 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 and 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 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 am especially welcome here, right on time. And he is going to be properly introduced by our moderator, Tobi Müller. Thank you. Thank you, Sacha Scheier, from the Federal Agency for Civic Education for having me. Thank you, Sharnet Hoffmann 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. After it's maybe for about 20 minutes, we'll have a conversation. The two of us here on stage. 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 oppose 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, what should always be contestable can end up seeming beyond this 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 extracurrent surveillance. Tonight, we can add to the list dataism or datafication as colonialism. The proper title of the lecture you can probably read 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 Datafication's Brave New World with Yoon Yu 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, Tobi. Thank you very much for these words, Tobi. I'm very happy and I feel honored to be able to speak here today and be part of this wonderful lecture series. Something big is going on with our data. Data is not just big in terms of what has reflected in our data. It's not just about the number of data, but it's about a big transformation in relation to our data. As we know it, since Edward Snowden in 2013 published his revelations. The real story of those revelations is not the one I'm saying. The revelations were actually not the story that went through the media, the surveillance through the NSA and the GCHQ. Because of that, ordinary citizens and also less ordinary, like Chancellor Merkel, but the actual story was the actual sensation that the private companies already collected a lot of data about us. What the governments just wanted to profit from? Bruce Schneider called this the story of the public-private surveillance cooperation. In this lecture, I want to take a closer look at what's going on with our data and I'll take a look at my book with the US American researcher, Ulysses Mejiaz, which will come out next year. It has the title The Cost of Connection. You can order it now. Our most important thesis is that the processes in our societies in which data is collected are so natural and it is not just a development or a new phase of capitalism, as some authors said. It is something much stronger. It is a new phase of colonialism that will in time provide the fuel for a further development of capitalism and the extent to which we can still not see it. This will be clear if we shift our focus from the last 30 to 40 years in which capitalism was part of, in addition, more areas of our lives over the last 500 years in which the relationships between capitalism and colonialism have developed. When we say colonialism, we mean the historical term. Colonialism as the property of resources, a huge amount. 1500 and during the following 400 years it was about the property of the territory, it was about the land and of course the property of the bodies of slaves needed to be extracted from the resources. Today the resources are us. We, that means the human life with all the details extracted as value and to value the data. This possibility that we're entering a genuinely new phase of colonialism where human beings start to have a new phase of colonialism in which the people themselves are the resources. But there is also a good point. First of all, this cycle of colonialism I mean with the last 20 years and secondly, we already have experience with the following of historical colonialism and that's why we have set to fuel capitalism in the West. And in the West we would do well to listen to those who remember worse than I do. And third, we certainly know what capitalism is, because we have lived the most time of our lives or even the entire time of our lives in capitalist systems. The first victims of historical colonialism didn't have these two advantages. What do we gain if we look at our current relationship to data on this big timeline? Do you remember at the beginning of the years when the topic of data was re-realized in our collective consciousness? In the book Cambridge Analytica Scandal in March 2018. After the scandal many users began to check which data were saved by them on Facebook or on search machines like Google. Many of them were shocked. Others already knew. At the high point of the scandal Christopher Wiley, a former writer of Cambridge Analytica and so to say the Edward Snowden this year, he said on Twitter that Cambridge Analytica planned to expand his project to India. He said, that's what colonialism looks like today. Now you might say, now wait a minute, that's too easy to think. The legacy of old colonialism lives, as we all know, in the geography of today's global capitalism. In the power of American culture, the gap between the races in the USA and Brazil and in many other countries and also in the dynamic of migration. In some way the legacy of the historic colonialism becomes a neo-colonialist. Facebook's attempt to win the Facebook Free Basics platform in Africa can be called neo-colonialist. Because they profit from the historical inequality of the African and US American capital. Now some will say that this is not proven for a long time that we are in relation to our data with a new form of capitalism. And you will be right. It is too easy to use the word colonialism as a metaphor including a new form of colonialism. And that's true, you should not use colonialism as a metaphor and spread this metaphor to the digital areas. When Ulysses and I talk about data colonialism, then we think that's not metaphorical. Instead we claim that the appropriation of our data is the same as the oppression of gold and land in historical colonialism. An appropriation of digital territories has its own historical colonialism. We speak of a real colonialism, not of a metaphor. And we find that we should look at this threat in the eye. Every time we use an app or a platform, we add the use conditions. Oh, now my phone has ringing, I'm sorry. Normally, apart from the first days after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, nobody reads these use conditions. We just click on to vote because we want to use the app or the platform. Often our understanding is simply put forward and we are not asked, even if the GDPR tries to change it. Sometimes our employer encourages us to use FitBit to monitor our health, where we have to vote on FitBit's use conditions whether we want it or not. And sometimes we have no other choice than to use a safe approach of our data or a producer of a smart device for our home. But by that act of acceptance, actual or impartial, we will be able to understand what Ulysses and I call the way Ulysses and I call it. And these have consequences that we have never very often understood. It sometimes seems a mystery. How could we set so much aside without us resisting? But you also have to see that through the historical glasses. Through the glasses of the historical colonialistic glasses. Through the historical colonialistic glasses. This is a document from the early days of the Spanish conquest of South America and is called Requerimiento or Forderung. Almost exactly 500 years ago, the document was drafted in 1513 by Spanish jurists. The conquistadors ride to a village with gold furries and leave in the middle of the night about one kilometer from the village entrance this document of Spanish which the village residents did not understand. And they also knew that they did not understand these languages. But if you do not submit I certify if you do not submit then I assure you that we with the help of God will bring war against you. With all of us available and you will be under Jochen you will be forced to surrender to the church and our majesty. We will rob your property and you will have as much damage as it is with our power. The next morning they will ride into the village and leave in the middle of the night and leave in the middle of the night and leave in the middle of the night and you will have as much damage from the village and so no violence with the use of the app without violence and as freely as we speak I will come back to something first the reinforcement of resources Second, the creation of new social relationships in order to support this agreement. Third, the extreme concentration of wealth through this agreement. And finally, the ideologies that were used to tell the truth about the actual events. One of them is the most famous of the ideologies of civilization. All four levels also affect data colonialism. First, the agreement of resources. Human rights, human lives, human experiences and actions. All of this is directly converted to capital. This is often said to us that it is not true, because you would only take worthless side products of human life, side products that would fall anyway. All of this becomes too much. How much effort does it make to collect and format, to extract, and to process? Second, social relations are being colonized by the data relations, and all social relations are created by the amount of data that is maximized by the same amount of money. Third, the economic value that is extracted is huge. Concentrates mainly on the new colonial concerns, the Ulysses and I, the social quantification industry, Facebook, Google, and so on. And finally, the last four with new colonial ideologies you try to confuse what is really going on. It is not about the idea of civilization anymore, but about the idea that we all have to stay in connection with each other, and that everything has to be stored in the form of data, so that we, for example, can get personalized messages, and can use personalized products. It is postulated that all of this, after all, tracking is somehow unlikely. In our own life, we see in relation to our data all four dimensions of colonialism in action. But there is also a decisive difference. In contrast to the 1500s, we already have two to three hundred years of experience with capitalism, on which today, this capitalism, on which today's colonialism is being built. Therefore, today's colonialism also does not need any violence to work effectively. What is the new social order? Karl Marx has shown that the social order of industrial capitalism is based on the relations between work, which make up relations to be, through which the relations of work naturally appear. And until today they appear. Marx was an amazing theorist, and if we really understand him, he will have another possibility, namely that capitalism in the future could also be based on other abstract relations than on working relations. Perhaps these same relationships that we really enter into every day have a so regular, this data relationship that we have already become used to, so that it doesn't feel like we have to give our data to us, but rather like a comfortable solution. Perhaps the most important thing about today's colonialism is that it is so big that it almost escapes us. Perhaps it is the new corporate strategy and the dream of the company, of the Ulysses and I believe that it really drives the data manufacturing forward, namely the dream of it, to connect space and time with capital. Social relations on digital platforms and other things to clone, so that the connection with capital just naturally appears, and thereby to create a new social order that makes human life unlimited, capitalizable. This annexation of human life, our life, and its connection with capital, that is an annexation that is in the history of its same search. It is an annexation that goes without the gold of Latin America, where a huge and all-encompassing network of social relations already exists and the new forms of data relations can be built on, as long as we allow ourselves to do so. Yes, we are used to the idea that we are actually used to the idea that there is generally no alternative to capitalism, but the decisive question is whether there is an existing version or so for 20 years. So to make these general remarks a little more concrete, the rest of my lecture will be concentrated on one core area, in which data colonization mainly takes place, in the social relations. Marx has clearly said that the capital of the world is being built on the world, but that it works so well, because it is carried by social relations, what he famously called, as well as our relation to goods, which he was known for his goods, as well as by the social order that was created by these relations. Calpulani, the economic historian, showed how the rise of capitalism in the social relations. He said that a market economy can only exist in a market society, and this has to be created first, by artificial, I quote, artificial stimulants that are distributed to the social relations. Here, according to Poulani, a large institutional reorganization in the 19th and 20th centuries in all areas, work, land and finance, were almost all transactions, all transactions to money transactions, was ended. There was a change in movement, which resulted in social reforms, which would make the cruel social order of industrial capitalism a bit more human. In relation to our data, we are now in the first phase of a parallel process. There is still no change in movement. More and more transactions turn into data transactions, meaning that they are so transfigured that they enable the optimal value through the data. The simple data relations are only the easiest forms of it. These new social forms can be introduced without much resistance, because they were already necessary for social relations and also because of a change in how we know and understand how we see and understand our world today. What happened with the data has never been there before, and also in relation to knowledge. To all times, knowledge was established by the fact that we recognize the world around us and understand, in principle, regardless of its economic value, although it could have economic value. There are countless companies and institutions in the Big Data area that the new social knowledge, that means the human knowledge in general, that the knowledge of the people is made of the same material from which capitalism sees its value, namely data, the data we give up when we enter data relations. Knowledge and economic value the society and the market become one. When information comes to an end, you won't be able to distinguish between the transformation of knowledge and the transformation of capital. So the strategies for the economic value can be presented without honesty as suggestions to expand knowledge. Let's take a closer look at it. It is always difficult to take into account the extensive processes and a special difficulty is the fact that we still have an older idea of how social knowledge is produced. An idea that was created in the 19th century partly as a reaction to the horrors of early capitalism. This old model of social knowledge was based on public statistics that were generally raised by the state when it was repressed. When it was developed in the 19th century as a model of understanding of the social world and the social world, the social relations, were discovered as a model of social knowledge it had the following landmarks that Big Data doesn't share as we will see. First of all, it was publicly financed and the data was publicly raised even though it is clear to me that this was in Germany and secondly, it was publicly analyzed and used by governments and civil society organizations that wanted to reform society. For example, we get through statistical analysis of our understanding of poverty as a social phenomenon and not as a thing that is raised by God as the previous case was. Thirdly, this public knowledge was publicly discussed and even Charles Dickens took part in the debate about whether statistical predictions prove that people have a free will or not. And it was more or less publicly understandable and controversial. I don't want to say that the governments of the 19th and early 20th century were ideal but the public knowledge on which they supported was, until recently, our heritage. They predicted the entire social policy, until around 20 years maybe even today in some way. Trade societies that began to establish in the 19th century as institutions were the buyers and not the fair buyers of this social knowledge. And the government gave them access to it. The exception was the insurance which from the beginning achieved a special privilege to ask them detailed questions to secure them in the observation deck. But like Den Bauck in a short history of US-American insurance he also enabled the relative simplicity of the statistical models that felt affected by these calculations in question. Afro-Americans in the USA were successful at the Supreme Court to secure the exchange of the insurance with ethnic information at the expense of the contribution of this older model of the social knowledge namely its relative transparency. With all their mistakes this older knowledge as a wearable model of social and public knowledge for the foundation of social reform a model that made the market and its impact on the human life in question. So what is the model of social knowledge based on large amounts of data that are being processed by huge parallel computers called machine learnings? What is called machine learning is often based on long-term human work namely the refinement of the so-called training data from which the computer learns for example a human face to distinguish from a curve. This new way of generating and processing of social knowledge is brought together and financed and analyzed privately and discuss privately inside the walls of the company and is only privately accessible so that it is very difficult to fight outside the company. In addition because these are these knowledge and its processes due to extreme complexity and the countless repetitions that the machine learning requires are often incomprehensible so not transparent. As far as this new social knowledge of the everyday understanding is concerned, for example, there is the history of the beginning of the decade leading forces of guests on their parties the tool God View to monitor all the cars that are driving in the surrounding city in San Francisco for example. As part of the show they show locations of just active guests just for fun and the anonymity of the guests but maybe just for fun. So we take another US-American company that is less known ShotSpotter which is a data analysis company that supports the sector of crime prevention. When the CEO of a American judge was asked to put individualities about the proprietary algorithm on the basis of the judge's decision he said, it's like when you use the Netflix-Abo from someone and you don't do that but then the knowledge the corporate is ShotSpotter across the social domain is not like the Netflix-Abo it is knowledge about our common social world that has to be accessible accessible, accessible, available to the public if the social world is still the public world for which we have held it for 200 years. I have another remark of the algorithmic knowledge about the social world not yet mentioned that a series of authors don't like to talk to people about how they think how they reflect or interpret what was originally the goal of artificial intelligence and therefore to have the power to calculate the access to the machine learning so the goal of artificial intelligence is to find representatives representatives who are discovered by countless processes and who are well enough when two things are correlated. It is unclear what good enough actually means therefore reports in law systems such as the USA that rely on private providers of algorithmic models always ask what these products are based on but they don't always answer as often as it is the use of such algorithmic decisions by the state which obviously raises the biggest attention for example in terms of face recognition. In China face recognition as technology for local and national governments for normality. The goal is to have a data bank with the faces of all citizens to build up. But it is also a normal medium for economic transactions. You might have read that in Shanghai you can pay in such a way that you laugh in a camera. I think laughing always helps. Suddenly a California citizen found out that he was also looking for the USA. But face recognition is just a very small part of how algorithmic ways of knowing each area of social interaction colonize. We see that in marketing in the ads and we see that in insurance in the vehicle monitor in the armature board that leads to premium when you accept it in the car. We see that in logistics in the detailed driving records that most LKW drivers have to have in their vehicles. And of course we see that in the knowledge of the company management itself. For example in the badge that the MIT psychologist Sandy interacts with each other to promote the understanding of the company's work culture. These are only the areas of the daily life that we have already divided about the economy and the increase in value. That doesn't seem particularly shocking but there are other areas that the domain of data colonialism is more radical. First of all, all devices of the daily life, for example fridge and washing machines are connected to the Internet of Things with data relationships. Marketing specialists already think about the future and want to integrate product-related management into all consumer goods to be able to continuously monitor their use in cars like the Tesla can even seem cool. Second, in many countries people themselves tend to follow devices like Fitbit and in the marketing industry external tracking devices are only considered as a first step. It becomes fashionable to implant computer chips under the skin that serve as a kind of proof of progress that can accelerate the movements in controlled environments. In Sweden, he said that I quote that all wearables that we wear today will be implantable in five to ten years. That's what he said. But the data colonialism is also on the one side of what we have been hoping for that it is about economic value which is the institutions that regulate social life. In the USA the debate about the use of algorithms is still going on that I will come back to. And in the UK we have just seen that the underfinanced communal administration uses algorithms to determine if children are in danger and are watched by social workers. On all these different ways I could continue the list we collaborate with the public private surveillance partnership which, as Bruce Schneier says, is the whole world. From the perspective of marketing people the leading producers of social knowledge is not a loss but for them it is the win of a social world with which you interact and which you can influence. They imagine that this world is going to go on or, better said, deep down because more and more aspects of what we have kept for our inner life are somehow externalized and a surface of our life is already considered banal in the marketing industry. I want to give you two examples. In a report on the wearable future in the title The wearable future, PricewaterhouseCoopers presents a world in which I quote, brands could even use the sign of the body in a world where there are limitless marketing possibilities. For example, the sensor shows that here is a good sign for intelligent water. In the meantime, it is called in a report for the insurance economy with the title, the internet of things, chances for insurance, that insurance relations with the internet of things can reach and they can use it to connect customers and to influence their behavior. I don't want to say that these are bad colonialists who want to make human lives visible to violence. They would be horrified if they were taken over by a such accusation. But that is because I think they have the idea that colonialism has already changed so much. Let's not suppose however that this massive transformation of social knowledge will be the same for all of us. The important research by the US researches by Virginia Eubanks and others are the groups that are most likely to be protected by government, service providers, credit raiders, insurers and so on. These people at the very least are likely to be against it. It costs money to move forward. And when they are looking for work, it is the poorly paid work that they can get often connected with the force to accept even more surveillance than it is with work with higher standard. A social world is created in which the sensitivity and the forced acceptance of continuous surveillance is the highest probability to become one of the most important dimensions of inequality. There is the danger that we in this critique idealize the past although of course parts of the population are made to victims with stereotypes and are still being excluded from the resources. I don't think we are aware of what from our image of the social knowledge is about. There are at least three answers to this question. First and foremost, we are in danger of losing the older models of social knowledge and the categories that you have brought forward. For example, the idea of poverty as a social phenomenon that can only be understood when all socio-economic factors are connected like Marion Fouchkaard who has already spoken in this lecture series here wrote, older reasons for the poor to be in a cheaper condition because they are poor that means socially disadvantaged have now been replaced by the idea that the credit conditions should only be based on the credit-related behavior and the risks that such people pose for commercial risk systems and which are naturally followed by impersonal algorithms. Second, we risk to lose the access to older forms of professional knowledge that the new model of social knowledge does not respect. U.S. American lawyers who have examined algorithmic processes in communal administration come to the conclusion that independent algorithms that endanger the decision-making of officials and why? By creating a distance between their decisions and the proof-saving processes on which these decisions still have to be supported. Third, and this is perhaps the most dangerous we risk that we all lose the habit of waiting for our knowledge around us on what the people say about how people and non-machines interpret the world that it should be based on our voices. And because it is only this view of the social world that it is rational to think that it is worth striving for democracy we can possibly lose the value of democracy ourselves in the eyes at least as a reality. There is no accident that in a country where there is no democracy, namely in China, big weight is put on it to become global in the field of artificial intelligence. Maybe we should take Zhu Bo, a member of the Chinese Academy for Military Studies, who speculated in September in the Financial Times that the path to prosperity no longer leads to liberal democracy. End of the quote. There is also no accident that there are connections between some U.S.-American personalities that are leading in the field of AI like Peter Thiel, the founder of Palencia and right-wing thinkers who have left any loyalty to democracy. At least the journalists report that. There are of course also examples like the often-named vision E-Stance for a digital society that guarantees safe administration of people-related data whose property, if not the control of the individual, remains. The E-Stance vision only deals with the connections between the individual and the state. It does not deal with the wider market for data that is typical for the entire business sector in Eastland and most other countries. Finally, I as a scientist have to admit that there is a lot of new knowledge on these developments. I mean the new research from the behavioral economy to culture theory. The strong interest is to ask the idea of a rational human subject or even make fun of it and this idea is no longer being defended. From there to the often-used reputation of the marketing people through artificial intelligence I would like to give you the following message today. The digital, social world around us is being rebuilt and not through a bad confusion but through a practical combination of a new or a new company's rationality and the changes that this rationality clearly shows the way we live our everyday life is often going on. We are then involved until we decide it is not to be. This reconstruction of the social world entails, so to speak, refilling the tanks of the social knowledge. It fulfills it with another kind of information, which reacts less to social, political or human influences than we think of the social winters. And none of this is just random or just unhappy. These developments are exactly the means with which the wider movements of the data colonialism are supported. An important transformation of our era, which with time will lead to a new phase of capitalism, whose contours we cannot yet accurately imagine. And this transformation of the social knowledge and the social world requires refilling from something else. I mean, the refilling of the space of the human interaction, from which the social world is built up, that I now, in order to live in this world, I have to take responsibility for the worst. In the worst case, we damage through the kind of tracking the space of the freedom that makes it possible. So far, we still follow freedom like a needle, as the being yourself in the other person. With Fitbit and its external infrastructures of data management, I am no longer completely with me. Something else is in between. But there is also hope. Namely, that we are not yet in a early stage of this deep-growing changes in the digital society. We can know about the history of colonialism and our awareness of the form that the data relations already use to question their inability to doubt their necessity and to present the possibility to connect and connect us to each other under other conditions. The price for the connection can still be new, maybe at least for another decade. The fight in China will be the first cultural, economic and political fight in China and not the West to establish the conditions. In China, the vision of data-driven and overall vision of data management is already in the political explanations of the Chinese government without any apology, for example in relation to the social point of view, the Chinese government clearly makes that the goal of their program for artificial intelligence is not to further the freedom or to improve the self-knowledge. Its consequence is to improve the social and economic order. That is no social order as we see in the democracy of the West. It is not based on freedom and yet it is based on the computer-supported networks that we installed in the West. It is smart. We are entering a historic fight about the values of freedom from which we believe that our democracies build on it. In the first phase, this fight will also be a fight about the power of imagination like political solutions and the first question that we have to ask ourselves is how do we build different infrastructures for the economy and for the social network. Instead, the first question should be, is this the future of the digital society that we had imagined and that we actually want? If not, then we have to start to imagine a different future and that is not easy. Dr. Yuval Harari too wrote recently that the rejection of the ideology of data is not only the biggest scientific challenge of the 21st century but also the most urgent political and economic project. The challenge is even bigger that the social changes often take place in the hidden city. At this point, I would like to quote one of my favorite German authors, W.G. Sebald. According to him, the danger is that it will be a quiet catastrophe that is almost unnoticed. Now, it is the time to open our eyes to what is going on with data. That is why Julius and I wrote our book that on the great work many other authors build. In fact, at the time, to work together, to think together to face these difficult challenges but the time is short. Thank you for listening. Thank you very much, Nick for this very strong lecture. Sometimes pretty sad views and rather small hopes for the future. I would like to ask questions about the cost of connections and how we can deal with it in the next few years. I would like to ask a question and then we will take questions from the audience and from Twitter. I think there is a controversy in your book and the controversy about colonialism. You say that it is not a metaphor for you but you say that it is about a real colonialism and then you wrote in your book what the historical colonialism was and compare it to what we experience today. The Conquistadors in the 16th century read the Requerimento and you say this Requerimento came from the conditions of use that we have been presented today and to which we even agree because it is too difficult for us to reject it. Would you say that it is not a metaphor? Would you really say that it is not a metaphor for today's colonialism and why is it so seductive for us? Well, it is an analogy and we want to use the imagination of the reader the book the statement of the book the value of the book does not depend on whether or not you are convincing this one analogy but we found it very interesting and in the Cambridge Analytica scandal a lot of people only knew what they were doing the whole time finishing the book two weeks after I finished the first version of the book because the scandal just took place Facebook installed itself on my phone and I immediately thought and then I had to get to the usefulness and I pressed and I then automatically pressed and I did my wife offered to make a screenshot of the usefulness before I pressed and that is the photo that I used for the photo I am also part of this whole story at the concest there was terrible violence this is very unimaginable what they did to him and that is not about me but the abstract Hund It was about legal action on the gold they wanted of this document in the court, because they wanted to legalize it. Yes, they wanted, so to speak, an implicit, an implicit mood of the inhabitants. And so it is also with the conditions of use. We don't understand the language of the conditions of use. And often we get these messages in the middle of the night, when we just reload the app. And so I think that this analogy also works in certain ways. And other people have said that Facebook and other companies have a neo-colonialistic approach. Neo-colonialistic. But I say it's not only neo-colonialistic, it's pure colonialism in relation to our data. India has voted against Facebook Free Basics. Successful here. So it seems to go to alternatives, to give, yes, that was the civil society that looked through the offer. And that looked through, that it was about to adapt the data of the citizens. And of course parts of the market. Let's talk a little bit more about colonialism. I actually read an article from you and there you write that we have to attack the rationality of data colonialism. The big question here is, if we live in a time of data colonialism, how can we contribute to decolonialization? Well, we're talking about a very volatile campaign. It's about very practical, comfortable, social and economic solutions and social orders. And we all participate. And if I post on Facebook tomorrow, then of course it doesn't affect anything. If hundreds and hundreds of users do it, then it can actually affect something. Maybe they start using Instagram. That's also part of Facebook. But there are just so many companies in the social quantification industry. We often talk about these social media in this team. But that's just a small part of the whole data colonialism. If we look at all the companies today who deal with logistics, if they describe what a rational company is, then it's always about the collection of data and the value of data. And it's often about physical surveillance that is presented. That's something you can observe in the whole economy. So we're drawing from it is not straightforward. I think that it's here to take 10, 20 years even to get massive collective stress when we want to oppose this trend. And the first step is to use the imagination. We have to try to imagine what other methods can do. We have to put this logic in place that tells us that everything has to work so that it can't be different. Strangely enough, it worked differently 30 years ago. And that worked too. Who will be the people who question this kind of logic? Will the scientists be or other people? I have another question about work relationships and resources. You say that data colonialism creates life itself as value. And that sounds a bit like what journalists and people do in the show business every day. The human life, social interaction as well as work relationships. Is that a new recognition? Is that something that is created by data colonialism? Which is that it's certainly true that some of us actually labor on platforms. We are helping people learning to work. For example, there are people who contribute to artificial intelligence. That's work. That's paid, if not always good. And our argument is that that is only part of the chain. And if we fall from the path, we need to stop. We are all part of the chain. We have to keep the chain in our eyes. That means that all work relationships don't matter if they have to do with social media or not, all work relationships are ratified. Often the employers have to make sure that their work conditions are very strong, especially in the bad paying jobs. Life is very complicated, everything is connected with each other. And there is the idea that everything we do, even if we don't keep it for work, even if no one keeps it for work, can still produce useful data and that this data can be created valuable. And that's something that the companies haven't known for 30, 40 years. Of course, they have always dealt with the whole human life and for themselves and tried to win out of it. But now they are taking all of their new dimensions. That's the actual change. And to describe the whole thing vividly, it's almost as if the companies have discovered a higher dimension in which capitalism can also touch foot. In the past, it never made sense that our inner thought life, our sport, that we go jogging, that all of this can be made out of money. But that's what it's about. And that's a higher dimension of the use without limits. Because we get used to it and we get more and more tracking options available. And that's why I believe that this is a really big change and that we shouldn't say no to this development. If we think of Marx, I think of Shakespeare, a comic character who had a funny character who didn't have much to do about anything. He had a funny character who didn't have much to do about anything. And this man speaks of true fetish. No, Marx speaks of true fetish. And he quotes Shakespeare and he says, this is a gift. And reading and writing is a gift. And Marx said, the gift of change. And reading and writing is natural. Now, what is it today? Dark Barry, this Shakespeare has already seen the data distribution. Now, Marx, now, Dark Barry, I know him, because I've introduced him as a student but back to Marx. Marx said that the true fetish was worth writing on a market and that social order was based on it. He said, Marx said that many things would be fetish in capitalism. For example, rents. Rents that you can take in when you own a land, for example. We postulate that there is a new fetish, the data. Data is, so to speak, a side product of life and that's what it's all about. And that's what it's all about in many management books. That is the new fetish. Data, so it's said, is the natural side product of human life and will be the new fetish. I would say that that explains that in the private and public sphere because when data becomes fetish and our lives become the source of that data, that would mean that our life is no longer private but a public good, a public resource. Yes, of course, you can say that if we don't replace it. That's why we have a whole chapter titled Think About Social Knowledge. We find it very important that we think about alternatives and that we analyze how data production works. And data is also social knowledge. We have knowledge about the world in which we live together and we live together in this world. We have a basic name and we expect that our social media ratings, for example, will be reduced if we apply ourselves to a workplace. So here is a normalization city and if it's really foot-fast, then we won't be able to change it. That's the biggest transformation of today's time. For the first time in the history of humanity, we know the world in which that knowledge about humanity is at and for itself at the value of money. There is no limit between knowledge and money. And even Marx didn't see this before, although he might not have been so surprised. It's actually a direct continuation of his own analysis. But it really goes very, very far. It couldn't be seen in the 19th century so concretely. The people are constantly being watched and that's why you say, with time it's going to be much more difficult for them to change it. That leads us to psychology, surveillance. We are here in the area of the earlier GDR and there was of course a lot of surveillance in West Germany, but there was also a lot of surveillance. You can't forget that, but we know that surveillance leads to a change in the behavior, to certain careful behavior in the public, in the public. Is it also the case today that everyone is constantly being watched and that we see it more carefully or not? Well, we see that young people, when they use Facebook, become much more careful. At the beginning you were much more careless. Young people have their certain behavior codecs when they use Facebook. But I don't think that most people are aware of it, that they are constantly being watched every time they go online. We can... Now, there is a reason why I was so impressed as I am. I really don't think I don't believe that the direction in which we are moving, that this business logic that leads to constant surveillance of every human activity and that you claim that it is natural and as Kevin Kelly says, that we have to accept it so that the technical progress can be given. I don't think that it is about freedom. I don't think that it is about the basic kind of freedom. Hegel said that freedom also means being yourself. Even if you are with others. And Hegel was very important for other philosophers and theorists. And he understood that freedom is also a relationship. For freedom, it is not about that I compete with you. It is not about being helpful. I think that it doesn't help us against surveillance. Because most people are ready to give up freedom for comfort. But 200 years ago Hegel was so excellent together that freedom is that we recognize each other that we are still with us even if we are together and that we can meet and exchange. He says that freedom is to be with yourself when you are in a social environment. That we have to walk through our life. He says that we always have to return to ourselves. Our self changes constantly. We become a little bit wiser, we make fewer mistakes, we become a little bit smarter, we become more modest in the course of our life. And at the end of life is the death. And in this book he says that we should not give up this freedom for comfort. That's why he says that it is very strange and that people are sort of dangerous. But of course it's often disguised. So it's very hard to realize that this is what we are risking. And it's hard to see it in the eyes. I think that we are beginning to understand that the markets that their influence always continues through product management and that is what they have set themselves as a goal. We have to call that, we have to observe that. And we have to ask ourselves, is that really the life that we want? And does it still come together or is our freedom not so important? Maybe we have to define comfort and freedom in order to say it polemically. Maybe we have to give you an example. Well, to see that as in Berlin, in the club, you can't take pictures. It's thrown out right away. And at some concerts you also get a little bag where you put the phone and many people start to enjoy this kind of freedom. In near the main station in Berlin, there is a big sauna where many people run around and you also have to lock the phone and you can't take it with you. And that's an important point if you have a lot of money and can pay a great amount of money then you will always have the opportunity to enjoy little freedom if you have little money and for example have to work three or four jobs to get the rounds then most of the jobs where you always have to have the phone where you are watched where you are followed all day by cameras. It will probably never come that all the loss of freedom is as painful as I feel at the moment. There will be winners. There will be people who make profit of course the conditions of the data companies they will not let you watch them every day. By the way, I also use Amazon and Amazon has a program called Voice Picking their employees get instructions about their headphones all day long and they have to do their job exactly after these instructions. Jeff Bessels, the chairman of Amazon, I think has no head for it. I think he has a lot of freedom as he spends his day. This is a trend richer people will be able to get freedom richer people will not. This is a problem for the audience. The last question before we ask the audience to ask questions is about inequality. You said that we that the social world and the public world are still the same as they have been for 200 years. I wonder if the government is still the same as they have been for 200 years now. We know that from the German sociology and the social strata has come to the last up to four. For example, for decades, they have been criticized a lot that the governments should also work differently before we apply this to the private sector. Now I would like to emphasize again that I do not want to idealize the past times. There has been a catastrophe. Social science has been terribly misused. The conditions were somewhat terrible. We quote these and the studies to the 19th and 20th centuries because we find it important that social science was public even if it was partly misused. And now we are building up a world where the whole science is in private. Private is used private is collected and no public institutions are accountable. And that is a very big change. A change well we also have to ask ourselves what kind of government we will have in the future. If you look at the 1980s there private companies have to buy statistical data from governments because they needed the data for example to enter credit cards and so on and in Great Britain three or four years ago the government thought about the people's goal because it seemed cheaper to buy the information from private companies. Here you see a big change. But I see the government here the responsibility to analyze the world to understand and to describe to private companies. And that changes my view on governments. And I think it also changes our social world which no longer fits with the logic of democracy because in democracy it is about hearing different voices. We could get used to that no one hears us when private companies can describe much better what is going on in the world and that makes me worried. I think about the history of the people's goal in Germany you could speak for hours in Germany that is a special case. Now is the highest time to open the discussion for the audience. There are two microphones in the room. Please use the microphone if you want to ask a question. Please the gentleman with the glasses and please stand up so that the young man can have the microphone. Thank you for the fascinating talk. Thank you for your excellent presentation. You have shown that the world of data and that it is similar to colonialism and I would like to deal with the term colonialism and criticize it because it would not be interesting to call it feudalism if you look at how it is used or how it is structured or how it looks here. I think it goes deeper into the structure than the process of colonialism. That is of course a very important question. We have thought about it intensively whether we want to use the term colonialism. You have invited this gentleman from London and have the impression that I am not qualified to talk about colonialism because he has Mexican roots and he has the impression that we need the term colonialism to understand what is happening here. We can of course come together and that was a great experience to write this book together with Julius because we had completely different starting points and also about what the word colonialism actually means to us and for me personally that is why we use the word colonialism. We can of course talk about feudalism. Many people have used the term feudalism. I tried to use this word myself. But I think it works differently than feudalism. The social response of feudalism to social responses has been a very on the side of the world but the 10th was paid to maintain the respect of the village or the property in some way. So I think feudalism has also dealt with great territories but the reason why we talk about colonialism is that colonialism is where we think about the foundation of the world economy and ask ourselves when this base of the world economy will change and when we look at the whole story we realize that around 1500 the great people in Spain Great Britain and so on started to think that they can use all the resources of the world to exploit them. And that was something that changed the way you think about economy and it was irrelevant how much violence was necessary and that is a fundamental change in capitalism and also what capitalism can do that you can adapt to every kind of life and as a source as a resource and I think only the word colonialism can describe the fundamental character of these changes but of course it also has a hook also Marx is sometimes criticized for that capitalism developed out of colonialism out of the profits made with colonialism and that's why and then colonialism also comes with capitalism in connection we have in this larger time space of 500 years when we use the word colonialism and the question we can ask ourselves is at the beginning of a new 500 year phase we already have capitalism, the question is will we have it over the next 500 years how will it be organized everything will be completely different than what we have known so far because everyone is considered as a source of capital how will the services be organized how will the companies be organized we can't say all that yet but that's why we see it as so important that we all think about it because the changes we are facing are really very fundamental right in the middle Thank you very much for this great work that you are doing to listen to has shown me that you have managed to show and to dramatize to point out that knowledge has a social efficiency that knowledge has power over the social order and then all kinds of stories that are also the beginning that the renaissance is and the beginning of the knowledge system is the new scientific way to create knowledge this development has its starting point with the 15th century and I think that in the knowledge that we would like to we would like to have and we have the idea that that in neutral verifiable forms the knowledge is touched and that there are no forms of epistemology that show their efficiency but that's going to be in the opposite way to put this into question how would you see the possibility to see the possibility to be so that the scientific knowledge can produce validity do you think with how we can evaluate our own subjectivity or do you think that on a general level the new evaluation the subjectivity as part of the social order not only in the individual activity but in the connected activity and in different forms and you understand that as a form of the beginning of the resistance that's a very important point and that's why I mentioned that the way of freedom that we see not only the individual freedom not my freedom to make a choice on the market, the question do I want to buy a certain tip or not that's not really relevant but what concerns me is the attempt to take my entire subjectivity to me and that's the reason that's why we're talking about Hegel and you can also lead Latin America there are also Latin American philosophers who have similar thoughts but who are against the West against the Western dominance and see that something has to be protected against this dominance and that's something that I don't only have myself I admit that my subjectivity in a social world in a world that respects me that takes care of me that brings me to trust others and with that I have the feeling that I have a certain freedom when I respect the others as they respect me that means we have this relationship level from the beginning and that is a very important point important is that this struggle, this logic to question must be a common struggle that everyone of us must that are the conditions that we want or that we don't want we have to work together we have to support each other and that's going to be difficult because we have to do that together we can't do that for each other and that's why I'm really against those who say well, I just rely on Facebook and that's the problem then that goes back to the problem it's completely out of the question that we have to raise and fight here and the second is the question of rationality that Tubi mentioned for us is the moment in which we have seen the whole picture was the moment in which we read a great essay by a sociologist from Peru and who has been with the problem for 30 years of rationality and he also went into the clarification and I don't want the clarification to reduce the colonial forces that would be absolutely ridiculous but there is a certain connection between the clarification and the magnification of the well-being that took place at the same time as Bacon an important thinker at that time was also politically active and we have to think about that we have to think about rationality that's of course nothing wrong people have the right to improve their own life they have the right to be self-rational that's a little wonderful but the idea that a part of the world the model of rationality for itself and only a part of the world can be viewed as rational that is a very violent way of going and that was a very important part of colonialism and we have found that in the core the idea that big data can only be applied only under these conditions that we can only find out what people are and how they work that is a very unheard of demand and claim and that is something that we have to deal with because these claims are today in the core and in other regimes and if we don't make it clear that the colonial exceptions are then we can not question this whole change of our knowledge we have to learn from what we already know about colonialism if we don't do that then we are blind for what is happening today and we are not blind for the subject of complexity complexity, sorry there are many other questions I know that we can only choose a few there is a man in the back who has a headscarf who has already raised his hand at the beginning and afterwards we are going to deal with what happened on Twitter I unfortunately have to say it in German the colleague the contractor gets it I wait well we are missing some points in your analysis you have shown a lot of dangers where I have to say yes, I agree with you many times but I also say we can change a lot it is the question whether I pay Facebook with Goldenuggets or with touched copper pieces I decide that then it is so what I have missed is actually the influence, the possibility and it has been for 33 years the civil society CCC there are a lot of people who look through the user conditions and say, here it is not true here it is not true there is the movement and the strictness of the open data I have the question you write a book together with a friend and say you use a lot of other sources how many of them are actually open data it has to be because we all here these work with our money have paid our taxes and what I am missing would be of course political answers if you China I say clearly bad example yes, but what do I do here in Germany what do I do here in Europe politically what do I do to this between Hase and Egel who want my gold I want you to give it back we have to limit ourselves to a question so what do we want to have politically changed so that the danger does not occur yes, you certainly can not enter all these comments but maybe on a part of the important points that you have introduced here and of course I have only tried to give you a rough overview if I had another hour we would have been able to enter the practical aspects there are things that people try we are at the beginning what Polania has called a counter movement we have already noticed that something is not right we can now start to change but Facebook has a big problem looking at its politics and there are all the problems with open data I know that in Germany there are obligations that some companies have to prepare to make a certain contribution and I think that even if they bring their advantages with them that no one really deals with the core issue of data collection and it is this core problem that freedom is threatened and Facebook is only a single actor that means they also like to be and what we say in the book is that we do not want the practical answers to be more important but what we say is that if we look at the whole society then the starting point cannot be in the practical suggestions because none of us really knows how we want to change the system we just don't know that and therefore the best starting point is that we try our imagination that we think about what we actually want to move and if that is not the case then we think about what we actually want and how we can get there and some of the measures that you have mentioned of course fall in line but other things also belong to it and the position of the governments is very complicated because as I already said the governments are usually the buyers of this data and the governments have greatly reduced and that is a very big shift in the weight distribution between the big companies and the governments I think that the DSGVO was a very important measure that has asked what comes to economic logic from the USA I think that was politically important and that is also symbolically important I still have my question how much that can really change because it doesn't change the conditions under which we share our conditions and it may change a little bit but it doesn't change what we do every day it will take a lot of time there are still a lot of questions in the room but on Twitter nothing happens so one more question at the end of the first series can I pass it on to you please thank you, here is one question on Twitter how can we change our social data in new ways should we for example push there in the United States there are also similar ideas I think I have to explain this a little bit more so there is the idea that we have certain responsibilities when we have a contract signed for example when we have a contract in England when we have a contract then we have a very special contract only to tell the truth that is a special contract and in the USA there is the thinking approach to think about how we can use that we could say companies like Facebook have a right to behave and they say that they promote social relations and you can say that has to be connected with responsibility and I think it is an important point to think about responsibility and the DSGVO plays a big role the American debate and the European debate were often separated and the DSGVO has a very big symbol value and is also seen as a very important step on the market of course it will not be enough because there were also laws in the 19th century and capitalism was a little bit aggressive but the basic problem was not solved and this new action is something like the DSGVO well I would say yes because in the first sentence it says that human rights have to be done it is not about the companies doing what they want that there are fundamental human rights here and I do not know what the exact conditions of use mean in the future but is this a new thought? here is another question in the audience I unfortunately have to ask the question wait a moment until the head manager opens I wanted to compare the colonization of Latin America with the current colonization I myself am from Latin America and I wanted to know because I have said that the Spanish gave themselves a law to make this gold official or legal but actually this colonization was also a company that is the most important but it was also the people or the country and not the people and it was above all a company and that is the most important of the story and not only the gold the gold was important but the most important in the story is actually this destruction if you compare this do you also believe that for this future there was a legal destruction and this law was also given not only to make a gold but also to destroy people thank you this is something that we thought a lot about because the transformations that we are talking about which are of course not so close and we don't care the processes in historical colonialism and I would never say that you can compare it but we are convinced that in the long run our way of life will be affected the way we deal with each other in the social sphere we are opposed to the voices of other people the opinions of other people to hear if we say the individual opinions count or if they are not useful because they are not well quantified and I believe in that sense we already have a destruction a thinking and that is what threatens us in the future that is of course not physical violence and the results can be drastic we have to take that seriously of course we have said that very carefully in the book but what I said about the Spaniards I wanted to express that their goals were pretty complex there were some of them that were very important that colonialism should be legal they were just behind the gold it was just like today a complex situation with different actors and they definitely led to the establishment of all resources and when Facebook speaks of its mission it can be inspiring and in reality it is about data that is the analogy the rest is pretty complex we are late we have to collect the last few questions we have prepared a few imbis and drinks we can also continue to talk I have a last question about the new negotiations that we talked about Maria Foucault she mentioned and the quote is that the poor were socially disadvantaged and in the USA this idea has been strengthened that people with a good credit will be given that means that the risk of getting no credit for poor has increased and the inequality has increased now there is a gap between rich and poor and the question is is it not something that could actually be changed by law which we talked about a lot which in the end social factors with calculations so that inequality can not be replaced by the society which is co-hosted the institute for internet and society is already dealing with this shouldn't we work on it more? in any case as I said Polanyi said or explained that the transformation in the 19th century took place on two levels there was the movement and the counter movement schools were founded there was movement against child labor and of course we can also deal with the data collection maybe the DSGVO is the first step in this direction here it is not about what data is being used but at least what data is being collected and I think yes that is definitely something we can do and we have to work interdiscipline we are not allowed in our own areas the communication scientists we have to work with the political scientists sociologists and lawyers to work on a plan how we can change what is happening and there are researchers who mainly research on data problems and the companies criticize very strongly and also take personal risks and I think that we as scientists are responsible for doing that and talking about our concerns about the world thank you very much for your presentation you probably didn't trust google maps enough and that's why it was a bit exciting to come here and you would have come too late but you did and I am really happy I would be happy if you could stay here for the little impasse and thank you very much