Content area
Full Text
Introduction
A recent White House report on 'big data' concludes, 'The technological trajectory, however, is clear: more and more data will be generated about individuals and will persist under the control of others' (White House, 2014: 9). Reading this statement brought to mind a 2009 interview with Google Chairperson Eric Schmidt when the public first discovered that Google retained individual search histories that were also made available to state security and law enforcement agencies, 'If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place, but if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines including Google do retain this information for some time ... It is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities' (Newman, 2009). What these two statements share is the attribution of agency to 'technology.' 'Big data' is cast as the inevitable consequence of a technological juggernaut with a life of its own entirely outside the social. We are but bystanders.
Most articles on the subject of 'big data' commence with an effort to define 'it.' This suggests to me that a reasonable definition has not yet been achieved. My argument here is that we have not yet successfully defined 'big data' because we continue to view it as a technological object, effect or capability. The inadequacy of this view forces us to return over and again to the same ground. In this article I take a different approach. 'Big data,' I argue, is not a technology or an inevitable technology effect. It is not an autonomous process, as Schmidt and others would have us think. It originates in the social, and it is there that we must find it and know it. In this article I explore the proposition that 'big data' is above all the foundational component in a deeply intentional and highly consequential new logic of accumulation that I call surveillance capitalism. This new form of information capitalism aims to predict and modify human behavior as a means to produce revenue and market control. Surveillance capitalism has gradually constituted itself during the last decade, embodying a new social relations and politics that have not yet been well delineated or...