Author: Stefania

Stefania keynotes at LAVITS in Santiago de Chile, November 29

DPGpgHVWAAEbnrCIn November 20-30 Stefania will be in Santiago de Chile for a number of talks. She will keynote at the 5th International Symposium of the Red Latinoamericana de Etudios en Vigilancia, Technología y Sociedad, organised by Universidad de Chile with the non-governmental organization Datos Protegidos, whose theme this year is Vigilancia, Democracia y Privacidad en América Latina: vulnerabilidades y resistencias.

Stefania will also meet digital rights activists and participate in the following events: the workshop ‘Designing people by numbers’ with Celia Lury (Warwick University) at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile on November 21st; a ‘conversatorio’ with the Red Chilena Estudios Ciencia, Tecnología y Sociedad at the Universidad Diego Portales, on November 23rd; a ‘conversatorio’ with members of the Humanities Faculty, Campus Juan Gomez Millas University of Chile on November 27th.

 

 

Tropicalizing Surveillance: Implementing big data policing in São Paulo, Brazil

By Claudio Altenhain

In 2013, Geraldo Alckmin, governor of São Paulo, announced a major advancement in policing Brazil’s most populous and economically potent union state: His administration had acquired the license for the use of the Domain Awareness System (DAS), a “smart” big data tool developed by Microsoft and deployed by the New York (NY) Police Department in order to fight crime and, most crucially, prevent further terrorist attacks in the United States’ financial capital. When introducing the DAS in the first place, the then NY Mayor Michael Bloomberg sustained that “[w]e’re not your mom and pop’s police department any more. We are in the next century, we are leading the pack” (26:50), thus associating state-of-the-art surveillance technology with an aura of modernity and a sense of local pride. Unsurprisingly, this kind of discourse was echoed when the program was presented to the Brazilian public during Alckmin’s re-election campaign. The corresponding advertisements were not short of grandiose promises: Not only would the software enable the interconnection and integration of hitherto separate police databases; it would also incorporate São Paulo’s vast network of private CCTV systems and, most prominently, automatically detect cases of “suspicious” behavior such as somebody trying to enter private property while wearing a motorcycle helmet. As the system “migrated” from one setting to another, the typology of threats it is supposed to fend off thus shifted accordingly: While in New York, the DAS’s implementation was mostly justified with the persistent, yet somewhat anonymous risk of terrorists attacking out of the blue, in São Paulo Detecta plugs into a well-established common knowledge of potentially “dangerous” subjects, places, and situations typically involving the (mostly dark-skinned) marginal as the ideal perpetrator.

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Significantly, while the DAS’s deployment soon provoked critique amongst civil rights organizations such as the ACLU, Detecta did not stir any similar kind of controversy in São Paulo – in spite of the fact that, until the present day, Brazil did not adopt any comprehensive legislation concerning the protection of personal data. Instead, public debate would soon revolve around the question whether or not the system was fulfilling the promises it was announced with in the first place. Alexandre Padilha, the Workers’ Party’s candidate to challenge Geraldo Alckmin, sustained that Detecta was a failure and did not substantially improve public security; symptomatically enough, other than that his campaign video drew upon exactly the same imagery as his adversary, depicting US-American police technology as a mainstay of his anti-crime policy. Meanwhile, media reports indicated shady business practices when the software was first acquired. Comparing the respective controversies about DAS and Detecta, it thus becomes apparent that they entail distinct notions of the “rogue state”: Whereas in New York, the DAS was criticized for its potential infringement of civil liberties, in São Paulo the case of Detecta would epitomize both incompetence and corruption, while privacy rights and abuses of police power were hardly broached.

PastedGraphic-4Meanwhile, PRODESP, a state-owned agency developing IT solutions for governmental purposes, was charged with “translating” the software so that it would serve the specific needs of São Paulo’s police forces – a process oddly referred to as the system’s “tropicalization” by several of my interview partners, both amongst and beyond São Paulo’s police forces. Given the fact that the government had acquired an “as is” version of the DAS, there was indeed a lot of ground to cover; and despite the accompanying support of Microsoft staff, initial results were mostly unsatisfactory so that Detecta remained dramatically underused, as an inquiry realized by the state’s board of audits soon found out. As I could verify during one of my field trips in late 2016, the version in use back then was indeed running at such a slow pace that it would complicate rather than facilitate police investigations; besides, the few of the “intelligent” CCTV cameras which were up and running would constantly give false alarms since they were unable to distinguish cars half-covered by traffic signs from individuals roaming the streets (the latter constituting a “suspicious” situation demanding review). However, apart from the apparent technical challenges to set up a running network of heterogeneous data bases and thousands of surveillance cameras, Detecta suffers from another major obstacle of a more institutional kind: In Brazil, police forces are divided in two different organizations, the military police (Polícia Militar, PM) and the civil police (Polícia Civil, PC). While the major task of the PC consists in criminal investigation and prosecution, the PM is charged with maintaining “public order”: crime prevention, street policing and accompanying public events, most notably. Since both units thus carry out emphatically distinct policing tasks, they are equipped with their proper data bases; and because their mutual relationship is a somewhat uneasy one to say the least, there is not much of an incentive to share information. By consequence, and although facilitating data exchange has been a crucial motivation to acquire Detecta in the first place, the promise of an IT-driven policing revolution is as yet being thwarted by the prosaic reality of institutional quarrel and mutual distrust which characterizes the coexistence of PC and PM.

While these drawbacks imply that the “real” Detecta is indeed a far cry from the omniscient – indeed, even prescient – policing tool which was originally promised to the electorate, it would be precipitant to squarely (dis)qualify the whole project as a failure. In fact, PRODESP has recently come up with a new, cloud-based version of Detecta – ironically enough, it scarcely resembles the product delivered by Microsoft any longer – which, as I could verify, seems to work a lot faster than its predecessor. The system no longer draws upon “intelligent” cameras supposed to automatically identify “suspicious” behavior, but it does incorporate an increasing number of license plate readers run by DETRAN, the municipal traffic agency. Vehicles can therefore automatically be traced as well as linked to information stored in further data banks such as the criminal record of the owner, or prior occurrences in which the car was involved. Although this may appear as a rather modest progress as measured by the flashy “pre-crime” campaigns disseminated by software giants such as IBM, various police officers I spoke to told me that the latest version did represent a palpable improvement in their daily routine. In this sense, Detecta’s “success” would have to be measured in terms of the incremental changes it triggers in both IT and institutional culture – a process taking place beyond the screen of governmental as well as corporate propaganda put up to convince the general public. It is this, unsurprisingly, the sober point of view shared by most IT experts as well as police insiders I have been talking to in the course of my research, and their perspective deserves attention – especially so if we are to develop a critical understanding of the processes at work here.

PastedGraphic-5There is, however, yet another aspect under which an acritical focus upon Detecta’s “success” (or the relative lack thereof) tends to conceal a set of dynamics which certainly deserves attention – namely, to which extent the program both draws upon as well as fosters the emergence of public-private economies of (in)security in a city which is already heavily marked by stark socio-economic contrasts and the corresponding militarization as well as “citadelization” of urban space. While these tendencies are anything but new, it may be argued that they were further reinforced after João Dória, a party comrade of Geraldo Alckmin, was elected mayor of São Paulo in 2016. A businessman-turned-politician, Dória is both a hi-tech enthusiast and a fierce advocate of public-private partnerships; it was therefore only consequential that he would full-heartedly embrace Detecta and extend it through further projects such as Dronepol, a municipal police unit equipped with drones, and City Câmeras, a further initiative to establish a close-meshed public-private CCTV network. All of these projects rely upon a substantial involvement of non-state actors such as neighborhood boards, trade associations and the corporate sector – and despite official affirmations stating the contrary, it is plain to see how they were being hijacked by private interest groups from their very date of inception. It is in this sense that “success” and “failure” turn into profoundly relative categories unsuitable to orient any kind of critical research – unless they are re-read against the peculiar and irreducibly local genealogies of policing the urban (or, more generally, of governing through (in)security), that is. In any case, the board of audits’ affirmation that Detecta’s implementation “does not yet present effective results for public security” may sound somewhat naïve against this backdrop – emphatically public purposes might never have been at stake anyway here. Revisiting the peculiar notion broached by some of my interview partners, and extending it beyond a purely “technical” concept, it might therefore indeed be argued that the program’s “tropicalization” is not least about its translation from one specific diagram of power into another, a process which may teach us a lot about their respective modes of becoming. Far from sustaining that São Paulo confronts us with a more “archaic” or less “modern” configuration than New York (or any other city of the “global north” for that matter), it might still sensitize us for the contingencies and path-dependencies at stake when an increasingly “global” model of securitizing the urban goes “local”.

Claudio Altenhain is a PhD candidate of the international Doctorate in Cultural and Global Criminology. He is interested in Latin America, science and technology studies, and the anthropology of policing and crime.

 

 

Stefania at the Conférence Erasme-Descartes 2017 “Big Data: toepassingen en uitdagingen”, November 10

Stefania will speak at the Conférence Erasme-Descartes 2017 dedicated to “Big Data/Mégadonnées : usages et enjeux”/“Big Data: toepassingen en uitdagingen”, in Amsterdam on November 10. She will join Eric Leandri (Qwant), Mélanie Peters (Rathenau Institut) and André Vitalis (Centre d’Études sur la Citoyenneté, l’Informatisation et les Libertés) on a roundtable discussing “Big Data, kans of bedreiging voor de maatschappij?”.

The description of the event (in Dutch) is below.

Sinds 2002 dragen de Erasmus-Descartes conferenties bij aan de dialoog en uitwisseling tussen Nederland en Frankrijk. Ze bevorderen de bilaterale samenwerking op nieuwe gebieden.

Met de keuze voor “Big Data” als thema van de 15e Erasmus-Descartes conferentie bouwen we voort op alle onderwerpen die in eerdere edities aan bod zijn gekomen. “Big Data” raakt namelijk aan een groot aantal wetenschappelijke, technologische, economische, industriële, sociale en maatschappelijke kwesties. Ze roepen complexe vragen op, in het bijzonder voor wat betreft het behoud, de relevantie en het gebruik van gegevens. Alle sectoren zijn ermee gemoeid: de deeleconomie, de levenswetenschappen, het infrastructuuronderhoud, de energietransitie enbijvoorbeeld intelligente voertuigen. Veel Franse en Nederlandse industriële spelers hebben dus te maken met “Big Data”.

Infrastructuring in the South: An interview with digital humanitarian Luis Hernando Aguilar

by Miren Gutierrez

Is the so-called South more creative when it comes to devising bottom-up, data-based solutions for social needs? Looking at Luis Hernando Aguilar’s experience in disaster response, it might seem as if the answer is affirmative. Indeed, the South—understood as a space for resistance, ingenuity and alternative—has been the geographic and intellectual birthplace of digital humanitarianism, which I consider a form of proactive data activism, that is to say the series of sociotechnical practices of engagement with data infrastructure that use, produce or appropriate data for social change (Milan and Gutierrez 2015).

Aguilar, a Colombian currently based in Amman, is a pioneer ‘digital humanitarian,’ a new figure in the international response to disasters, crises and armed conflicts. He is the Information Management Officer for the Whole of Syria Health Cluster at the World Health Organisation (WHO) based in Amman, and has held similar positions at the UN Mission for Ebola Emergency Response (UNMEER) and at the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), based in Ghana (covering Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leona as well) and Colombia. In these positions, Aguilar has specialized in creating information systems to support those assisting people affected by complex emergencies, and to liaise volunteers, victims and humanitarians, so they meet, cooperate and coordinate action. I have had the opportunity to interview him several times over the past couple of years to discuss how digital humanitarianism looks like from nearby. In this blog post, I share some insights from these precious conversations.

Digital humanitarianism uses spatial, communication and data infrastructures to aid humanitarian efforts in quasi-real time, a significant paradigm change. Utilizing crowdsourced data gathered via different channels, verifying the data and visualizing the resulting analysis through interactive mapping software, digital humanitarianism has disrupted traditional emergency operations, happening in a more hierarchical, fixed and deliberate manner. Aguilar considers 2010 as the year when everything changed.

On January 12, at 16:53:09 local time, an earthquake hit Haiti. Within minutes, a group of digital humanitarians—supported by the Haitian diaspora in the US—deployed the Ushahidi platform to gather reports coming from victims and witnesses. “It was chaotic: No transportation, the lines of communication were broken. [Against the odds], thousands of eyewitness accounts submitted through email, text or Twitter, mostly sent via phones, were analyzed and made visible, and the [Ushahidi] platform started being used to coordinate disaster relief operations,” he says.

Hundreds of volunteers from everywhere handled reports of entrapped people, medical emergencies and requests for help, feeding the map so rescue workers could use the information on the ground. A total of 1,500 reports were gathered and visualized in the first two weeks alone.

“The Ushahidi Haiti Project, although far from perfect, marked a paradigm shift that meant the incorporation of citizen data into the running of humanitarian operations,” Aguilar says.

A parenthetical comment is in order here: Links in this commentary take you to Ushahidi blogs, which sometimes include static maps. Unfortunately, digital humanitarianism is ephemeral, and so are its maps. I say “unfortunately” because, as a researcher, you are forced to seize the moment and observe these maps as they develop. Then, they often vanish. They are living things, perennial works in progress, never to be whole. The transient nature of many of these activities has to do with two components: a) their humanitarian nature, and b) their dependence on user crowds and digital humanitarians. Humanitarianism refers to the short-term efforts involved in providing material and logistic assistance, and responding to crises, mediating in conflicts and undertaking peacekeeping operations. In general, humanitarian organizations get in and out quickly with the objective of saving lives and increasingly also livelihoods. They deal with the emergency, not its underlying causes. On the other hand, crisis-mapping, crowd-sourced data platforms depend totally on the action of crowds and digital humanitarians. Without their enthusiastic engagement, there is only an empty map. “Volunteers have to be managed too. During the first three days, everybody wants to help, but many times the emergency situation lasts for months,” explains Aguilar.

With the rise of the data infrastructure and other information and communication technologies, Aguilar has been progressively implicated in major crises, such as the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile (2010), and Ecuador (2016), the crisis mapping in Colombia and Libya, the Typhoon Haiyan mapping in the Philippines (2013), the Ebola emergency in West Africa (2014-2016) and the crisis in Syria.

Since then, the Haiti crisis mapping, Ushahidi—“testimony” in Swahili—and other crowd-sourced data-based crisis mapping platforms have been launched to tackle emergencies across the world. And in 2012, the Digital Humanitarian Network –a network-of-networks— was launched by Patrick Meier and Andrej Verity to link volunteer and technical communities with humanitarian organizations.

The Ushahidi Haiti Project was later the basis for the creation of the Standby Task Force (SBTF) in 2010, an independent mapping community of trained volunteers who are permanently prepared to get involved in a crisis before a more significant team of relief workers could assemble. The SBTF was first tested a month later in a drill exercise of an earthquake affecting Bogota, in which Aguilar was involved. He was also instrumental in making OCHA the first UN agency to use Ushahidi in the crisis mapping of Libya in 2011 because traditional humanitarian organizations did not have access to the country.

Ushahidi is an excellent example of “infrastructuring” in the Global South. Most names and cases mentioned by Aguilar in our conversations come from the South. Ushahidi was created in Kenya in 2008, during the post-electoral violence, the SBTF was first tested in Colombia, and Libya was the UN’s first experiment with crisis mapping based on crowd-sourced data.

“I believe that the lack of resources and need improve creativity. There are plenty of capacities in developing, so-called Southern countries; but there are plenty of people in rich countries who collaborate in humanitarian operations too,” says Aguilar. What is important is that digital humanitarians, conventional rescue teams, as well as victims and witnesses—he adds—can now work together and react more quickly in the face of disaster thanks to data, information and communication infrastructures.

Many deployments of the Ushahidi platform have failed too for lack of crowds to sustain them or for glitches in the verification systems, for example. However, the impact of these platforms has signified a point of no return for international humanitarianism for their ability to quicken and enhance rescue operations.

The Ushahidi platform and crisis mapping at large have become the means of more disruptions. Data infrastructure—including the datasets, software and storage needed to clean, analyze, store and visualize data—mostly comes from the so-called North, which often determines how data are obtained, interpreted and even used, because neither data nor their infrastructure are neutral. Meanwhile, Ushahidi, although based on existing technologies, is a product of the African ingenuity. And it has been so successful that it has been embraced outside the boundaries of crises and the geographic South (i.e. Snowmageddon, mapping snowball fights in New York and Boston in 2010), influencing people’s relationship with maps beyond humanitarianism.

The Ushahidi Haiti Project marked the beginning of a great, Southern adventure. In 2010, something magic happened: the birth of digital humanitarianism, “a marriage of technology and data with people’s solidarity,” concludes Aguilar.

*This is a summary of several interviews which have been combined and will appear as one soon—stay tuned! The interview draws on my PhD dissertation “Bits and Atoms: Proactive data activism and social change from a critical theory perspective”, defended in June 2017 and soon forthcoming in a shareable format, which relies on thirty semi-structured interviews with experts, data activists and data journalists, as well as several in-depth interviews and a case study, focused on the Ushahidi platform.

_mirengutierrez1_1a94a9ffAbout the author. Dr Miren Gutierrez is the Director of the postgraduate programme “Data analysis, research and communication” and a lecturer of Communication Sciences and Media at the University of Deusto, Spain. She is a Research Associate with DATACTIVE as well as the Overseas Development Institute, London. Miren’s main interest is data activism, or how data infrastructure can be utilized for social change in development, climate change and environmental issues. She holds a PhD in Communication Sciences.

Big Data (a partir) do Sul: O começo de uma conversa necessária

por Stefania Milan e Emiliano Treré

Traduzido do inglês por Marcelo L B dos Santos, Investigador do Centro de Investigación y Documentación (CIDOC) de la Universidad Finis Terrae, Chile (thank you very much!) e revisado por Sérgio Barbosa (Center for Social Studies, University of Coimbra, Portugal) [updated 13 April 2018 by Sergio Barbosa]

Dia 15 de julho de 2017 em Cartagena, Colômbia, cerca de cinquenta acadêmicos e ativistas se juntaram para imaginar como seria ‘Big Data desde o Sul’. Organizados com poucos recursos e muito entusiasmo por nós dois* e antecedendo a conferência anual da IAMCR em Cartagena, o evento de um dia foi concebido para promover a mudança ‘dos meios às mediações, da datificação para o ativismo de dados’, como sugere o título. Pensamos que esta linda joia do Caribe, nas margens de um país que recentemente começou a inventar um futuro pacífico para si mesmo, seria o lugar mais apropriado para dar inicio a uma conversa muito necessária sobre uma série de questões que nos têm mantido ocupados ao longo dos últimos anos: Como seria a datificação de cabeça para baixo? Que questões perguntaríamos? Que conceitos, teorias, métodos adotaríamos ou temos que desenvolver? O que perdemos ao ater-nos à(s) perspectiva(s) convencional(is) do Ocidente? Neste artigo, resumimos a conversa iniciada em Cartagena – com vistas ao futuro.

Datificação e seus descontentes: Para Além do Ocidente?
A datificação mudou radicalmente a forma que entendemos o mundo ao nosso redor. Entender o ‘big data’ significa explorar as profundas consequências deste giro computacional, as consequências para as epistemologias, ontologias e ética convencionais, bem como as limitações, erros e lacunas que afetam a coleta, interpretação e o acesso à informação em tamanha escala. Se renomados pesquisadores de diversas disciplinas já começaram a explorar criticamente as implicações da datificação através dos domínios social, cultural e político, grande parte desta produção acadêmica crítica emerge sob um eixo Ocidental conectando de forma idealizada o Vale do Silício, Cambridge, Massachusetts e o Norte da Europa. Acreditamos que falta algo nesta conversa.

Não obstante, já sabemos muito. O emergente campo interdisciplinar dos estudos críticos de dados, na intersecção entre as ciências sociais e as humanidades, chama a atenção para a potencial desigualdade, discriminação e exclusão detrás dos mecanismos de big data (Gangadharan 2012; Dalton, Taylor y Thatcher 2016). Recordamos que a problemática do big data não é meramente uma questão tecnológica ou o leme do conhecimento da inovação e da mudança, mas uma ‘mitologia’ a qual temos que indagar e abordar criticamente (i.e. boyd & Crawford 2012; Mosco 2014; Tufekci 2014; Van Dijck, 2014). É uma questão que, apesar de tingida com narrativas positivistas e modernizadoras, e amplamente louvada por suas possibilidades revolucionárias em termos de, por exemplo, participação cidadã, não está isenta de riscos e ameaças, na medida em que regimes opacos de gestão e controle da população se tornam protagonistas (ver Andrejevic 2012; Turow 2012; Beer & Burrows 2013; Gillespie 2014; Elmer, Langlois y Redden 2015). A expansão das práticas de mineração de dados tanto por corporações como pelos Estados levanta questões críticas sobre vigilância sistemática e invasão de privacidade (Lyon, 2014; Zuboff 2016; Dencik, Hintz y Cable 2016). Questões críticas também emergem das formas como o mundo acadêmico e o mundo dos negócios se relacionam de forma equivalente com a datificação: a ‘grandeza’ dos atuais enfoques sobre os dados vem sendo questionada no mundo acadêmico (Kitchin y Laurialt 2014), e nos motiva a prestar atenção nas práticas cidadãs (Couldry & Powell 2014) e em formas cotidianas de engajamento com os dados (Kennedy y Hill 2017).

Mas como essa datificação se desenvolve em países com democracias frágeis, economias instáveis e pobres? Será que nossas ferramentas conceituais e metodológicas são suficientes para capturar e entender os obscuros desdobramentos e a espetacular criatividade que emerge da periferia do império? Convocamos os descontentes da datificação para juntar forças e enfrentar juntos estas preocupações – e criar perguntas mais críticas.

Do Sul/dos ‘suis’, para além do ‘universalismo de dados’… e o universalismo da teoria social

Acreditamos que é necessário desenvolver de forma sistemática um diálogo com tradições, epistemologias e experiências que desconstroem a dominação dos enfoques Ocidentais para a datificação, os quais não são suficientes para reconhecer a pluralidade, diversidade e riqueza cultural do Sul (dos ‘Suis’) (ver Herrera, Sierra y del Valle 2016). Tal como Anita Say Chan (2013), nós também sentimos que muitos enfoques críticos ainda se apoiam em um tipo de ‘universalismo digital’ que tende a assimilar a heterogeneidade de diversos contextos e invisibilizam as especificidades e as diferenças culturais. Gostaríamos de contribuir para o presente diálogo sobre a urgência de uma ‘Teoria do Sul’ que ‘questione universalismos no campo da teoria social’. Nos somamos a Payal Arora reivindicando que ‘precisamos de estudos conjuntos e sustentados no tempo sobre o papel e o impacto da big data no Sul Global’ (2016: 1693) – e, para avançar um passo adiante, ampliando o espectro para incluir todos os ‘Suis’ no plural que habitam nosso universo cada vez mais complexo.

Tal como Arora (2016) e Udupa (2015) nos recordam, apesar da maioria da população viver fora do Ocidente, continuamos enquadrando a maioria dos debates essenciais sobre democracia e vigilância – e as demais demandas associadas a modelos e práticas alternativas – por meio de preocupações, contextos, padrões de comportamento e teorias Ocidentais. Se bem reconhecemos as contribuições essenciais que muitos de nossos incríveis colegas (e nos desculpem se não incluímos todos), sentimos que algo está faltando na conversa, e que só um esforço coletivo a través das disciplinas, idiomas e campos de pesquisa poderá nos ajudar a re-considerar big data a partir do Sul. Nossa definição de Sul é flexível e expansível, inspirada nos escritos do sociólogo Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2007 e 2014), quem provavelmente foi o primeiro a escrever sobre a emergência e a urgência de epistemologias do Sul contra o ‘epistemicídio’ do neoliberalismo. Em primeiro lugar, está o Sul geográfico, isto é, as pessoas, atividades, políticas e tecnologias que emanam literalmente nas margens do mundo, tal como documentado pelo mapa de Mercator. Em segundo lugar, e mais importante, nosso Sul é um lugar de (e um signo que representa) resistência, subversão e criatividade. Podemos encontrar inúmeros ‘Suis’ também no Norte Global, sempre e quando haja gente resistindo à injustiça e lutando por melhores condições de vida contra o iminente ‘capitalismo de dados’.

Nossas reflexões sobre ‘big data do Sul’ se alinham com – e têm a esperança de alimentar – um processo mais amplo de re-posicionamento epistemológico das ciências sociais. Acreditamos que não podemos evitar medir as dinâmicas sócio-técnicas da datificação frente aos ‘processos históricos de despojo, escravidão, apropriação e extração […] centrais para a emergência do mundo moderno’ (Bhambra e Santos 2017: 9), levando em conta os riscos de cometer os mesmos erros – e o mesmo pode ser dito em relação a nossas ferramentas pedagógicas. Como Bhambra e Santos observaram com precisão, ‘como as injustiças do passado persistem no presente e demandam reparo (e reparação), tal trabalho deve ser também estendido como estrutura disciplinar que mais obscurece que ilumina o caminho adiante’ (Ibid.) (tradução dos autores).

Então, que implicações teria uma teoria de big data sulista?

Nós aceitamos o desafio de Say Chan (2013), quem nos recorda que há formas distintas de imaginar a relação entre tecnologia e as pessoas. Aqui compartilhamos com vocês nossa crescente lista de condições sine-qua-non para pensar a datificação da perspectiva Sulista. A lista é um trabalho em andamento e vem acompanhada por um convite explícito para que se juntem conosco nesta empreitada.

  • Trazer o agenciamento para o centro da observação de mecanismos e práticas tanto de baixo para cima como de cima para baixo. Inspirados por Barbero (1987), devemos nos enfocar na resistência e na heterogeneidade de práticas na medida em que elas se relacionam com a datificação –não somente relacionadas aos dados e datificação per se.
  • Descolonizar nosso pensamento, circunscrevendo as dinâmicas pós-Snowden do capitalismo de dados dentro das especificidades do Sul. Se muitos elementos serão equivalentes, as implementações, interpretações e consequências podem diferir. O que já sabemos não deve ser dado como certo, mas desvendado criticamente.
  • Prestar atenção para o ‘alternativo’: práticas alternativas, imaginários alternativos, epistemologias alternativas, metodologias alternativas em relação à adoção, uso e apropriação do big data. Preparar para o inesperado e o inexplorado. Esclarecendo: aqui as alternativas não são necessariamente subalternas ou melhores, são simplesmente distintas.
  • Tomar infraestrutura a sério, desvelando os fluxos complexos (de relações, dados, poder, dinheiro e contagem/contabilidade) que elas abrigam, geram, modelam e promovem (nosso agradecimento a Anders Fagerjord pela inspiração para pensar em fluxos). Situar noções como a de plataforma na experiência vivida de distintos países.
  • Conectar as epistemologias críticas dos mundos sociais emergentes com a política crítica da mudança social (obrigado a Nick Couldry por compartilhar sua visão sobre o tema em Cartagena – fiquem atentos para seu novo livro com Ulisses Mejias sobre ‘Dados, Capitalismo e Descolonizando a Internet’).
  • Assumir uma posição consciente e crítica em relação aos conceitos e métodos centrados na visão Ocidental. Se eles oferecem um ponto de partida fundamental, não podem ser assumidos automaticamente como o (único) ponto de chegada para aproximar-se ao big data desde o Sul.
  • Ao mesmo tempo, ser críticos em relação às práticas e formas de pensar do Sul, evitando assumir que eles são inerentemente diferentes, alternativos ou inclusive formas melhores ou mais puras de conhecimento.
  • Estar abertos ao diálogo, na direção que seja: Norte-Sul, Sul-Sul, Sul-Norte. Diante de tamanha complexidade, só podemos avançar juntos, engajando um diálogo com diferentes epistemologias e enfoques.

Posto isto, gostaríamos de encorajar nossos colegas a adotar mais explicitamente uma perspectiva de política econômica, que pode ajudar-nos a observar criticamente as múltiplas formas de dominação que reproduzem e perpetuam a desigualdade, a discriminação e a injustiça em todos os níveis. Também defendemos enfoques históricos que permitem conectar os atuais desdobramentos da datificação com suas raízes nas práticas coloniais, quando seja o caso (ver Arora, 2016). Sugerimos a adoção das críticas feministas e das ideias sobre a descolonização da tecnologia. Por último, consideramos este tipo de pesquisa como intrinsecamente ‘engajada’: se por um lado adotamos os altos padrões de uma sólida investigação científica, a ‘pesquisa engajada’ está autorizada a tomar partido e, mais importante, está projetada para ter impacto nas comunidades às quais nos aproximamos (Milan 2010). Este enfoque anda de mãos dadas com o estímulo à alfabetização crítica de meios e a educomunicação, através da qual inclusive acadêmicos buscam formas de tornar a informação acessível ao traduzi-la de forma compreensível e litigável, com o objetivo de permitir a mais pessoas lutar por seus direitos digitais.

Um exemplo de enfoque big data a partir do Sul

Para tornar nosso chamado mais concreto, oferecemos nosso próprio trabalho como uma das muitas possíveis formasde virar ‘de cabeça para baixo’ o que sabemos sobre datificação. Emiliano vem estudando a fabricação algorítmica de consenso e a obstrução da dissidência online; seu trabalho delineia como formas inovadoras e criativas de resistência algorítmica estão nascendo na América Latina e em outros lugares (Treré 2016). Stefania e sua equipe tem estudado a emergência de data-ativismo de base (Milán e Gutiérrez 2015; Milán 2017), de novas epistemologias de dados (Milan y van der Velden 2016) e de práticas de resistência à coleta massiva de dados na periferia do ‘capitalismo de vigilância’, inclusive na região amazônica (Gutiérrez e Milán 2017). Não obstante, temos que dar um salto avante e repensar também teoria de forma coletiva – isso significa com você – para além de casos de estudo e exemplos contingentes. Também não estamos sozinhos neste estudo já que temos muitos gigantes nos quais nos apoiar. Citando apenas aquele que inspirou nosso evento em Cartagena: quase trinta anos atrás, o comunicólogo hispano-colombiano Jesús Martín-Barbero nos instigou a passar ‘dos meios às mediações’, ou seja, passar de análises funcionalistas centradas na mídia para a exploração das práticas cotidianas de apropriação de meios através das quais atores sociais decretam sua resistência à dominação e à hegemonia (1987). Este potente movimento que ele provocou era inerentemente político: significava reorientar nosso olhar das instituições midiáticas para as pessoas e suas culturas heterogêneas, observando como a comunicação é modelada nos bares, academias de ginástica, mercados, praças, familias, entre outros. Seguindo Martín-Barbero, nosso trabalho tem sido orientado para concretizar o movimento da datificação no ativismo de dados, examinando as diversas formas através das quais cidadãos e a sociedade civil organizada no Sul (ou ‘Suis’) se envolvem com práticas para a mudança social de base relacionadas aos dados e resistem aos processos de datificação que aprofundam a opressão e a desigualdade.

Ainda há muito por ser feito e muitas conversas pela frente. Junto à Anita Say Chan, estamos lançando ‘Big Data from the South’, uma rede de acadêmicos(as) e profissionais interessados(as) em avançar neste diálogo multidisciplinar e multilinguístico. Junte-se a nós!

Assine a lista de e-mails
Leia o call for ‘Big Data from the South’ (Cartagena, 15 de Julho de 2017)
Acompanhe o blog dedicado ao tema. Fique ligado: teremos até um logotipo! Planejamos começar a publicar artigos de convidados sobre o tema, em qualquer idioma que seja escrito. Estamos buscando suas ideias e provocações: para colaborar por favor dispare um e-mail para TrereE@cardiff.ac.uk e s.milan@uva.nl.

Sobre os autores (e situando o privilégio branco)

Acadêmicos interdisciplinares constantemente movendo-se entre os estudos da sociedade e suas imaginações e táticas tecnológicas; movimento, mudança e contraste têm estado no coração de nossa carreira acadêmica e de nossa identidade. Europeus do Sul que migraram para o Norte em virtude do eterno mal-estar do sistema italiano de pesquisa acadêmica, nos vemos como acadêmicos engajados que gostam de remexer as águas entre disciplinas e entre métodos. Stefania é Professora Associada em Novas Mídias e Culturas Digitais na Universidade de Amsterdam, afiliada também com a Universidade de Oslo e é a pesquisadora principal do DATACTIVE project. Emiliano é docente na Escola de Jornalismo, Mídia e Estudos Culturais da Unversidade de Cardiff, onde ele também é membro do Data Justice Lab e um Research Fellow no Centro de Estudos sobre Movimentos Sociais COSMO (Itália). Anteriormente, ele foi Professor Associado na Universidade Autônoma de Querétaro, México. Ambos já conduziram pesquisa e já trabalhavam em diversos cargos em uma série de contextos “Sulistas”. Se bem escrevemos de uma posição privilegiada, vários Suis cruzaram nossas vidas pessoais e profissionais, instingando curiosidade, impondo desafios e ocasionalmente sofrimento, forçando-nos a fazer perguntas críticas a nós mesmos. Não temos muitas respostas. Melhor, queremos que este artigo de blog seja o começo de uma conversa de uma rede aberta e colaborativa, onde diferentes Suis possam dialogar, aprender e enriquecer um com o outro.

*O evento foi possível graças ao financiamento do DATACTIVE/European Research Council e pelo generoso compromisso de Guillén Torres (DATACTIVE) e da Fundación Karisma (Bogotá). Também gostaríamos de agradecer a hospitalidade do comitê organizador local da IAMCT (e Amparo Cadavid da UNIMINUTO em particular).

keynote: Stefania @ move.net, Sevilla (October 26)

Stefania will take part in the II Congreso Internacional Sobre Movimientos Sociales y TIC Move.net, in Sevilla, Spain, October 25-27. IN particular, she will speak on October 26th on Big Data… ‘al revés’ (”Big Data’… upside down’), drawing from an article co-authored with Emiliano Treré (Cardiff University) currently in preparation. She will also join Stefano Cristante, Joan Subirats, Stefania Milan y Francisco Sierra for a roundtable discussion on ‘Ciberactivismo/ Democracia Digital/ Open Data’.

 

How data activists foster map-based accountability for environmental health risks in Southeast Asia

By Anna Berti Suman (Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology and Society, Tilburg University, The Netherlands)

Post from the paper presented at ‘Big Data from the South’ conference’, 15 July 2017 in Cartagena, Colombia

Courts’ acceptance of digital maps evidence is considered a relatively uncontested issue. Nevertheless, when it comes to digital maps produced informally by the civil society, the matter becomes more complicated. Furthermore, in cases of powerful stakeholders being confronted with accountability claims based on these bottom-up maps, then maps acceptability in court is at all plain. This contribution will present the battle that victims of haze caused by illegal forest fires’ pollution have to fight in order to see their evidence recognized in courts, in particular against the haze perpetrators. Discussing about informally produced evidence raises the need to establish processes for certifying that these grassroots-generated evidence are accurate, reliable and neutral. Although these official certification processes are often hard to obtain, still these maps can achieve remarkable goal, regardless their successful use in courts. Namely, they allow the broader society to gain awareness and visualize (physically and politically) otherwise ‘invisible’ risks. This process if ‘visualization’ through open access digital maps has the potential to foster a map-based ‘digital accountability’ – in this case – of environmentally harmful companies to the victims of their crimes and to the society at large.

Map Haze SmokeThe use of grassroots collected environmental and health data brings the promise to foster accountability in risk governance. A case can be enlightening in this sense i.e. the case of maps use in the Southeast Asian haze. The Southeast Asian haze is s a fire-related large-scale air pollution issue. The noxiousness of the haze derives from the material of the peatland burned when an illegal forest fire occurs. Indeed, during the combustion, the organic material contained in the peat releases great amounts of fine particulate matter (PM2.5), which represents the main cause of pollution. The World Health Organization (2009) identified that this particulate matter is potentially fatal when inhaled. This contaminant is even more dangerous because it does not stay over the lands where it is produced, but it is transported by winds, often to densely populated areas. For example, in 2015 the haze was pushed towards Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, populous territories that are totally extraneous to these practices of forest burning. The haze therefore represents a cross-boundary risk to public health, which provides an interesting spark for reflecting on the potential of the use of Big Data in identifying and mapping pressing public health risks in ‘South’ contexts. In the case, public authorities and NGOs launched initiatives aimed to tackle the issue and condemn those responsible. However, these efforts have been hindered by a lack of reliable evidence on the fires’ exact location and on land ownership. The scarcity of evidence has been worsened by an uncooperative attitude of governments and companies, which showed resistance to disclose information. When the institutional answer is unsatisfactory, alternative players take the lead on the scene, or at least start acting to fill this gap. In the case, a possible solution emerged from the digital world. Non-institutional mapping platforms were created by on-the-ground activists. For example, it is noteworthy to mention the launch by the World Resources Institute and DigitalGlobe of “Global Forest Watch Fires” map[1], a bottom-up online platform for monitoring and responding to illegal fires. This platform is based on high-resolution satellites information documenting individual fires and gathering high-quality evidence of possible wrongdoing, potentially connectable to culpable individuals and companies. Greenpeace Indonesia joined these mapping efforts adding “Kepo Hutan”[2] interactive map to Global Forest Watch Fires map. Kepo Hutan has a specific focus on mapping the ownership of concessions areas at risk of fires. Indeed, it allows the public to see in detail information about the companies owning the lands, the characteristics (e.g. if peatland, if orangutan and tiger habitat) and the borders of specific concessions. In addition, the platform permits the user to see these concession maps in relation with fire hotspots and deforestation alerts. Both the maps have been developed making use of open source technologies and are open access platforms. The ‘openness’ of these initiatives exactly clash with the institutional refusal of public access to haze related information.

Students walk along a street as they are released from school to return home earlier due to the haze in Jambi, Indonesia's Jambi province, September 29, 2015 in this file picture taken by Antara Foto. Antara Foto/Wahdi Setiawan/via REUTERS/File Photo ATTENTION EDITORS - THIS IMAGE WAS PROVIDED BY A THIRD PARTY. FOR EDITORIAL USE ONLY. MANDATORY CREDIT. INDONESIA OUT. - RTSOJCY
Students walk along a street as they are released from school to return home earlier due to the haze in Jambi, Indonesia’s Jambi province, September 29, 2015. Credits:  Antara Foto/Wahdi Setiawan/via REUTERS

Initiatives challenging the status-quo as the presented maps have the power to affect the governance of public and publicly perceived risks as the haze. Two questions are raised by these bottom-up created digital maps. First, further research is needed to answer the question on whether they could provide authoritative evidence allowing civil society and activists to hold public and private actors legally accountable for their environmental crimes. Secondly, the chance that these platforms could foster a more transparent governance of public health risks like the haze must be investigated. The hypothesized concept of a map-based ‘digital accountability’ can contribute to this discussion. The promise is that new open-access technologies can challenge traditional informational and operational monopolies, and can assign new roles to the citizens. Despite the potential of these initiatives, the institutional reluctance to cooperate with the civil society by disclosing key information for the governance of specific public health risks represents an important barrier to the success of the bottom-up approach. Moreover, purely grassroots-based initiatives are often fragmented and not sustainable over time. A solution to overcome these shortcomings could be that of collecting all the bottom-up generated evidence and systematize them in a sole participatory repository of evidence. The World Resources Institute, as has been responsive to this demand, creating an integrated mapping platform on the haze (the above mentioned Global Forest Watch Fires). Nevertheless, still much has to be done in terms of coordinating and making a wise use of all information collected informally. Conclusively, it can be argued that civil society-initiated mapping tools have an undeniable potential, but to realize this potential they have to be supported by a multi-stakeholders intervention, stemming from the engagement of the international communities, to a stronger commitment of local authorities to ‘listen’ to the grassroots’ voice.

About the author

Anna Berti SumanAnna Berti Suman is a PhD researcher at Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology and Society. Her PhD project aims to investigate how practices of ‘Citizen Sensing’ affects the governance of public/environmental health risk and how they can be harmonized with the current models of risk governance. Besides academia, Anna is a committed environmental activist. Anna has a background in Law from the University of Bologna and Transnational Law from the University of Geneva. Her specializations are Health Law and Technology, International and European Environmental Law, and Sustainable Innovation. She has work and research experience in the health sector, Extractive Industries and Water Law. Email: a.bertisuman@uvt.nl

[1] For GFW maps, see http://fires.globalforestwatch.org/home/, and http://www.wri-indonesia.org/en/resources/maps.

[2] For Kepo Hutan maps, see http://www.greenpeace.org/seasia/id/Global/seasia/Indonesia/Code/Forest-Map/index.html (only Indonesian).

DATACTIVE @ AoIR, Tartu (October 19-21)

Lonneke and Stefania are in Tartu to attend the annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), October 17-21. Lonneke will present ‘Data politics at the grassroots’, whereas Stefania ‘Political agency, digital traces and bottom-up data practices’. Stefania will also take part in two exciting roundtables, espectively on “Future Directions for Critical Data Studies” (thank Helen Kennedy for organizing) and “Internet policy in the age of Trump—and how to stop it” (thanks Viktor Pickard).

Download the presentation of ‘Political agency, digital traces and bottom-up data practices’. A pre-print of the paper can be found on SSRN. It will soon be out on the International Journal of Communication, Special Section ‘Digital Traces in Context’ edited by Andreas Hepp and colleagues (2017)

Picture credits: @ (aka Olga Boichàk)

Big Data desde el Sur: El principio de una conversación que debemos tener

Por Stefania Milan y Emiliano Treré

Traducido del inglés por Miren Gutiérrez y revisado por Emiliano Treré y Alejandro Barranquero.  ¡Mil gracias a Miren y Alejandro por su preciosa ayuda!

El 15 de julio de 2017, en Cartagena, Colombia, unos cincuenta académicos, académicas y activistas se reunieron para imaginar cómo serían los “Big Data desde el Sur”. Organizado con pocos recursos aunque con mucho entusiasmo por los dos* -justo antes de la Conferencia anual de la IAMCR en Cartagena-, el evento fue diseñado con el objeto de plantear un cambio “de los medios a las mediaciones, de la dataficación al activismo de datos”, como sugiere el título de la conferencia. Pensamos que esta hermosa joya del Caribe, en los márgenes geográficos de un país que acaba de comenzar a inventar un futuro pacífico, sería el lugar más apropiado para iniciar una conversación muy necesaria sobre una serie de preguntas que nos han mantenido a ambos ocupados en los últimos años: ¿Cómo se vería la dataficación “al revés”? ¿Qué preguntas haríamos? ¿Qué conceptos, teorías y métodos adoptaríamos o tendríamos que idear? ¿Qué nos perdemos si acogemos las perspectivas convencionales occidentales? En esta publicación, reanudamos la conversación que iniciamos en Cartagena, mirando hacia adelante.

La dataficación y sus descontentos: ¿Más allá de Occidente?

La dataficación ha alterado dramáticamente la forma en que entendemos el mundo que nos rodea. Comprender los llamados “big data” significa explorar las profundas consecuencias del giro computacional, sus consecuencias en la epistemología, la ontología y la ética, así como las limitaciones, errores y sesgos que afectan la recopilación, la interpretación y el acceso a los datos. Aunque estudiosos y estudiosas de varias disciplinas han comenzado a explorar críticamente las implicaciones de la dataficación en lo que respecta a distintos aspectos sociales, culturales y políticos, gran parte de la crítica académica ha surgido desde una perspectiva occidental que conecta con Silicon Valley, Cambridge, MA y el norte de Europa. Creemos que algo falta en esta conversación.

Sin embargo, ya sabemos mucho. El campo emergente de los estudios críticos de datos, en la intersección de las ciencias sociales y las humanidades, nos interpela sobre la desigualdad, la discriminación y la exclusión que alberga la infraestructura “big data” (Gangadharan 2012; Dalton, Taylor y Thatcher 2016). Nos recuerda que los “big data” no son meramente un tema tecnológico o un instrumento del conocimiento, innovación o cambio, sino una “mitología” que debe ser interrogada y abordada críticamente (i.e. boyd & Crawford 2012; Mosco 2014; Tufekci 2014; Van Dijck, 2014). Nos recuerda que, a pesar de ser retratados con las narrativas del positivismo y la modernización, y ser ampliamente elogiados por sus posibilidades revolucionarias en términos de, por ejemplo, participación ciudadana, los “big data” no están exentos de riesgos y amenazas, al tiempo que regímenes opacos de control y manipulación adoptan un papel central en su gestión (ver Andrejevic 2012; Turow 2012; Beer & Burrows 2013; Gillespie 2014; Elmer, Langlois y Redden 2015). La expansión de las prácticas de minería de datos tanto por parte de las empresas como de los estados genera preguntas críticas sobre la vigilancia sistemática y la invasión de la privacidad (Lyon, 2014; Zuboff 2016; Dencik, Hintz y Cable 2016). Preguntas críticas surgen también de las formas en que la academia y las empresas se relacionan con los “big data” y la dataficación: la “grandeza” de los enfoques contemporáneos sobre los datos ha sido cuestionada (Kitchin y Laurialt 2014), y ello nos ha alentado a prestar atención a las prácticas ciudadanas (Couldry & Powell 2014) y a las formas de compromiso crítico diario con los datos (Kennedy y Hill 2017).

¿Pero cómo se desarrolla la dataficación en países con democracias frágiles, economías endebles y pobreza? ¿Es nuestra caja de herramientas teórica y metodológica capaz de captar y comprender tanto los sombríos desarrollos como la sorprendente creatividad que emergen en la periferia del imperio? Hacemos un llamamiento a los descontentos y descontentas de la dataficación para que unan sus fuerzas y aborden conjuntamente estas preocupaciones a fin de abordar preguntas más críticas.

Desde el Sur/los Sures, yendo más allá del “universalismo de datos”… y del universalismo de la teoría social

Creemos que necesitamos sistematizar y entablar un diálogo sistemático con tradiciones, epistemologías y experiencias que deconstruyen el dominio de los enfoques occidentales aplicados a la dataficación, y que no reconocen la pluralidad, la diversidad y la riqueza cultural del Sur/de los Sures (ver Herrera, Sierra y del Valle 2016). Al igual que Anita Say Chan (2013), nosotros y nosotras sentimos que demasiados enfoques críticos siguen dependiendo de una especie de “universalismo digital” que tiende a asimilar la heterogeneidad de los diversos contextos así como a pasar por alto las diferencias y las especificidades culturales. En este sentido, queremos contribuir a la conversación en curso sobre la urgencia de una “teoría del sur” que “cuestione el universalismo en el campo de la teoría social”. Nos unimos a Payal Arora al afirmar que “necesitamos un estudio concertado y sostenido sobre el papel y el impacto de los ‘big data’ en el Sur Global” (2016: 1693), y damos un paso más allá, ampliando el espectro para incluir a todos los Sures, en plural, que habitan en nuestro universo cada vez más complejo.

Como nos recordaron Arora (2016) y Udupa (2015), mientras que la mayoría de la población mundial reside fuera de Occidente, seguimos encuadrando debates clave sobre la vigilancia de la democracia –así como las demandas planteadas por modelos y prácticas alternativos— a través de los programas, preocupaciones, contextos, comportamientos y teorías occidentales. Y aunque reconocemos las contribuciones de muchos/as de nuestros/as colegas (y pedimos disculpas si por razones de brevedad no hemos podido incluiros a todos/todas), sentimos que falta algo en la conversación y que solo un esfuerzo colectivo, a través de disciplinas, lenguas y áreas de investigación, puede ayudarnos a considerar los “big data” desde el Sur. Nuestra definición del Sur es flexible y expansiva, inspirada en los escritos del sociólogo Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2007 y 2014), uno de los autores que con más urgencia han subrayado la necesidad de las epistemologías del Sur frente al “epistemicidio” del neoliberalismo. En primer lugar, está el Sur geográfico, es decir, las personas, las actividades, las políticas y las tecnologías que surgen literalmente en los márgenes del mundo, tal como se presentan en el mapa de Mercator. En segundo lugar, y más importante, nuestro Sur es un lugar de resistencia, subversión y creatividad. Podemos encontrar innumerables Sures también en el “norte global”, siempre que haya resistencia a la injusticia y luchas por mejorar las condiciones de vida frente al “capitalismo de datos”.

Nuestras reflexiones sobre los “big data desde el Sur” encajan –y esperan alimentar— el proceso más amplio de reposicionamiento epistemológico de las ciencias sociales. Creemos que no podemos evitar medir las dinámicas sociotécnicas de la dataficación frente a “los procesos históricos de despojo, esclavización, apropiación y extracción […] centrales para la aparición del mundo moderno” (Bhambra y de Sousa Santos 2017: 9), con el riesgo de volver a cometer los mismos errores, y lo mismo se puede decir de nuestra caja de herramientas disciplinarias. Como nos recuerdan Bhambra y de Sousa Santos, “si las injusticias del pasado continúan en el presente y necesitan reparación, ese trabajo reparativo también debe extenderse a la estructura disciplinaria que oscurece tanto como ilumina el camino adelante” (ibid.).

¿Qué implicaría entonces una teoría sureña de los “big data”?

Aceptamos el desafío de Say Chan (2013), que nos recordó que hay formas diferentes de las convencionales para imaginar la relación entre la tecnología y las personas. Aquí compartimos nuestra creciente lista de las condiciones sine-qua-non para pensar la dataficación del Sur. El listado es un trabajo en progreso y viene con una invitación explícita a unirse a nosotros y nosotras en este ejercicio.

  • Llevar a la agencia en el centro de la observación de los mecanismos y prácticas de abajo hacia arriba y de arriba hacia abajo. Inspirándonos en Barbero (1987), debemos centrarnos en la resistencia y la heterogeneidad de las prácticas en lo que se refiere a la dataficación: no solo en los datos en sí, sino también en su infraestructura y dinámicas.
  • Descolonizar nuestro pensamiento y situar la dinámica post-Snowden del capitalismo de datos en las especificidades del Sur. Si bien muchos elementos serán los mismos, las implementaciones, los entendimientos y las consecuencias pueden ser diferentes. Lo que sabemos no debe darse por sentado, sino que hay que descifrarlo críticamente.
  • Prestar atención a las “alternativas”: prácticas alternativas, imaginarios alternativos, epistemologías alternativas, metodologías alternativas en relación con la adopción, uso y apropiación de los big data. Hay que abrirse a lo inesperado y lo inexplorado. Y para aclarar las cosas cabe señalar que las alternativas no son necesariamente subalternas sino simplemente distintas.
  • Llevar la infraestructura en serio, desvelando los complejos flujos (de relaciones, datos, poder, dinero y conteo/contabilidad) que ellas abrigan, generan, modelan y promueven (gracias a Anders Fagerjord por la inspiración para pensar en flujos). Situar nociones como la de plataforma en la experiencia vivida en distintas geografías.
  • Conectar las epistemologías críticas de los mundos sociales emergentes con la política crítica del cambio social. Gracias a Nick Couldry por compartir sus pensamientos sobre este asunto en Cartagena. Su nuevo libro con Ulisses Mejias sobre “Datos, capitalismo y descolonización de Internet” habla precisamente de esto.
  • Ser atento/a y crítico/a con los conceptos y métodos centrados en Occidente. Si bien ofrecen un punto de partida clave, no pueden tomarse por defecto como punto de llegada único para acercarse a los big data del Sur.
  • Ser críticos/as con los razonamientos que llegan del Sur también, para evitar caer en el supuesto de que son formas de conocimiento intrínsecamente diferentes, alternativas o incluso mejores y más puras.
  • Abrirse al diálogo en la dirección que nos lleve: Norte-Sur, Sur-Sur, Sur-Norte. Frente a mucha complejidad, solo podemos avanzar juntos/as, entrando en un diálogo con distintas epistemologías y enfoques.

Dicho esto, quisiéramos alentar a nuestros/as colegas para que adopten de manera más explícita una perspectiva de economía política, lo que puede ayudarnos a examinar críticamente las múltiples formas de dominación que reproducen y perpetúan la desigualdad, la discriminación y la injusticia a todos los niveles. También abogamos por enfoques históricos capaces de rastrear el despliegue actual de la dataficación a sus raíces en las prácticas coloniales (ver Arora 2016). Proponemos involucrarse con las críticas y las ideas feministas en torno a la descolonización de la tecnología. Finalmente, nos gusta pensar que este tipo de investigación es intrínsecamente “comprometida”: al adoptar los estándares de una sólida investigación científica, la “investigación comprometida” puede tomar partido y, lo más importante, está diseñada para cambiar las cosas en las comunidades con las que nos ponemos en contacto (Milán 2010). Este enfoque va de la mano de la promoción de la alfabetización y la educomunicación crítica, mediante las cuales los académicos buscan que la información sea accesible mediante su traducción a un material comprensible y procesable, con el objetivo de atraer a más personas para luchar por los derechos digitales.

Un ejemplo de acercamiento a los “big data” del Sur

Para hacer que nuestro llamado sea más concreto, ofrecemos el ejemplo de nuestro propio trabajo como una de las muchas maneras posibles de voltear la dataficación boca abajo. Emiliano ha estado estudiando la fabricación algorítmica del consentimiento y la obstaculización de la disidencia en línea, y ha esbozado cómo se forjan formas creativas e innovadoras de resistencia algorítmica en América Latina y más allá (Treré 2016). Stefania y su equipo han estado analizando cómo el activismo de datos (Milán y Gutiérrez 2015; Milán 2017), las nuevas epistemologías de datos (Milán y van der Velden 2016) y las prácticas de resistencia a la recopilación masiva de datos, surgen al margen del “capitalismo de vigilancia”, incluido, por ejemplo, en la región amazónica (Gutiérrez y Milán 2017). Pero necesitamos colectivamente, contigo, dar un paso adelante y repensar también la teoría, más allá de los estudios de caso y los ejemplos. Somos muchos/as en este esfuerzo, ya que nos aupamos a hombros de gigantes. Por nombrar solo a uno de los que inspiró nuestro evento en Cartagena: Hace casi treinta años, el comunicólogo hispano-colombiano Jesús Martín-Barbero nos urgió a pasar “de los medios a las mediaciones”, es decir, de los análisis funcionalistas centrados en los medios a la exploración de las prácticas cotidianas de apropiación de los medios a través de las cuales se promulga resistencia a la dominación y la hegemonía (1987). La poderosa transición que activó fue inherentemente política: significó reorientar nuestra mirada desde las instituciones de los medios hacia las personas y sus culturas heterogéneas para ver cómo se generaba la comunicación en bares, gimnasios, mercados, plazas, familias, etc. Siguiendo a Barbero, nuestro trabajo ha estado orientado a pasar de la dataficación al activismo de datos, examinando las diversas formas en que la ciudadanía y la sociedad civil organizada en el Sur participan en prácticas relacionadas con los datos desde abajo para el cambio social y resisten una dataficación que aumenta la opresión y la desigualdad.

Mucho más queda por hacer y muchas conversaciones por celebrar. Junto con Anita Say Chan, estamos lanzando ‘Big Data from the South’, una red de académicos, académicas y profesionales interesados/as en llevar adelante este diálogo multidisciplinario y multilingüe. ¡Únete a nosotros y nosotras!

Únete a la lista de correo

Lee la convocatoria de “Big Data from the South” (Cartagena, 15 de julio de 2017)

Echa un vistazo al blog dedicado. Atención: ¡incluso hemos encargado un logotipo! Tenemos previsto comenzar pronto a publicar textos de invitados e invitadas sobre el tema. Estamos buscando tus ideas y provocaciones. Para contribuir, envía un correo electrónico a: TrereE@cardiff.ac.uk y s.milan@uva.nl.

Acerca del autor y la autora (y situando al privilegio blanco)

Un investigador y una investigadora que movilizan la interdisciplinariedad para moverse entre el estudio de la sociedad y sus imaginaciones y tácticas tecnológicas: el movimiento, el cambio y el contraste han estado en el centro de nuestras trayectorias académicas y nuestras identidades. Europeos del Sur emigrados al Norte debido al malestar eterno que aqueja el sistema de investigación italiano, nos gusta vernos como investigadores comprometidos que mezclan las aguas entre disciplinas y métodos.

Stefania es Profesora Asociada de Nuevos Medios y Culturas Digitales de la Universidad de Ámsterdam, y está afiliada también a la Universidad de Oslo. Es Investigadora Principal del proyecto DATACTIVE. Emiliano es Lecturer de la Escuela de Periodismo, Medios y Estudios Culturales de la Universidad de Cardiff, donde también es miembro del Data Justice Lab y Research Fellow del Centro de Estudios de Movimientos Sociales COSMOS (Italia). Anteriormente, fue Profesor Asociado en la Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro, México.

Ambos hemos investigado y trabajado con varias responsabilidades en varios contextos del Sur. Somos conscientes de escribir desde un lugar privilegiado, pero varios Sures han cruzado nuestras vidas desde el punto de vista profesional y personal, inculcando curiosidad, imponiendo desafíos y sufrimiento ocasional, y obligándonos a realizar preguntas críticas. No tenemos muchas respuestas. Más bien, deseamos que este comentario sea el comienzo de una conversación y de una red abierta y colaborativa en la que diferentes Sures puedan dialogar, aprender y enriquecerse mutuamente.

* El evento fue posible gracias a la financiación del DATACTIVE/European Research Council y al generoso compromiso de Guillén Torres (DATACTIVE) y la Fundación Karisma (Bogotá). También agradecemos la hospitalidad del comité organizador local de IAMCR (y a Amparo Cadavid de UNIMINUTO en particular).

 

Big Data from the South: The beginning of a conversation we must have

by Stefania Milan and Emiliano Treré

On July 15, 2017 in Cartagena, Colombia, about fifty between academics and activists got together to imagine how ‘Big Data from the South’ would look like. Organized with little resources and much enthusiasm by the two of us* and preceding the annual IAMCR conference in Cartagena, the one-day event was designed to make the move ‘from media to mediations, from datafication to data activism’, as the title suggested. We thought that this beautiful gem of the Caribe, at the geographical margins of a country that has recently started to invent a peaceful future for itself, would be the most appropriate place to pioneer a much-needed conversation about a series of question that has kept both of us busy over the past few years: How would datafication look like seen… ‘upside down’? What questions would we ask? What concepts, theories, methods would we embrace or have to devise? What do we miss if we stick to the mainstream, Western perspective(s)? In this post, we resume the conversation we prompted in Cartagena—looking forward.

Datafication and its discontents: Beyond the West?
Datafication has dramatically altered the way we understand the world around us. Understanding the so-called ‘big data’ means to explore the profound consequences of the computational turn, its consequences on the mainstream epistemology, ontology and ethics, as well as the limitations, errors and biases that affect the gathering, interpretation and access to information on such a large scale. If scholars of various disciplines have started to critically explore the implications of datafication across the social, cultural and political domains, much of this critical scholarship has emerged along a Western axis ideally connecting Silicon Valley, Cambridge, MA and Northern Europe. We believe something is missing in this conversation.

We already know a lot, though. The emerging, composite field of critical data studies, at the intersection of social sciences and the humanities, calls our attention to the potential inequality, discrimination and exclusion harbored by the mechanisms of big data (Gangadharan 2012; Dalton, Taylor, & Thatcher 2016). It reminds us that big data is not merely a technological issue or the flywheel of knowledge, innovation and change, but a ‘mythology’ that we ought to interrogate and critically engage with (e.g., boyd & Crawford 2012; Mosco 2014; Tufekci 2014; van Dijck, 2014). It tells us that, although tinted with the narratives of positivism and modernization and widely praised for their revolutionary possibilities in terms of, e.g., citizen participation, big data are not without risks and threats, as opaque regimes of population management and control have taken central stage (see Andrejevic 2012; Turow 2012; Beer & Burrows 2013; Gillespie 2014; Elmer, Langlois and Redden 2015). The expansion of data mining practices by both corporations and states gives rise to critical questions about systematic surveillance and privacy invasion (Lyon, 2014; Zuboff 2016; Dencik, Hintz and Cable 2016). Critical questions arise also from the ways in which academia and businesses alike relate to big data and datafication: colleagues have questioned the ‘bigness’ of contemporary approaches to data (Kitchin and Laurialt 2014), and encouraged us to pay attention to bottom-up practices (Couldry & Powell 2014) and forms of everyday critical engagement with data (Kennedy and Hill 2017).

But how does datafication unfold in countries with fragile democracies, flimsy economies, impending poverty? Is our conceptual and methodological toolbox able to capture and to understand the dark developments and the amazing creativity emerging at the periphery of the empire? We call for the discontents of datafication to join forces to jointly address these concerns—and generate more critical questions.

From the South(s), moving beyond ‘data universalism’… and the universalism of social theory
We believe that we need to systemically and systematically engage in a dialogue with traditions, epistemologies and experiences that deconstruct the dominance of Western approaches to datafication that fail to recognize the plurality, the diversity, and the cultural richness of the South(s) (see Herrera, Sierra & Del Valle 2016). Like Anita Say Chan (2013), we, too, feel that too many critical approaches are still relying on a kind of ‘digital universalism’ that tends to assimilate the heterogeneity of diverse contexts and to gloss over differences and cultural specificities. We would like to contribute to the ongoing conversations about the urgency of a ‘Southern Theory’ that ‘questions universalism in the field of social theory’. We join Payal Arora in claiming that ‘we need concerted and sustained scholarship on the role and impact of big data on the Global South’ (2016: 1693)—and we go one step further, enlarging the picture to include all the Souths in the plural that inhabit our increasingly complex universe.

As Arora (2016) and Udupa (2015) reminded us, while the majority of the world’s population resides outside the West, we continue to frame key debates on democracy ad surveillance—and the associated demands for alternative models and practices—by means of Western concerns, contexts, user behavior patterns, and theories. While recognizing the key contributions of many of our amazing colleagues (and forgive us if for the sake of brevity we haven’t included you all), we feel that something is missing in the conversation, and that only a collective effort across disciplines, idioms, and research areas can help us to re-consider big data from the South. Our definition of the South is a flexible and expansive one, inspired to the writings of sociologist Boaventura De Sousa Santos (2007 and 2014) who was probably the first to write about the emergence and the urgency of epistemologies from the South against the ‘epistemicide’ of neoliberalism. Firstly, there is the geographical South, i.e. the people, activities, politics and technologies arising literally at the margins of the world as captured in the Mercator map. Secondly, and most importantly, our South is a place of (and a proxy for) resistance, subversion and creativity. We can find countless Souths also in the Global North, as long as people resist injustice and fight for better life conditions against the impending ‘data capitalism’.

Our reflections on ‘big data from the South’ fit within—and hope to feed—the broader process of epistemological re-positioning of the social sciences. We believe we cannot avoid measuring the sociotechnical dynamics of datafication against ‘the historical processes of dispossession, enslavement, appropriation and extraction […] central to the emergence of the modern world’ (Bhambra and de Sousa Santos 2017: 9), pending the risk of making the same mistakes all over again—and the same is to be said for our disciplinary toolbox. As Bhambra and de Sousa Santos acutely observed, ‘if the injustices of the past continue into the present and are in need of repair (and reparation), that reparative work must also be extended to the disciplinary structure that obscure as much as illuminate the path ahead’ (Ibid.).

What would a Southern theory of big data entail, then?

We take the challenge from Say Chan (2013), who reminded us that there are more and other ways than the mainstream to imagine the relation between technology and people. Here we share with you our growing list of the sine-qua-non conditions for thinking datafication from the South. The list is a work in progress, and comes with an explicit invitation to join us in this exercise.

  • Bring agency to the center of the observation of both bottom-up and top-down mechanisms and practices. Taking inspiration from Barbero (1987), we should focus on resistance and the heterogeneity of practices as they relate to datafication—not solely on data and datafication per se.
  • Decolonize our thinking, situating the post-Snowden dynamics of the data capitalism in the specificities of the South. While many elements will be the same, implementations, understandings and consequences might differ. What we already know should not be taken for granted but critically unraveled.
  • Pay attention to the ‘alternative’: alternative practices, alternative imaginaries, alternative epistemologies, alternative methodologies in relation to the adoption, use, and appropriation of big data. Prepare for the unexpected and the unexplored. To be sure: here alternatives are not necessarily subaltern or better, they are simply distinct.
  • Take infrastructure seriously, unpacking the complex flows (of relationships, data, power, money, and counting) they harbor, generate, shape and promote (thanks Anders Fagerjord for the inspiration to think in flows). Situate notions like the platform in the lived experience of distinct geographies.
  • Connect the critical epistemologies of emerging social worlds with the critical politics of social change (thanks Nick Couldry for sharing his thoughts on this matter in Cartagena—everyone watch out for his new book with Ulisses Mejias on ‘Data, Capitalism, and Decolonizing the Internet’).
  • Be mindful and critical of Western-centric concepts and methods. While they do offer a key point of departure, they cannot be taken by default as the (sole) point of arrival when approaching big data from the South.
  • At the same time, be critical of Southern understandings and practices as well, to avoid falling into the assumption that they are inherently different, alternative, or even better and purer forms of knowledge.
  • Be open to the dialogue, in whatever direction it takes us: North-South, South-South, South-North. In the face of much complexity, we can only advance together, entering in a conversation with different epistemologies and approaches.

That said, we would like to encourage our colleagues to embrace more explicitly a political economy perspective, which can help us to take a critical look at the multiple forms of domination that reproduce and perpetuate inequality, discrimination and injustice at all levels. We also advocate for historical approaches able to trace the current unfolding of datafication back to its roots in colonial practices, when applicable (see Arora 2016). We suggest engaging with feminist critiques and ideas around the decolonization of technology. Finally, we like to think of this type of inquiry as inherently ‘engaged’: while adopting the gold standards of solid scientific research, ‘engaged research’ might take sides and, most importantly, is designed to make a difference to the communities we come close to (Milan 2010). Such an approach goes hand in hand with the promotion of critical literacy, whereby even academics look for ways of making information accessible by means of translation into understandable and actionable material, in view of bringing more people to fight for their digital rights.

One example of approaching big data from the South
To make our call more concrete, we offer the example of our own work as one of the many possible ways of turning ‘upside down’ what we know about datafication. Emiliano has been studying the algorithmic manufacturing of consent and the hindering of online dissidence; his work outlines how creative and innovative forms of algorithmic resistance are being forged in Latin America and beyond (Treré 2016). Stefania and her team have been looking at how grassroots data activism (Milan & Gutierrez 2015; Milan 2017), new data epistemologies (Milan and van der Velden 2016) and practices of resistance to massive data collection emerge in the fringe of the ‘surveillance capitalism’ , including for example in the Amazon region (Gutierrez and Milan 2017). But we need to collectively—with you, that is—make a leap forward and rethink also theory, beyond case studies and contingent examples. We are not alone in this effort as many giants can lend us their shoulders. To name but one who inspired our event in Cartagena: almost thirty years ago, the Spanish-Colombian comunicologist Jesús Martín-Barbero urged us to move ‘from media to mediations’, that is, from functionalist media-centered analyses to the exploration of everyday practices of media appropriation through which social actors enact resistance to domination and hegemony (1987). The powerful move he triggered was inherently political: it meant refocusing our gaze from media institutions towards the people and their heterogeneous cultures, looking at how communication was shaped in bars, gyms, markets, squares, families, and the like. Following Barbero, our work has been oriented to making the move from datafication to data activism, examining the diverse ways through which citizens and the organized civil society in the South(s) engage in bottom-up data practices for social change and resist a datafication process that increases oppression and inequality.

Much more remains to be done, and many conversations to be had. Together with Anita Say Chan, we are launching ‘Big Data from the South’, a network of scholars and practitioners interested in bringing this multidisciplinary and multi-language dialogue forward. Join us!

Join the mailing list
Read the call for ‘Big Data from the South’ (Cartagena, 15 July 2017)
Check out the dedicated blog. Stay tuned: we have even commissioned a logo! We plan to start soon publishing guest posts on the topic, in any language people might want to write them. We are looking for your your ideas and provocations: to contribute please shoot an email to TrereE@cardiff.ac.uk and s.milan@uva.nl.

About the authors (and situating white privilege)
Interdisciplinary scholars constantly moving between the study of society and its tech imaginations and tactics, movement, change and contrast have been at the core of our scholarship and of our identity. Southern Europeans migrated North on account of the ethernal malaise of the Italian research system, we like to see ourselves as engaged scholars and to muddle the waters between disciplines and methods. Stefania is Associate Professor of New Media and Digital Cultures at the University of Amsterdam affiliated also with the University of Oslo, and the Principal Investigator of the DATACTIVE project. Emiliano is Lecturer in the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University where he is also a member of the Data Justice Lab, and a Research Fellow at the COSMOS Center for Social Movement Studies (Italy). Previously, he was an Associate Professor at the Autonomous University of Querétaro, Mexico. Both of us have conducted research and worked in various capacities in a number of Southern contexts. While we write from a privileged observation point, various Souths have crossed our professional and personal lives, instilling curiosity, imposing challenges and occasional suffering, and forcing us to ask ourselves critical questions. We don’t have many answers. Rather, we want this blog post to be the start of a conversation and of an open, collaborative network where different Souths can dialogue, learn and enrich each other.

*The event was made possible by the funding of DATACTIVE/European Research Council and by the generous engagement of Guillén Torres (DATACTIVE) and Fundación Karisma (Bogotá). We also wish to thank for the hospitality the local organizing committee of IAMCR (and Amparo Cadavid from UNIMINUTO in particular).