“…you are the sum total of your data”(Raley, 2012:121). What does this statement mean? What are the political implications of this state of being?

1. Political
Implications of
data doubles
Group 2
Archit Sangal, Ayush Das, Ayush Tiwari, Balkaran Singh,
Darshini A, Gaurav Deshmukh, Chandrima Bhattacharya

2. What makes data have political qualities
01
The concept of data doubles
02
Checklist
03
What makes data a social and political issue?
04
Example from literature
05
Example from today's world
06
"...you are the sum total of your data" - Outro
07
"...you are the sum total of your data" - Intro
00
A digital duplicate of our lives
captured in data and spread across
assemblages of information systems
Data Double?

3. "you are the sum total of
your data"
Dataveillance
Dataveillance
Dataveillance
and
and
and
Countervailance
Countervailance
Countervailance
Is raw data
sufficient to be
'consumed'
directly?
Dataveillance: the practice of monitoring digital data
relating to personal details or online activities.
Countervailance: offsetting an effect by countering it
with something of equal force

4. One that allows for some flexibility
in design which is leveraged
various interest groups to design
artifacts that shape the social order
in a particular way, that maintain,
change, or redistribute power
arrangements in a community.
Two ways in which artifacts may have political qualities:
When you have a choice in whether
you wish to design/deploy it, or not.
But once you commit to that choice,
a particular social and political
order will follow.
Various interest groups (major
organsisations, governments,
international bodies vie for quality
data to mould the world in their
preferred way.
Many policies are formed using
collected data, predictions and
even narratives are based off of it.

6. Surveillance technologies do not monitor people qua individuals but instead
operate through processes of disassembling and reassembling. People are broken
down into a series of discrete informational flows which are stabilized and captured
according to pre-established classificatory criteria. They are then transported to
centralized locations to be reassembled and combined in ways that serve
institutional agendas. Cumulatively, such information constitutes our “data double,”
our virtual/informational profiles that circulate in various computers and contexts of
practical application.
Google
Announcement-
Dec 2009
personalized according
to fifty-seven signals,
among them location,
machine and browser
information, and prior
search history

7. The structure so far
1) Who is making the decision?
2) Who is designing?
3) What is it designed for?
4) How it arranges/rearranges (existing) social relations?
5) What are possible and actual use cases?

8. Why data is a
social and
political issue?
Because not only it concerns anyone who is connected
to the Internet but also because it reconfigures
relationships between states and citizens.
I will let them collect my data as it will be
used for my customised internet experience
Oh my sweet summer child

9. "Data enacts that which it represents"
There has never been a state that had command over such
granular, immediate, varied, and detailed data about
subjects and objects that concern them
#cambridgeanalytica #uselections #ukreferendum
Data is not only shaping our social relations, preferences,
and life chances but our very democracies
Focus on
politics of data
Atomism
Immediacy
3 Shortcomings:
1.
2.
3.

10. "Your genetics, your personals, your medicals, your psychologicals, your police-and-
hospitals. It comes back pulsing stars. This doesn’t mean anything is going to happen
to you as such, at least not today or tomorrow. It just means you are the sum total of
your data. No man escapes that"
White Noise (1985)

11. (1) Even established democracies might decay. There is a risk that surveillance capacities that are used
for democratically legitimated purposes today will be used for poorly legitimated purposes in the future.
(2) Surveillance may be used to enforce laws that lack legitimacy due to the disproportionate
punishment attached to their violation.

12. Anti-hijab protests in Iran
Actions taken by Iran's so called"Moral Police"
Tracking protesters by their faces and detaining their families and other suspected friends (they had
their social network data), banning their mobile numbers, diservicing utilities etc.
Blanket ban on Internet usage.
Punching school girls trying to peacefully organize by tracking their locations and
'Pushing' fake videos & photos of people attacking mosques to counter the traction of people joining
protests, etc (Changing the narrative in their favour)
1.
2.
3.
4.

13. Google decides what news I read,
and in the long term it would have
made a tremendous effect on
what my beliefs and personality
are.
My contact number is sold out to spammers

14. Apparetly, I am a millionare
Goodmorning sunshine,
its time for your daily spam messages

15. Credit card fraud (stealing of credit
card numbers)
Selling email addresses to
advertisers / other services
Auto-spam of email contacts
Sharing/selling personal information
to advertisers
Selling personal information to 3rd
parties for aggregate data collection
.......and so on

16. "you are the sum total of
your data"
Is raw data
sufficient to be
'consumed'
directly?
It is, and it is
being done as we
speak.
Dataveillance
Dataveillance
Dataveillance
and
and
and
Countervailance
Countervailance
Countervailance
This means your data double may not be the
exact replica of who you are, but, it sure is
enough to put you into the space where you can
be influenced across all dimensions, which in
effect, is actually what counts after all.
Therefore, you are the sum total of your data.