Featured illustration by Mirko Rastić.

Life in the age of the datascape is wild. We can communicate with anybody, for free, the world over. We can meaningfully engage in the lifeworlds of our loved ones irrespective of their geography. We can drown in knowledge at the tap of a keyboard. We can map our way across unknown cities. We can create, edit and share text, sound, picture and video instantly, collaboratively, across multiple devices, on the fly. Our brains, thought patterns and subjectivities become technologically augmented. Search engines and social networks become extensions of the self.

The underside of our age is the heavy digital trace we leave behind. Every movement tracked by the location service on our smartphones. Every need, want and desire recorded as search terms. Our communication over phone, text and email potentially recorded. The content of our emails and instant messages algorithmically raked for themes and keywords.

This data—which is then collated, categorized and described in vast bulk as metadata—is an explosive store of value that has emerged over the last two decades. It is our lives, recorded, extracted and stored. It is information that, before the digital mediation and capture of human existence, was lost into the ether. And it is from these vast new data stores, these virtual representations of ourselves, that tech-monoliths such as Google and Facebook parasitically extract their value. It is for this that we must demand remuneration. It is against this privatization that we must demand data liberation.

Data-Parasites

Google and Facebook are hailed as either the benevolent providers of a beneficial, transformational and free digital infrastructure, or the practitioners of increasingly total, nefarious data gathering in aid of surveilling our every move. Neither of these two characterizations is quite correct. While services such as email, messaging, search and maps have both extended and transformed our communicative, intellectual and logistical abilities, they are not provided benevolently, nor are they provided for free.

Simultaneously, while these corporations do have the ability to build up incredibly detailed profiles on individuals, their aspirations are not totalitarian. They are not interested in liberating human potential, but neither are they interested in controlling us via surveillance. What they pursue is surplus value extraction. They aim to reproduce capital. As every other corporation, they chase profit.

This is something Google and Facebook do incredibly well. While being worth nearly $800 billion combined—more than the total GDP of the Netherlands—they are also the two fastest growing corporations in the history of capitalism. And yet, it is initially mysterious as to where this value originates. Neither Google nor Facebook create any content, only an infrastructure that catalogs and ranks. Nor do they charge for their products or services, instead giving them away for free. Both have minute labor inputs when considering their size, the value of Facebook being nearly five times that of Starbucks while employing just 7 percent of the labor.

So how do these companies come to be valued so highly? It is because we—the consumer, user and producer—labor for Google and Facebook for free. We create the content that they index. We expose our lifeworlds to digital capture and enclosure. We let them mine us for data. Data that is then collated and described as metadata. Metadata which is used to serve us the precise, targeted advertising on which Facebook and Google’s revenue streams depend. By our very existence in the datascape, by becoming a digital being, our lives are squeezed for surplus value.

Data-Labor

Such a notion of hidden, data labor aligns with that of digital labor theorists such as Tiziana Terranova. Her work cataloging exploitation in the datascape and the existence of “digital sweatshops” has been important in de-glamorizing digital labor and exposing companies—such as the Huffington Post, who rely on vast swathes of unpaid writers—for what they are: exploitative of increasing precarity in the culture industry and elsewhere. But more than this, Terranova claims that labor is also diffuse, essential and existential. That merely by existing in the datascape, through the most basic forms of engagement, we are laboring in the interests of capital.

I will admit, this sounds peculiar. Using Google or Facebook does not seem like work. It is a leisure activity that we choose to pursue, or at the very least a convenient service that improves our lives. And while the latter is true, the use of these data-parasites is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid. As they institute themselves as the unseen infrastructure of both our digital and physical worlds, our increasingly coerced engagement begins to look a lot like labor.

Already, if we are to exist in the datascape, we cannot avoid data-mining services such as email, search and social media. Not owning an email address, for example, would result in exclusion from social networks, online shopping, online banking, most spaces of virtual community and nearly all forms of digital communication. Search is also unavoidable. Constructive engagement with the vast jungle of the web is impossible if one does not use Google or one of its competitors. At the same time, every major email and search provider will algorithmically rake over each word you type. Your thoughts, queries, communications and desires will be captured and transformed into valuable, privatized metadata.

We can go further than this, however. Increasingly, engagement with the datascape—and consequently these tech-parasites—is a prerequisite for a meaningful existence in the physical realm too. Email is an unavoidable necessity for vast swathes of twenty-first-century work. Search is essential if one is perform any labor with an informational component. Google maps are indispensable for the ever-increasing amount of precarious, freelance workers who have to navigate cities on the fly.

In this way, these data-parasites have come to establish themselves as the unavoidable, omnipresent infrastructure of a datascape upon which we increasingly depend for our own reproduction. Their use becomes normalized and expected. Our lifeworlds are increasingly channeled through them. More and more of our everyday action is mined for data, and produces value for these corporations.

Couple this unavoidability—this attempted existentiality—with the fact that our engagement is the main source of their value, that the data they extract is also their profit, and it seems obvious that our use of these data-mining services is labor. We cannot avoid it. We are coerced into performing it. It is directly productive of capital. We are data laborers.

Resistance in the Datascape

In light of this reframing, the tech dream of Google’s founders rapidly turns into nightmare. Sergey Brin wonders at the possibility of creating “a little version of Google that you just plug into your brain,” so that, as Schmidt puts it, “we would know enough about you to give you targeted information, the targeted news, the targeted advertising, to make the instantaneous, and seamless, happen.”

Revealed is Google’s intention to existentialize themselves totally. To occupy the most data-rich pastures. To attach their parasite to the source—our brains—and ensure the capture, enclosure and privatization of the totality of human cognition. Google would become biological, our every flicker of consciousness making them a profit.

Such wretched, dystopian futures can only be averted if we assert the reality of data labor and use it to interrogate current modes of resistance and inform potential alternatives. For example, if we continue to view struggles over privacy as panoptic rather than economic, as a fight against nefarious surveillance rather than surplus-value extraction, we will continue to obfuscate the extractive, data-mining intentions of these corporations.

One alternative tactic is to start analogizing the privacy policies of Google and Facebook to that of traditional wage contracts—with all the attendant struggles over pay, conditions and working hours. This reframing helps us to realize our true position in relation to these techno-parasites. We are not the grateful beneficiaries of free services as Silicon Valley claims. Nor are we the controlled and surveilled totalitarian subjects usually offered by the liberal left. Instead we are laborers. Laborers who should demand more than a smattering of free services as remuneration.