the governments of the 19th and early 20th century were ideal or blameless, of course not. But the publicness of the knowledge on which they relied was until recently our inheritance. It shaped all social policy up until around 20 years ago, perhaps sometimes still even to this day. Commercial corporations in the 19th century were only beginning to establish themselves as institutions. So at that time, they were the buyer, not the seller of this social knowledge. They depended on government to share it. The exception was the insurance industry, which from early on acquired a special privilege to ask detailed questions of those they considered for insurance. But even there, as Dan Bauck brings out in a recent history of the American insurance industry, the relative simplicity of the statistical models then used made it possible for ordinary people who felt disadvantaged by insurance calculations to challenge them. African Americans in America brought a case successfully to the Supreme Court to challenge how their racial status was treated by insurers when the premiums were calculated, which brings out another feature of this older model of social knowledge, its relative transparency. For all its faults, this older science proved a viable model of public knowledge for grounding societal reform, a model that actually challenged market forces and their effects on human lives. So what about today's emerging model of social knowledge that based on pools of big data processed by huge banks of parallel computers using so-called machine learning? It's called machine learning by the way, though as you may know it often relies on some pretty dull work by human beings to refine the so-called training data from which those computers learn how to distinguish, say, a human face from a pumpkin. Now this new way of generating and processing social knowledge is privately collected and funded, privately analyzed, privately debated most of the time inside the walls of corporations, and certainly mainly privately accountable, making it very hard to contest from the outside of corporation walls. In addition, because of the extreme complexity, a massive repetition on which machine learning depends, this knowledge and its processes is largely opaque. It's not transparent. The remoteness of this new social knowledge from daily understandings of the world has been noted by journalists. For example, there's a story of how in the early years of this decade, Uber executives, when they held a party, used to treat the people there to what they called the God view. Of all Uber's cars tracked around the surrounding city, San Francisco. As part of the spectacle, they would show the locations of currently active passengers. Sometimes for fun, they removed passenger anonymity. But maybe Uber really were just playing. So let's take another US corporation, less well known, ShotSpotter, a data analytics company supporting the crime prevention sector. When ShotSpotter's CEO was challenged by an American judge to provide details of his proprietary algorithm on the basis of which the judge was going to decide on sentencing issues in court, he refused. It's like taking someone's Netflix subscription. And no, you don't do that. But then the knowledge that corporations like ShotSpotter are acquiring right across the social domain is not like someone's Netflix subscription. It is knowledge about our shared social world that must be publicly accountable, accessible, debatable. If that is, the social world is still the public world that for two centuries we have assumed it is. I've not yet mentioned another feature that a number of writers have found disturbing about algorithmic knowledge of the social world. That it's not based on talking to people, asking what they think, how they reflect, how they interpret the world they share, as even statistics were at their root. Instead, the goal of artificial intelligence, and therefore it's huge attraction for corporations and governments that with access to the computing power and resources on which machine learning depends. AI's goal is the finding of proxies. Proxies discovered after countless layers of pattern seeking. Proxies which emerge as a good enough substitute for predicting when two things will be correlated. It's unclear what good enough means which is why judges in legal systems such as the American one that are increasingly relying on private suppliers of algorithms are asking what those products are based on without as we saw always getting the answers. Now as usual it's the state's use of such algorithmic judgment that seems to attract most attention. For example in the area of facial recognition. In China, facial recognition is becoming normal as a government technique for national and local states. The goal is to have a database of the faces of all citizens by 2020. But it's also becoming a normal medium for economic transactions. You may have read that in Shanghai you can pay for your Kentucky fried chicken simply by smiling at a camera. I guess smiling always helps. A Californian burger chain was recently reported to be introducing this in America. But facial recognition is just a very small part of how algorithmic ways of knowing are colonizing every domain of social interaction. So we can look at marketing the fine-grained tuning of ads to your online presence. Insurance, the car monitor on the dashboard that may give you lower premiums if you accept its presence in your car. Logistics, the detail recorders the most truck drivers must now have in their trucks. And of course management science itself. For example the badge which MIT psychologist Sandy Pentland proposes introducing into every workplace to monitor how workers interact with each other to aid our understanding of the corporation's work culture. Now these are all areas of everyday life that we had thought were part of the economy and the extraction of value. Maybe not so shocking therefore. But there are other areas which expand much more radically the domain of data colonialism. First of all the appliances and devices of everyday life such as fridges and washing machines are increasingly entangled with data relations through the internet of things. Marketers are already thinking far ahead to installing what they call product relationship management into all consumer goods to monitor their use continuously after purchase. Cars such as the Tesla can even make this seem cool. Second in many countries people are choosing even competing to self track through devices such as Fitbit. In the marketing industry external tracking devices above the skin are seen as just the first step. A fashion is developing for implanting computer ships beneath the skin as a sort of identity card that will speed up your progress through controlled environments. In Sweden an advocate of such chips said quotes all of the wearables we wear today will be implantable in five to ten years. And data colonialism is even expanding into the one domain we might have hoped would stand above the extraction of economic value. The institutions which regulate social life. In the US there is growing debate about the use of algorithms in courts of law to which our return. Finally in the UK we learn recently that underfunded local government is using algorithms to assess if children are in danger and so need monitoring by social workers. In all these many ways and I could go on. We are collaborating with the public private surveillance partnership that as Bruce Schneier said spans the world. But from the perspective of marketers as the leading producers of this new form of social knowledge they have not lost they have gained a social world to interact with to influence. They imagine this world expanding or should we say deepening as ever more aspects of what we thought was just our internal life becomes somehow externalised so that they present a surface to be tracked. This appropriation of the stuff of our lives is already treated as banal in the marketing industry. Let me give you two examples. In a report on the wearable future PricewaterhouseCoopers imagined a world where quotes brands could even tap body cues to tailor messages in real time obviously. That world will provide marketing opportunities without limit as they say sensor revealing that you're thirsty he is a coupon for smart water. Meanwhile in the consultants report for the insurance industry called the Internet of Things Opportunity for Insurers we learned that insurers could quotes use IOT enriched relationships to connect more holistically to customers and influence their behaviours. Now I'm not for one moment saying that the authors of those reports those who hope to build upon them are evil colonialists who seek to do violence to human life deliberately. They would no doubt be horrified at the accusation maybe some are in the room I'm sure they'd be horrified at this but that's I suggest because they've already so internalised the ideology of data colonialism and the appropriations it requires. Let's not suppose however that this massive transformation of social knowledge will play out equally for everyone. As important research by Virginia U banks 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 idealising the past quietly when of course populations were victimised, 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 form of 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 Foucaud, an earlier speaker in this lecture series wrote older rationales for giving the poor more favourable 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 behaviour. 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 judgement that are not respected by the new model of social knowledge. So American legal theorists who 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. This rebuilding of the social world involves as it were a refilling of the tanks of social knowledge filling them with another form of information that is less responsive to social, political or even human inputs than we once thought social knowledge was. And none of this is accidental or just unfortunate. These developments are precisely the means through which the wider moves of data colonialism are sustained. A key transformation of our age that in time will fuel a new stage of capitalism whose full contours we cannot yet predict. And this transformation of social knowledge and the social world requires the hollowing out of something else. I mean the hollowing out of the space of the human subject. From whose interactions the social world is built but who now to live in that world must increasingly submit to being tracked. At worst through such tracking we damage the space that underlies the very possibility of freedom. Assuming we still following Hegel understand freedom as he put it as the freedom to be with oneself in the other. When I am with Fitbit and its external infrastructures of data management I am no longer fully with or alongside myself. Something else is in between. But there is one piece of hope. And this is we're still at an early stage of these profound changes within digital society. We can use our knowledge of the history of colonialism and capitalism and our awareness of the shape that data relations are already taking to question their inevitability, to challenge their necessity and to imagine the possibility of still connecting with each other on other terms than these. The costs of connection can still perhaps for a further decade at least be renegotiated. The battle will be played out as much in China as in North America and Europe. In fact, and this may be the first cultural, economic, political battle where it's China, not the West, that sets the terms. In China, the vision of data-driven order that I've outlined for you tonight is already announced without apology in the policy statements of the Chinese government. For example, on its social credit system which is attracting much attention in the West. The Chinese government makes clear that the goal of its artificial intelligence program is not to enhance freedom or better self-knowledge. It is, as it says, a market improvement of the social and economic order. This is not social order as we know it in the democracies of the West. It is not an order based on freedom. And yet it is based on broadly the same technological system of computer-based connection that we have been installing in the West. In fact, it's a more streamlined version of it. It's smarter. We're entering, then, a historic battle for the values of freedom on which we thought our democracies were built. In its early stages, this battle will be as much a battle for the imagination as for policy solutions or technological adjustments. The first question we must ask, therefore, is not how do we build different infrastructures for the economy, for social connection. The first question instead should 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. Thank you very much, Nick, for this very strong lecture bleak at times in the outlook with a small window of hope. I would like to ask the question of the cost of connection and how it can be renegotiated in the next 10 years at the very end. This is a little cliffhanger here in our discussion after audience participation and after what we're going to hear from Twitter. And start with what I think might be just a controversial core, actually, of your argument, of your lecture. It is already in the title and it's the term colonialism and neocolonialism. And you say explicitly, we do not understand it as a metaphor. We understand it as something that denotes exactly the same thing. Then you go on to point out some differences between historical colonialism and what we are facing today. Actually, you're saying that what the conquistador is read out in the middle of the night in early 16th century in Latin America, the requerimiento equals the terms of service. The things we don't read, we don't understand in the internet. The terms of service come with a deal. At the end, they do come with a deal of consent, so to speak. And it's very hard to oppose that deal, to counter that deal. Would you still hold that it actually, it is not a metaphor or is it something like colonialism we have today and how do we counter that deal that is so seductive to most of us? Is this on? Oh, yes, good. Well, we use that analogy and it's an attempt to get our imaginations working. The book does not depend on whether you believe that analogy exactly or not. There were differences. But we find it a really striking similarity. That the situation we all face in relation to terms and conditions that really emerged in the Cambridge Analyst scandal when people started looking at what they'd agreed to. The picture I put up of a phone with Facebook requires you to accept came when, as we were finishing the first version of our book two weeks after the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke. For some reason, I lost Facebook on my phone. And without thinking, because I hardly use Facebook to be honest, without thinking, I said, oh, I must reinstall it. So when I tried to reinstall it, it gave me the choice of what it would have to get from me for me to reinstall it. And stupidly I pressed accept, but luckily I asked my wife to take a picture of my phone before I did so. And that's the picture I put up there. I'm not excluding myself from this complicity in any sense. The reason we think there's a similarity is that the Spanish court, and it's important to remember this, in spite of the appalling violence that early colonialism involved, if you read the eyewitness accounts, it's beyond terrible what happened, was actually part of a much more complicated picture. The Spanish court wanted to grab the gold legally. There were fierce debates in the court of the Spanish king about how to do this legally. And that's why they drafted this document, the requirement, which would, just as we as our data corporations ask us, because they want to do it legally, of course. Yes, they operated with an implied consent. But of course, very often, since we know we never read those terms and conditions, they're in a language we don't understand, but we often don't even see them, so they might as well be in the middle of the night. Our data has already gone, we have already consented. So we think there's quite a precise analogy there. And that's why we suggest that, although a few people have rightly said there are neocolonial aspects to what goes on with data, such as Facebook's attempt to supply the internet on the cheap to 23 African countries and so on and so forth. That is neocolonial. But it doesn't get to the core what is newly colonial about what's going on with all our relations of data. And that's the distinction we want to make. India successfully fought against Facebook free basics, actually, so there is an alternative to that. Well, it did, and there was a strong civil society that saw through the offer and saw it as an attempt to increase market share, but also, of course, to get data from those Indian citizens. And so that was a very important battle. Let us stick to the notion of colonialism just a little bit more. I quote from an article, actually, you wrote in there. You said, in order to decolonize data colonialism, its underlying rationality must be attacked. You talk about epistemological decolonization. Of course, that's the big question. If we are living in a time of data colonialism, how do we decolonize it? Well, that's why I stressed at the end imagination because we're talking about a very, very complicated, very practical, very convenient in many ways, social and economic order, where we're all part of. It's simply not practical to imagine that just by me going off Facebook tomorrow, I'm gonna make any difference at all to that. If hundreds and hundreds of millions start doing that, that might begin to shake Facebook. They go to Instagram then. They go to Instagram, which is actually owned by Facebook. And in addition, there are all the other parts of what we call the social quantification sector. And then just to widen it a little bit more, we stress that we often focus on social media because that's the side of social quantification that we're most familiar with. But actually, that's only one small part of data colonialism. If you look at most businesses today and the way they think about logistics, the way they think about what it is to be a rational business, what it is to manage assets rationally, it always now involves the collection, the processing and the implementation of decisions based on fine-grain data, which depending on the class of the employees, very often involves bodily surveillance of those employees. So this is a live rationality right across management science, endlessly debated. And it's important to see this goes very, very deep. So withdrawing from it is not straightforward. It's a massive collective project that will take 10, 20 years even to get clear some of the practical moves that could dismantle it. But the first step is the imagination. And the first step for the imagination to think about is the rationality that makes all of this seem somehow to make sense, to seem natural, to seem to be the way things have to be. Because it was not the way things had to be 30 or 40 years ago. And we need to hold on to that. Maybe we can come to the point where we think of who those agents will be who challenge this sort of rationality. Academia might be one of those agents. But first, let us talk a little bit about labor and resource. From your lecture again, I quote, data colonialism is in contrary, appropriates life as raw material, whether or not the data is the product of labor or labor like conditions. To me, that sounds pretty much like all of my friends are doing every day. In journalism, in showbiz, in academia, also that they see social interaction as a form of labor, actually. This would not be surprising to most of the people I engage with in my everyday life. Is this a new quality then, so to speak? Is it something that is really brought about by those ancients you portrayed? There's an overlap here, which is that it's certainly true that some of us are doing actual labor on platforms. We are helping machine learning to work when we read the capture signatures. We input data, that is, can be called labor. Maybe it should be called labor and paid accordingly. That's been an issue that a lot of the debate has focused on into recent years. And it's an important debate. Our argument is that that is only one part of the change, and if we focus on the part, we miss the whole. The whole is something much bigger, which is first of all, as I said, all labor relations, whether or not they're to do with social media, the more familiar areas, are being data-fied. They're having data relations incorporated into them, often involving the requirement to submit to be under surveillance of some sort. And that's really changing your life work conditions if you are particularly in a low-paid job, a low-status job. But the second thing that's going on that is very, very different, and it's subtly linked in and intertangled, life is complicated, but it is different, is the idea that whatever we're doing, even if we don't think it's work, even if no one thinks it's work, is still living and it still may generate useful data exhaust for corporations from which value can be generated. And this is what we insist on in the book, is not something that corporations could have imagined 30, 40 years ago. Of course, they always had the goal of expanding across the whole terrain of social life. As Mark said, capitalism always expands. That remains true, but how it expands, the dimensions across which it can expand, that's where the change is. And if you like, just to put it in vivid terms, what we're saying is that it's almost as if we discovered some higher dimensions in which capitalism could also expand. We knew the basic three or four that are there right in front of us. Never occurred to us that our inner life, what we do when we think we're just reflecting, musing, or just thinking about whether we're running well and so on and so forth, could also be a resource for capitalism. But that is what it now is. That's in a higher dimension of exploitation, potentially without limit, because the more we adapt to this, the more we expose new surfaces for tracking. And that's why we insist this is genuinely a new moment where capitalism requires totally new potential, unless we disagree, unless we start to stop this expansion. It may be on a higher level, but speaking of Marx, not of Marx, of Marx, I had to think of Shakespeare quote he incorporated in Capital Volume One. He quoted a character, a comic character who is quite well known, I think, in Great Britain, not so much in Germany, of the play Much Ado About Nothing. The character's called the dog berry. And he speaks of the commodity fetish. He quotes Shakespeare, and this comic character always confuses things the wrong way around, like malappropriations, so to speak. He says, to be a well-favored man is the gift of fortune, but reading and writing comes by nature. He says that in 1867, so to speak. So this is like the commodity fetish turned around, that the gift of fortune, the gabber der Umstände of circumstance is something else than reading or writing as nature. It's unmarked. So to be well-favored today is the result of labor indeed. So can we say that dog berry is proven right by datification? Well, Marx's idea that the world is actually upside down from the way it remains true. And by the way, I know about dog berry as a part I play when I was a student after. So it's a great part. Marx said that with the commodity fetish, our confusion of the flow of life for things which intrinsically have a value somehow in the market was crucial to the social order that is built on top of it. And he argued the various things were fetishized in capitalism, such as rent was the fetish that somehow naturally comes from the land or interest naturally comes from money. We're arguing in the book that there's a new fetish now which is data itself. The idea that data is the natural, if you like, emission or product, output of life, which is something you can see in many management texts, almost verbatim, you can see assumed in much management discourse. That is another fetish, the idea that data is the natural outcome of human life. It is actually not at all natural. Would you say that this new kind of fetish of data being the fetish actually explains for the shift we are witnessing of the public sphere and the private sphere? Because if the data actually is being fetishized and our life is the resource for this kind of data as you explained in your lecture, it would entail that our life is not private anymore, that it is a public good, so to speak, or a public resource. Ultimately, yes, unless we resist this massive set of changes that are going on. And that's why in the book, we have a whole chapter thinking about social knowledge because you can look at this all from the point of view of economic production, if you like, and that's very, very important and there's so much great work that's been analyzing how data production works. And obviously it's limits sometimes, it's not always successful and so on. But when we move to the other side of data, which is its role as social knowledge as the stuff out of which we come to know the world we live together, then when you think about how that becomes normalized, built into the way we do live together on the basis of various assumptions, the way things are and so on, we expect our social media ratings to be taken into account when we go for a job and so on. Then you start to realize that there's a normalization built into the very foundations of social knowledge. It is very hard to shift once it's built in and that's the transformation, the biggest transformation that's going on today because as I said, uniquely in human history, we're now saying that the stuff from which economic value is made is the stuff from which we know the world in which economic value is made. There's no gap between knowledge and value anymore and this is something that even Marx could not have directly expected, although he might, if you were alive today, see it as a direct continuation of his analysis but it is an extraordinary new extension of where he was pointing us in his work in the 19th century. Because people are tracked and surveilled constantly, you said they lose the capacity to change over time. Maybe the next question leans into psychological territory a little bit. So surveillance, I mean, we are here speaking on the grounds of the former GDR, which was a different kind of surveillance state, not that there wasn't any surveillance in West Germany, God forbid, but we know that it actually leads to change in behavior, to more coded behavior in the public sphere, to more hesitant behavior. Do we have that today? Because that would imply that people were actually aware that they lived in a constant state of potential surveillance and I'm not sure if they actually are. Does it lead to changes in behavior already, would you say? Well, there may be, and I think we couldn't observe it in the way young people use Facebook gradually as awareness of the fact that Facebook is a lot less private than initially people in courage to think it was, I'm sure a certain caution, decorum, sort of social restraint has been built in but that doesn't really get to the much bigger universe of surveillance that's going on every time we do almost anything online. It's impossible to integrate that in how we behave because it will require really acting on the basis that the corporation was watching us all the time. There's no way we could make sense of a life like that. Now, there is a reason why I put it that way which is that I genuinely don't believe, and this is really like the normative, not the empirical side of our book, I genuinely don't believe that the direction we're going in now by installing as a business rationality, the consistent tracking of every human activity and saying that's natural, and saying as Kevin Kelly from California said, this is part of what we have to accept for technological momentum. I genuinely do not believe that is compatible with freedom. More importantly, it's not even compatible with the very basis of freedom. Hegel talked about this idea of the freedom to be with oneself in the other. What was extraordinary about Hegel and how he was so profoundly inferential for Marx but also the post-colonial theorists like Fanon and many others is that he saw that freedom is relational. It's he completely exploded the liberal model of freedom that's just me competing with you because the liberal model of freedom will not help us in any way deal with surveillance because we are being encouraged as consumers to trade in that sort of freedom for convenience. The only type of freedom which can help us is the sort of freedom that Hegel expressed so brilliantly 200 years before any of this happened which is relational freedom. The freedom to be oneself that I recognize in you and you recognize in me and that's why we value talking to each other, facing each other, having an encounter, that's what it means, that's the basis of its meaning. So when he says freedom is the freedom to be with oneself in the other, in the other is the complex social world we have to pass through as we live our lives but the with oneself is the cause. He said we always return to this circle of ourselves which is always changing but it's always our life that we're trying to push forward, become wiser, become less stupid, make less mistakes, become more humble and so on and so forth. And it's that life that faces death of course at the end. Now the idea and Dave Eggers in his wonderful novel The Circle expresses this very, very well the idea that we could give up that in exchange for convenience as he explains in the novel is extremely violent, very absurd, strange and it can cause a sort of madness in some of his characters but of course it's often disguised. We disguise this under many levels. So it's very hard to realize that this is actually what is at stake. It would take some time for this debate to develop but I think this is what we are beginning to realize as marketers more and more expand their dominion over our lives for example through extended product relationship management as I said in the lecture. This is the expectation of marketers and we have to name it and be very explicit about it and ask ourselves is this genuinely the life we want and is that because it's compatible with freedom or is it because we don't care about freedom anymore? Maybe we have to redefine that notion of convenience or freedom and I think there's also to put it kind of polemically emerging markets that sort of cater to those kind of pockets. The question is just how exclusive they are. To give you an example in Berlin there's a very famous gay nightclub called Burkine and like more and more nightclubs you cannot take your phone in there it's actually you cannot take any pictures or you're thrown out immediately and there's like at some concerts you get those little bags where you have to put your phone in people actually pay for that kind of stuff to enjoy that kind of freedom. There's like a big spa somewhere north to Hauptbahnhof in Berlin where there's kind of naked sauna landscape where there's no phones either. People pay a lot of money to get in there and to lock their phones into little lockers. But as you actually hit the nail on the head as we say in England, people have paid for it a lot and that's why I brought out the issue of inequality that if you to live have to do three or four jobs then you have to accept the terms and conditions of those jobs. Those jobs probably because of three or four of them involve coordinating as you move around space you must have your phone on you must be connectable at all times you must submit to any platforms that require your data to track your performance and so on. The, we are not going to get to a world where all of us are feeling the sort of pain and sense of loss of freedom that I emphasize in the argument because there will be winners in this game. There will be those who have the power to win to protect themselves more who as CEOs of companies and so on will make sure that they are not tracked every moment of every day. I think if we take Amazon we know that what goes on on the Amazon warehouse where they find the books and I do use Amazon, I don't deny it they find the books they have they have something called voice picking. So the employees in their trolleys in their vehicles have to follow very precise instructions through their headphones telling the mover a little to the left, a little to the right and so on all day, that's all they do. Now, I don't believe that Jeff Bezos the CEO of Amazon has to negotiate how he moves around his ballroom in the same way. I don't believe it. I'm sure he has a lot more freedom as to his discretion and that brings out this is a fundamental new dimension of inequality exposure to surveillance and that may help us not see that it's still driven by a general problem. The last question before we open it up to the audience actually deals with equality or rather inequality again from your lecture. You said it is knowledge about our shared social word that must be publicly accountable, accessible, debatable. If that is the social word is still the public world that for two centuries we have assumed it is. Now, my question would be has it really been that public all the time like we assume because the exclusion government reproduces for example still that is in Germany at least is becoming apparent again in a lot of German sociology at least the lack of what they call responsibility towards the lower social stratum has been constant in the last up to four decades. So even before neoliberalism hit actually Germany quite a few German sociologists write down that vein do we need more equal government before we talk about equality or inequality of the private sector? I'll come back to that in a minute but the first thing I wanna stress is that as I said we're not idealizing the 19th century and 20th century. You said that. They were clearly not perfect. In fact there were desert catastrophes. This sort of social knowledge was abused to the most terrible ends as we all know. However, the point we're making is that if you look back historically and we're basing that on a lot of studies on the 19th and 20th century and we're not historians. They were, this was in principle publicly driven knowledge in principle with abuses and so on like everything. We're now building a world where the knowledge that enables us to recognize it as social is in principle private, privately owned, privately gathered, privately put to use. In principle mainly privately accountable unless we somehow through legal cases force it open. That's a very big shift and it's a shift that I think directly relates to the point you were making. What sort of government will we have? Well, it's a strange thing to get our heads round but it's, if you go up to around the late 1980s private corporations used to buy statistics of government. Particularly in America. Because they didn't have the data gathering capacity with credit cards and all the things that came in at that point, they gradually acquired a data gathering capacity that far exceeds now what a government can do. Which is why in Britain three or four years ago the government even considered abandoning its national census to centuries old because it could get the information cheaper and more regularly from the market. Now then you may say that's just a market deal and some neoliberal people would say that. But the problem is where a government delegates the responsibility of knowing the world that it's there to govern. To private corporations you have a very different notion of democratic government. And you also have a very different social world which I think will not necessarily be compatible with the rationale of democracy. Which is that all of us deserve voices because we're normally listened to and therefore we should be listened to in the political world. What if we get used to no longer being listened to when the world that we know is described back to us. Then we don't even have a rationale for democracy anymore. That's what worries me. Oh we could talk a whole evening about the history of the census in Germany that was highly controversial in the 80s. Germany is a special case on the census. Special European case, yes. But now it is high time to open up this discussion to you. There's two microphones in the back. Please raise your hand and I'll try to distribute the microphones as good as I can from up here. I saw a hand on this side. Please the gentleman with the glasses. Can you just stand up so the microphone sees you so to speak? Thank you for the fascinating talk. And as you have simply demonstrated, the worlds of data is deeply entrenched in with a lot of emergent properties. Probably not equal in terms of colonialism. So I'm wondering again as the discussant, I'm wondering the usage of the term colonialism here. Is it not calling colonialism like trans-territorial feudalism or something like that because the lives of data, the way it is transacted, the ways it is generated, the emergent properties of it are far deeper than the processes of colonialism. Thank you. Thank you for that. I mean, it's obviously a very important question and we thought very hard about the use of the word colonialism and let me stress, although I'm a wide English man from London who you might think is really not qualified to talk about colonialism, having been descendants of those responsible for a lot of it, my co-writer is Mexican and this is very much our joint work. This is our joint position that we need the word colonialism to understand what's going on. And we need to come together if you like. And it's been a wonderful experience writing the book with Ulysses because we started from very different histories of what colonialism actually means to us but we've evolved a common position through writing which is absolutely our common position and that's for me personally very important but why do we use the word colonialism? Could we use the word feudalism? Quite a few people have used the word feudalism. I was tempted by that term myself at a very early stage. I don't think it's like feudalism. Feudalism after all involved social responsibilities for the feudal lord. It was a very abusive and unequal world but nonetheless the other side of the taking of resource the one-tenth in Britain over the corn was the responsibility to somehow maintain the village and do various things. There was a sense of responsibility however unequal that was. So it's not obviously accurate to say it's feudalist although it's certainly a big grab of territory and feudalism was. The reason why we say it's colonial it's because the only period in history when we can look back and think about when were the economic fundamentals of the world economy changed? And they were changed around 1500 when corporations they weren't even corporations at that state they tended to be kingdoms in Spain, Portugal, Britain, Holland and so on. Began to imagine an extraordinary possibility that they could literally appropriate the whole of the world's resources. That was a put it crudely a game changer a completely different way of thinking about what the economy was that the world was there for the taking however much violence it took. And we are arguing that this is a fundamental change in what capitalism which of course is already now fully established can do that it can appropriate any form of life in any detailed form it takes and see that as a source. And that is such a fundamental change we think only the word colonialism gets to if you like this game changing quality but there's the additional hook that as we know although some histories of capitalism sometimes Marx has been criticized for this ignored capitalism came out of colonialism it came out of the profits the resources of colonialism. So if we need to this is where the colonialism comes in not only does it give us a more accurate take on what capitalism still is that it emerged from colonialism but it gives us this broader time scale this time scale of the past 500 years to think about and so we're invited everyone to think could we be at the beginning of a new 500 year time cycle with a new capitalism developing maybe things will accelerate now because we already have capitalism in the next half century which we very differently organize from anything we imagine now because every one of us will be plugged in as a source for capital work will be totally differently organized corporations will be differently organized services will be differently organized and so on none of us can predict that yet but it's that sort of act of the imagination we want to encourage because we believe that the change is that fundamental there's yeah please please stand up right in the middle maybe fourth row first row so thank you for this wonderfully incisive work that you're doing and listening to you you managed to demonstrate and dramatize the way that knowledge is socially has social efficacy the work that knowledge does in fusing and consolidating social orders and then you point to the beginning of the colonial story which is also the beginning of the renaissance and the kinds of knowledge systems that do scientific forms of knowledge generation develop in tandem with and I fear that amongst the ideologies that you identify there is ideology built into the knowledge that we would hope to be able to have recourse to now which is reliant on factual neutral falsifiable systems of knowledge and those are not forms of understanding epistemology that revealed their social efficacy at all they obscure them and the so I so to put this into question how would you frame the possibilities for revalorizing subjectivity in ways that still can have scientific knowledge producing validity you mean each of us revalorizing our subjectivity or you mean at a more general level re revitalizing subjectivity in as part of the social order as part subjectivity is not just expressed in individual activity but in collective activity or in plural activity yes of all kinds of different gradations and you mean that as the beginnings of some form of resistance to what's going on obviously yeah that's a very important point and that's why I stressed earlier that in case it sounded otherwise that the type of freedom we're saying is a threat isn't the purely individual freedom my freedom to make choices in the market to know what bag of crisps I buy or not I'm not sure I even care who knows why I buy what bags of crisps I buy it's not really very important but I am concerned about an attempt to grab my whole subjectivity which that's just an extremely small part and the reason we mentioned Hegel but also the Latin American thinkers one can draw on as well there's a Mexican philosopher called Enrique Ducell who made a similar point to Hegel even though he developed his philosophy against the West in the face of Western domination he developed the idea of the natural substance of the person which has to be protected at all costs against external power and that is on the basis that this is not something I just have on my own I have it I acquire it in a social world in a world that respects me that cares for me that enables me to trust others just as they can trust me I gradually acquire that possibility of feeling that I have a certain freedom that is I respect in others just as they respect in me it's relational from the start so we have to start from that and that leads to an important practical point maybe two which is that this struggle to challenge this rationality which undermines subjectivities we've known has to be a collective battle it has to be each of us saying these conditions are intolerable we need to work together to help each other reduce our dependence that's going to be hard we have to work together on this it cannot work as an individual battle so we strongly against those people who say well each of us should now just withdraw from Facebook and that will solve it exercise our market freedoms that simply misses the point that this is a struggle for a different type of collective life a different way of being connected to each other the other point that it raises is this question about rationality which you think Toby was mentioning for us the final moment when we got the whole picture of our argument in view was when we rediscovered a wonderful essay by a Peruvian sociologist called Anibal Quijano who wrote an essay about nearly 30 years ago called Modernity Slash Rationality and in that essay he goes through what you just mentioned the development of the enlightenment and its entanglement one way or the other and I would never crudely reduce the enlightenment to colonialism or economic forces that's obviously ridiculous but there was an entanglement between the enlightenment and the extraordinary expansion of wealth through colonialism at the same time Francis Bacon, one of the writers for the enlightenment was also a theorist of colonialism however if we follow through that history to where we are now he argues the key thing we need to resist the core is a certain idea of rationality there's nothing wrong with rationality human beings have a right to try and live their lives better to make more sense of it to be more rational to encourage others to be more rational of course rationality being more rational is fine but the idea that one part of the world as it were owns the model of rationality the definition of what can count as rational that is the violence and we know that was a very integral part of certain forms of science and obviously colonialism and when we discovered this we realised this is the core of the big data of dataism the idea that only by gathering data in this way on these terms and aggregating it this way in these places can we have any hope of knowing human beings that is an extraordinary claim and we have to challenge that in its core just as we've challenged the historical versions of that but this is a living presence right now these are claims being made right now by the World Economic Forum UNDP the consultants and so on these are the language that they're talking in and if we do not expose that is a colonial claim at this point then we have no hope of challenging this whole shift in the nature of knowledge we have to learn from what we already know about colonialism if we don't we are blind in facing this challenge and we are not blind we have the knowledge so I thank you for that point again a notion of complicity in there at the resurfaces we take one more question before we go to Twitter I know there's many questions it's kind of hard to handle right now but you get your turn I hope Mr. Gentleman in the red sweater and the headphones on right there who raised his hand early on and after that we'll ask what's on Yes, nice to meet you My name is Georg von Borowitschini, Pirate I unfortunately have to say it in German I hope the colleague the contractor gets it transferred So, I'm waiting Well I miss a few points in your analysis You have shown a lot of dangers although I have to say a few things Yes, I agree with you a lot but I also say we can change a lot ourselves That's the question if I pay Facebook with a gold nugget or with a scrapped copper piece I decide that Then it's like what I missed is actually the influence, the possibility and it's been 33 years of civil society CCC observes it very precisely works very precisely against it There are a lot of people who look through the user conditions and say, here's what's wrong, here's what's wrong, here's what's wrong There is the movement and the stringent of the open data So I have the question to you You write a book together with a friend and say that you use a lot of other sources How much are they actually open data or should it be because we all here, or worldwide work with our money, our taxes and what we are urgently missing are of course political answers If you, China, I'll say it's a very bad example Yes But what do I do here in Germany? What do I do here in Europe? Politically What do I ask for this competition between Hase and Egel who want my gold I want that they give it back We have to limit ourselves to a question So what do we want to change politically so that the danger does not rise Maybe we cannot answer all of the questions or comments Thank you very much Thank you very much for that There's a very important series of points you're making And of course in the book I wasn't emphasizing it in the lecture I was trying to give you a vision of a general direction of travel If I'd had another hour we could have got into practicalities There are things that people are trying to do We are in the beginnings of what Polanyi called a counter movement People are beginning to sense something is wrong things need to be changed Yes corporations such as Facebook are facing some major challenges now in terms of their public policy their involvement in the public world that needs to continue of course I don't deny that for a moment The issues around open data are also very important I know there are proposals in Germany for Facebook to release some of its data for use by smaller corporations That may be a contribution in some way Our point though and this is why we do put it in more dramatic terms is that none of those proposals though they may have some benefits gets to the core issue of the collection of data which is fundamental to the question of freedom as we see it And also they don't deal with the fact that this is a very large scale system Facebook is just one player however powerful within it So we are saying in the book not that we neglect the practical responses they will become increasingly important but we're saying that when we're facing a whole social order that is being built partly through our own activities the starting point cannot be practical proposals because none of us if we're honest knows how to change this yet We do not And therefore the best starting point is to imagine use our imagination to think and use historical knowledge to think about whether this is the direction we want to go into if not to imagine how that world might be different and then together to start to think how we might build ways of connecting with each other differently That will involve some of the measures you're talking about but it may involve very other things different things as well And the position of governments is very, very complicated because as I said governments are now mainly the buyers of this data not the sellers their bargaining power has been reversed compared with two centuries ago and that's a very dramatic change in the relation between corporations and government So although of course I have hopes that law can change things I think the GDPR was a fundamental intervention in terms of challenging the market rationality coming from the United States in particular is enormously important politically and symbolically and I still have reservations as to how much it can change because it does not change the terms on which we give consent most of the time to the collection of data It's changed the debate but it may not yet have changed what we're doing every day and that's what we have to focus on for the long term There's a whole bunch of questions here in the audience but I hear there's not that much going on on Twitter tonight One question, so let's hear it We need a microphone up here First row Thank you So far there's just one question on Twitter How can we remediate our social data relations or our platforms and the individual? Should we look at imposing a fiduciary duty on platforms? Well that's a proposal that's been made in the United States and I should explain what it means because I don't know how far the concept of fiduciary duty translates into German law I just don't know In American and British law, the idea of fiduciary duty is the sort of special responsibility that we have in certain contractual relations Strangely enough, when you enter into a contract in English law with an insurer you are under a special obligation to tell the truth because they are ensuring your life or whatever they're taking the risk on your life and this came out two or three centuries ago So it's a very special duty and some American lawyers think this could be a basis of changing the way we think about corporations I think it could be a good legal start because I think first of all we have to go beyond the idea that Facebook and so on are just corporations doing what they have a right to do in the market They are providing infrastructures for social life They are claiming exactly to provide the basis of social life That must come with some notion of special responsibility So I think there's something in that as part of changing the whole legal environment and the way we think about these corporations while they still continue to exist So I think that's an important point and I would stress that in the United States there's really some excellent debate which is increasingly taking into account the GDPR That's a big shift in the past year to two years that the American debate which tended to be very closed off in the European debate has increasingly started to take into account the symbolic importance of GDPR interrupting markets and that's why the GDPR was so important and that's why law is very important but under these special conditions it may not be the only answer After all, there were laws regulating the markets in the 19th century which made capitalism less cruel but it didn't by any means end all the problems So the GDPR is part of the renegotiation you were talking about at the end of the talk? Yes, I think so partly because symbolically it says in the first sentence of the GDPR that the collection of personal data raises fundamental questions of human rights In other words, it's not just a question of corporations doing what they can in the market That's a fundamental principle and just a bit more skeptical about whether or its measures will be sufficient to stop us giving consent when we don't really plan to That's a very difficult problem but it's the start of a massive change in the law at least There's a lady in the back who wanted to ask a question for a long time so please go ahead So you'll have the headphones with this current colonization I'm from Latin America myself and I wanted to know because I said that the Spanish government gave themselves a law to simply set up this gold officially or legally but actually this colonization was also a company It wasn't just the gold that was the most important but it was also the people or actually the country and not the people and it was above all actually a company the destruction and that's actually the most important from the story and not just the gold The gold was important but the most important thing in the story is actually this destruction If you make this comparison do you also believe that maybe now for this future can we also expect that it will also be destroyed because it was a legal destruction This law was also given not just to set up a gold but also to destroy people Thank you This is something we thought about a lot because obviously it will be very important if the transformations we're talking about could not ever involve some of the violence that clearly was core to the appropriation of resources in historic colonialism and we're very careful never to pretend that there's actual violence going on at the moment we would never make such a silly claim but what we do say is that in the long run and this is the argument about the social world in the long run raise ways of living ways of recognizing each other in the social world ways of listening to voices on the basis they matter as opposed to the current big data rule which is say voices do not matter they don't count they don't add into useful data that's what will be exterminated and we do use that word in the book because it's very serious when a way of thinking about the human world ends it ends and we are just beginning down a road where that could happen that's not the same as physical violence but it may be as drastic a result in the in the long run and I think we have to take that seriously but of course we put that quite cautiously in the book but the point I made about the Spaniards and what they wanted to do was simply to get the point across the point that they have very complicated goals some people wanted colonialism to be legal there were long debates in the Spanish court about how it could be made legal others were entirely in favor of grabbing the resources without the legal cover and so on it was a complicated reality just as today is a complicated reality but the actual reality in the long run was the appropriation of resource so we shouldn't confuse today's complexity and the wonderful a mission of Facebook and so on which sometimes is humanizing inspirational you could sometimes some of the words use we should not confuse that with the reality of the grabbing of data that was the only point I was making inevitably is a very complicated comparison I am told we're running late I'm sorry I have to come to the very last questions there is something to eat outside there's drinks outside we can um further discuss those things outside I'm trying to rephrase my last question I was announcing a little bit you know about the renegotiation and I'd like to quote really quickly Marion Fourkart again which who was part of the series you quoted by saying all your rationales for giving the poor more favorable terms because they were poor that is socially disadvantaged have now the USA largely been replaced with the idea that the terms of credit are to depend solely on one's prior credit related behaviour that is the risks those people pose within commercial risk systems as tracked in personal algorithms there it goes again the question of inequality and how it's changing how it's actually not natural but how it's evolving under different economic system so to speak or even new levels as you called them now the question is isn't that something that actually could be fixed by legislation the bias in these algorithms which we talked about a lot in this series that eradicates the social factors built in which in the end means that technology sociology philosophy and the humanities should work much more closely together which is I think something the institute for internet and society which is co-hosting this series is precisely doing or is trying to do is it not happening enough should we do that more is there a kernel for change right there I think that's a very good point that the as I said had just hinted at it Polanyi said explained that the transformation of the 19th and 20th century was a double movement first there was the change of society so that capitalism could work within it then there was the counter movement legislation in factories and schools and so on and so forth against child labour and so on it's quite possible we will begin to see some fundamental legislative challenges that go to the core of how data be collected maybe GDPR is the beginning of that laying down some fundamental first principles on a general scale but not getting to the question of how the data is used the sort of judgments that can be made yes this is exactly what we need to be talking about I believe this is a challenge right across disciplines we can't stay in our disciplinary silos and thinking about this we're talking about the transformation of society communication scholars need to work with lawyers political theorists economists sociologists to work and so on to try and develop agendas for change and legal reform this is beginning to happen to some degree in the States the United States with the involvement of critical data scholars who are doing remarkable work often taking high risk to challenge corporations we're just at the beginning I believe but it's a very exciting time we're at the beginning of this counter movement and I passionately believe that academics have a responsibility to speak up and make clear what it is that they find so troubling about the world that is being built around and through us thank you very much for this lecture you got a little lost but you made it in time you didn't trust Google Maps enough I think but then you made it like right on point we ran a little late but I ascribe this to the topic that is so hot and troubling at the same time thank you for bearing with us for so long as I said let's have a drink outside there's something to eat thank you Nick Coldrey thanks to you see you in December thank you cheers