The presentation at the conference Data Traces was in German, hence also the slides. Below is unedited live written english translation created by Felix Gerloff. It’s a impressive on-the-spot summary, but don’t parse words.
Felix Stalder: “Politics of Data β Between Post-Democracy and Commons”
β culture as “trade floor” of meaning / interpretation
β topic: how the structure of theses processes of debating meaning in culture changed
β significant change today: big data sets instead of small data
β the quantitative change quickly becomes a qualitative change, because it needs different approaches to deal with big data
β he not necessarily means automated data that is often discussed in the context but cultural items/products more
β more people nowadays participate in cultural production and the normalization of handling big amounts of data β> an imperative of dealing with and producing large amounts of data
β Why are more people involved in that today?
β historical transformation processes in work structures, society and geo-politics
β change of work culture: higher expectation in regard of communicativeness, expressiveness etc. towards workers
β societal change: possibilities of articulation extended / more participation on societal meaning making
β expansion of the concept of “design” / everything can be seen as design today
β design means dealing with options / debating possibilities/options for action
β more and more (political/societal) questions are asked for decision and negotiating options / questions that earlier were regarded as fate or myths
β the expansion of “questions of culture” leads to an “explosion of communication”
β every question that is relevant for the “everyday life” is discussed in a sphere beyond the “private” realm
β relatively late to this development the technical infrastructures for this mass communication/negotiation appear/co-develop (since the 2000s as a dominant phenomena)
β showing a glimpse of this production of data (“The Internet in Real-Time”)
β all are acts of meaningful expressions
β the “like” as the minimal / most granular act of value decisions / “from my perspective in this moment this is important”
β from there a spectrum of growing “efforts” of articulation post > article > book/movie e.g.
β this developments lead to a crisis of former institutions that are focussed/limited on small data sets and a top-down direction of meaning making
β they spoke from a position of an overview, e.g. a canons in art or literature
β expert view
β the position of overview is non-personal by nature
β since the 1960s growing critique on these institutions
β questioning the canon of art / male domination in art canon e.g.
β the new technical infrastructure allows for the establishment of new institutions
β which goes beyond critique of institutions into creating alternatives
β refers back to the visualization of internet activity
β again, shows the effort of people who decide to post/like/get an account etc.
β “weak” social networks
β new “communities of practice” (groups based on common interest, common evaluating of something, like sharing cat images)
β Political challenges for the institutions
β opinion making and decision making beyond (institutional) representation
Strategy 1: “decoupling”
β everybody can debate/participate but few can make decisions
β example: privacy in social mass media / Facebook developers decide about the structure of social norms incorporated in their service/platform with no direct possibility for its users to participate in that
β structural decoupling of social layers of decision making based on the fact that the necessary data is secret and/or proprietary
These systems areβ¦
β post-democratic
β post-hegemonial
β post-cultural: no interest in meaning making
β these processes not limited to the “Internet”
β this decoupling, which has its most obvious realization in social networks can also be seen in other social processes/political negotiations
Strategy 2: “absorption” / “commoning”
β borders are not fixed producer/consument / economy/society
β encompassing/comprehensive institutions, focussed on consensus and complex “calculus”
β “commons”
β common/collective-democratic
β “hegemonial”
β comprehensive-cultural
β Not restricted to the Internt: example: “kickstarter” for saving greece
Discussion:
β Jutta Weber:
β expand the destabilization of “objectivity” to epistemes / changes in science (much earlier than discussed here)
β Felix:
β the presentation is very schematic of course
β this processes go further back of course (e.g. problems of data already in the census in the late 19th century)
Do you see a loss of value(s) in these processes? What is the connection to the time frame of decision making? Is this a chance or danger for democracy?
Felix:
β values, who’s values? where did the “common” values come from? repressive consensus, bourgeois values
β these structural changes are beyond personal control / the first strategy may be more dominant currently
β Christiane Heibach:
β the collection of big data seems to afford basically a dictatorial/totalitarian system / this seems to by prominent in the first strategy of decoupling, too
β post-economic was missing / is the economic the new basis of these processes
Felix:
β disagrees with the question of totalitarianism of data