No large-scale transformation or newly emerging social and economic order go uncontested. Polanyi describes a double movement: societies did not simply await the long marketisation of labour, land and money. Colonised peoples resisted colonial violence. The commodification of labour, land and money was followed by a countermovement of institutions and rules that protected society from the effects of unbridled marketisation. Many of these regulations, such as workers’ protection or welfare states, are in turn being challenged with the commodification of data and the transformation of society through data colonialism. Likewise, communities at today’s frontlines daily resist the corporations that seek to destroy their environments and turn them into sacrifice zones. Policymakers and digital rights activists around the world are continually fighting back against the power of Big Tech. Winning digital futures that are social, ecological, and just means confronting the commodification of data, but also the crises triggered by the commodification of labour, land, and money.
How could we find forms to govern data and its material infrastructure more democratically? One popular legal answer is the strengthen the right to privacy as, for example, in the European Union with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), or ban some of the data collection and targeted advertisements as under the Digital Markets and Digital Services Acts.
Simply regarding data commodification as a problem which pits individuals against corporations is not truly emancipating. Salomé Viljoen, a Michigan Law School professor, proposes reconceptualising data governance democratically so that it accounts for the insights generated at the level of populations, because, even if there were meaningful ways to withdraw individual consent from corporate or state data extraction, insights about that individual could still be inferred from aggregated data collected from people who were categorised as belonging to the same demographic group.
Acknowledging these data relations and understanding data governance in such a way opens a means to recast data as a common good or public utility. Data should be collected and used only in instances that are democratically agreed in advance and also that benefit citizens. It would allow for building counter-power and drastically reduce data extraction. This would allow for data ownership via public trusts or common ownership, forms that are emerging from the bottom-up. Existing data and data that is being collected by private entrepreneurs should be transferred to the public domain and institutions, similar to the expiry of intellectual property rights, before the latter are phased out entirely. Such data trusts acting on behalf of data subjects could, when existing in plurality, already ensure our empowerment vis-à-vis powerful corporations under the current system.
Approaches to the treatment of data as a common good that involves citizens’ contribution, access, use and ultimately empowerment are being successfully implemented in Barcelona, where city officials stress the need for transparency, accountability, and trust – and could be scaled (supra-)nationally through common property, public institutions that are subjected to scientific oversight and democratic accountability and that act independently from law enforcement or military institutions. These pushes for different regulative legislation and the creation of community structures for the participation of data governance needs to be complemented by ‘nowtopias’, niches where a desirable future already is being implemented, such as subversive ‘digital commoning’ projects or through the ‘contentious politics of data activism’.
The issue with the digital economy does not lie exclusively in the ability of certain very powerful companies to extract data for their profit, but rather in the colonial and extractive logic on which capitalism rests. Therefore, the response from any radically transformative countermovement must be broader, more comprehensive, and challenging to the power relations inherent in the digital economy and capitalism in general, while also representing the plurality and heterogeneity of all reality.
It will require struggles in many different areas. Platform workers all over the world are already expressing resistance through strikes, seeking and building solidarity and working class power, through unions, but also a continuum of strategies. From these countermovements, new models of ownership in the digital economy such as cooperative platforms are emerging. Rather than just supporting this flourishing of local, small-scale cooperatives, legislators should seek to socialise existing platforms. The latter also includes the (infrastructure of the) internet, which has to be geared towards serving as a and for the public good rather than having an ad-funded backbone.
While these proposals would not put an immediate end to the underlying phenomenon of the commodification of data, they would put us on a trajectory towards de-commodification. This de-commodification has to alongside the reduction of material throughput of the (digital) economy, a re-orientation towards sufficiency rather than efficiency. Degrowth proposals aptly identify the impossibility of decoupling resource intensity (and carbon emissions) from economic growth and the need for securing global well-being. There is a need for binding targets for reducing resource extraction. Indigenous and local communities should have a real say in consultations about extractive projects affecting them.
Advocates for the de-commodification of data should seek alliances with and learn from environmental and climate justice groups who are at the forefront of often local struggles against extractivist projects, and for a post-extractivist model of development that contest the colonial logic, which the digital economy requires and which is devouring environments all around the world, in order to arrive at caring futures in which it is possible to sustain global ecosystems.