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Global sales of smartphones reached 1,424m units in 2015 — 200m more than in 2014. In effect nearly a third of mankind has a pocket computer, and we are so accustomed to these convenient gadgets that we easily forget the bargain they force on us, on which the entire digital economy is based: Silicon Valley companies give us apps in exchange for our personal data. These companies brazenly collect location, online activity, contacts and other information (1), which they analyse and sell to advertisers, who are delighted to be able to ‘deliver the right messages to the right people in the places and moments that perform best’, as a Facebook ad platform proudly proclaims.

Though controversy over surveillance has been growing since Edward Snowden’s 2013 revelations, the collection of data for commercial purposes is not generally seen as a political issue, relating to communal choice, and therefore a matter for collective debate. It arouses little concern outside specialist organisations, perhaps because few know about it.

There’s a saying from the 1970s: ‘If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.’ In that decade US economist Dallas Smythe realised that anyone slumped in front of a screen is working unknowingly. Television, he said, creates a product — the audience, the attention of viewers — which TV channels sell to advertisers: ‘You audience members contribute your unpaid work time and in exchange you receive the programme material and the explicit advertisements’ (2). The unpaid work of Internet users is more active. On social networks, we convert our friendships, emotions, desires and anger into data exploitable by algorithms. Every item of information on our profile, every like, tweet, search or click adds to the usable information held by Amazon, Google and Facebook on servers around the world.

The unpaid work of converting the world into data is termed ‘digital labor’. Silicon Valley prospers from this original online sin. In 1867 Marx wrote in Capital: ‘What does the primitive accumulation of capital, ie, its historical genesis, resolve itself into? ... the expropriation of the immediate producers.’ Capital used ‘conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder ... force’, to enclose common land, put starving peasants to work for a wage, and colonise the South. Today it also uses ‘lolcat’ videos. Economic historians may credit the casually dressed bosses of Silicon Valley with the creation of a world-group of cheerfully dispossessed labourers, willing co-producers of the services they consume. Google’s $75bn revenues in 2015, mostly from advertising, indicate the scale of shameless accumulation through dispossession. When Facebook published its 2016 second quarter earnings, Re/Code amusedly reported that the social network, with its 1.71bn monthly active users, was ‘making more money on each person [than ever before], $3.82 per user’ (3).

Stolen not given

Data (from the Latin for given) is the least appropriate name for something that is in fact stolen. The involuntary work done by Internet users may be the subject of brilliant studies by academics (4), but the political and trade union left have not yet incorporated this concept into their analysis, still less their demands. Yet material and immaterial exploitation are closely intertwined. Digital labor is a link in the chain that shackles the miners of Kivu, forced to extract the coltan used in making smartphones, the workers at Foxconn in China who assemble them, and the Uber taxi drivers, Deliveroo couriers and Amazon warehouse workers whose work is ruled by algorithms (5).

Who produces data? Who controls it? How is the wealth derived from it shared out? What other economic models could there be? Making these questions political issues is all the more urgent because the proliferation of web-connected objects (Internet of things) and the installation of sensors on industrial production and logistics lines increases the flow of information every day. Ford’s CEO Mark Field boasted in 2015 that ‘today’s cars produce a massive amount of data — upwards of 25GB of information per hour’ (about two seasons of Game of Thrones). From journeys made to driving parameters, musical preferences and weather forecasts, everything is transmitted to the carmaker’s servers. Consultants already suggest drivers might negotiate a discount (6).

Some highly organised groups, conscious of the need to protect their interests, have made combating this theft of data a political priority. These include big farmers in the US. Agricultural machines fitted with data capture devices have been harvesting information that makes it possible to finetune sowing, soil treatment and watering to the nearest metre. In 2014 seed and chemical company Monsanto and tractor maker John Deere both suggested to farmers in the Midwest that they should transmit parameters directly to the companies’ servers for processing.

Mary Kay Thatcher, the American Farm Bureau’s senior director for congressional relations, is wary. In the educational video Who owns my data?, she says: ‘Farmers need to know who controls their data, who can access it, whether the aggregated or individual data can be shared or sold.’ She is concerned that data captured by multinationals will fall into the hands of speculators who will use it to manipulate the market. ‘They only have to know the information about what is actually happening with harvests minutes before somebody else knows it’ (7). Organisation has paid off: in March, agricultural technology providers and farmers’ representatives agreed ‘privacy and security principles for farm data’. In July the Agricultural Data Coalition set up a server farm for joint information storage.

We will all be (micro) shopkeepers

Ideas like these have not yet occurred to EU leaders. In October 2015 complaints filed by an Austrian student against Facebook for violation of privacy led to the invalidation of the 20-year-old Safe Harbour agreement, which had permitted the transfer of data to US enterprises. The EU could have forced the web giants to store Europeans’ personal data in Europe, but instead this year signed a new framework agreement for automatic transfers, with the Orwellian name Privacy Shield, in exchange for a pledge from the US Director of National Intelligence that there would be no ‘indiscriminate mass surveillance’. Now you only have to switch on your mobile phone to be involved, unknowingly, in an import-export business. Though the struggle against the TTIP agreement has attracted millions of supporters, the reaffirmation of electronic free trade has elicited no particular reaction.

The mobilisation in these areas, and its scale, will result in three possible futures for digital labor. In the first, users broker their own data. Computer scientist Jaron Lanier proposes that if ‘something a person says or does contributes even minutely to a database ... then a nanopayment, proportional both to the degree of contribution and the resultant value, will be due to the person. These nanopayments will add up, and lead to a new social contract’ (8). We will all be (micro) shopkeepers.

In the second, the state takes back control. With the intensification of austerity since the beginning of the decade, popular anger has grown over tax evasion by high-tech companies. Alongside the European Commission’s antitrust investigation of Google, and fraud investigations by national authorities, the idea has emerged in France of taxing high-tech enterprises on the value generated by personal data. In their report on tax in the digital sector, senior French civil servants Nicolas Colin and Pierre Collin urge that France should ‘recover the power to tax profits derived from “unpaid work” by Internet users located within French territory’ (9).

Sociologist Antonio Casilli proposes that such a tax should fund an unconditional basic income (10), as an instrument of emancipation and to provide some compensation for digital labor. This is one way of turning personal data into a progressive political issue. So there may be a third way, based not on commodification but on socialisation.

In transport, health and energy, personal data has until now been used only to implement austerity by cutting costs. It could just as well help to improve urban traffic flow, the healthcare system, energy resource allocation, or education. Rather than being transferred, by default, to the US, it could be compulsorily transferred to an international data agency under the supervision of Unesco (United Nations Organisation for Education, Science and Culture). Rights of access and use could be differentiated: automatic for the individual concerned; free, but anonymised, for local government, research or public statistics organisations; possible for organisers of non-commercial public interest projects. For private entities, access would be conditional and fees charged: priority would be given to the common good, rather than commerce. A related proposal was set out in France in 2015, with a view to reclaiming sovereignty. An international agency would have the advantage of bringing together, under strict standards, countries sensitive to privacy issues that wish to challenge US hegemony.

The popularisation of shared ownership and use of data is hampered by a technical inferiority complex which combines perceptions that ‘it’s too complicated’ and that ‘there’s nothing we can do about it’. But, despite its complexity and jargon, the digital domain is not distinct from the rest of society, nor can it be separated from politics. The critic Evgeny Morozov writes: ‘While many of the creators of the Internet bemoan how low their creature has fallen, their anger is misdirected. The fault is not with that amorphous entity but, first of all, with the absence of robust technology policy on the left — a policy that can counter the pro-innovation, pro-disruption, pro-privatisation agenda of Silicon Valley’ (11).

The question is not whether there will be a confrontation over control of digital resources, but whether progressive forces will take part in it. Pressure for thepopular reappropriation of online communications, the emancipation of digital labor, and shared ownership and use of data is a logical extension of a 200-year struggle. They counter the fatalistic belief in a future dominated by the surveillance state and the predatory market.