After User Experience, Dreaming of Human Experience
While participating in a UX psychology study group, I was jotting down references related to new keywords I came across, and ended up discovering a few new(?) books.
Today's post is about the second of those, a book titled Critique of the Data Society.
What I personally found refreshing(?) was that this book — which deals with sociology and human experience, topics I've been paying attention to lately — was written by someone working at the very front line of the technology field. Back when it was written (2017), the author very kindly explains his insights about digital phenomena, drawing on a variety of metaphors from across the universe.
From another angle, what's striking is how accurately the book describes the kinds of situations we feel today (2023) with new technologies like ChatGPT or AutoGPT. This can be read as the author's sharp insight, but it also makes me wonder whether it isn't a kind of consistent influence (or a conservation of relational mass) that new technologies — created and experienced by humans within the universe (or the metaverse), and exerted on their surroundings — produce.
I'd like to excerpt some of the passages that struck me while reading. I don't feel I have enough substance to mix my own opinions in with the original text, so I'm recording the passages as raw and vivid as possible.
If any of these resonate with you, I hope you'll read the book in full, and that each of our thoughts will once again be shared with one another.
A place where data — generated by human activity or arising naturally — is gathered, processed in real time, and cultivated, is what we call a "platform." A platform is both a station where netizens linger and a place where data is collected, read, and cultivated.
If we use the metaphor of the material economy, a platform is something like a commercial rental property bustling with netizens. The owner of the platform-mall outfits demarcated electronic spaces and service items where netizens can play well, and calls in tenants who will voluntarily enter into contracts. The interesting thing is that most of the move-in conditions are free contracts, and there isn't even a move-in fee. The mall landlord shouts to future tenants that the lease is "free," and really does lay out a place to play and provide services to tenants and users without discrimination.
Metaphorically speaking, on the surface it looks like the masses are freely exchanging data online like bees, doing "pollination" activity, but at the back end of the platform, most of the honey they produce ends up being collected back into the hive. The platform tenant is like a worker bee that gathers honey day after day and fills the platform's hive.
Netizens, while voluntarily performing data activity in this commercial estate, are absorbed and captured into a value mechanism akin to labor. Pollination activity by netizens — like Wikipedia — is the "general intellect" of the digital ecosystem and a process of social value-giving, but most of the honey-collecting work performed by tenants becomes the platform owner's share, and remains as private profit. Within these platform activities and processes, capitalist profit takes the form of "becoming rent of profit".
Critique of the Data Society (Lee Kwang-Seok, KOREATECH) p. 46
The desires hidden in the platform economy
The process of capturing rent profits on platforms — where data is captured and cultivated — has become a common sight today, and global in scope. Naver and Google, masquerading as online services such as mail and cloud, freely parcel out rental space to netizens and step forward as global platform landlords. On platforms like YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, every day we shoot and upload, share, write, click, and react.
We say we are "sharing" data with anonymous others in the outside world, but it cannot remain as our own value, nor can it be made into the commons of citizens. In the world of data, the owners of these global platforms turn into private property and resources everything that their tenant-tenants produce while sharecropping — from active writing and posting photos on the digital wall, all the way to the most subtle emotional reactions and biometric data. In the end, the honey is not for the resilience of natural ecology, but becomes the property of the beekeeping platform operator.
Platform owners or brokers thoroughly bring into the market not only data and the realm of the "general intellect," but even shared physical goods and resources that until now had been left as social or community culture, seeking to generate profit in new ways.
Things that used to be regarded simply as social gifts and that flowed back and forth without market transactions — mutual labor exchange (pumasi) and rural volunteer culture (sharing labor), shared childcare and home-schooling, eating together as a neighborhood, neighbors offering each other a place to sleep, communal living — are gradually disappearing. These were, in fact, warm common assets and culture that had long been informally maintained within local communities. Modern capitalism, in contrast, plows over the ground of grassroots mutual aid and now formalizes it as market money-making under the frame of the "sharing economy." The sharing economy and the platform economy are the market's desire to drive private-property stakes — under the names of "sharing" and "efficiency" — into the tangible and intangible assets of communities and the objects of social gift-giving.
From the perspective of online culture, this looks as if platform landlords are once again processing and re-appropriating, as a new revenue source, the cultures of collective intelligence — like open-source software or Wikipedia — that bloomed freely outside of copyright.
The logic of the platform economy, which absorbs and privatizes citizens' bodily data online, has come to capture into the platform even the labor power and asset value of irregular freelance workers from the real material world. For example, the recent business types of "sharing economy" or "gig economy" online platform operators or brokers — Uber (cars), Airbnb (a place to sleep), TaskRabbit (service labor), and so on — fall into this category. Through online platforms, they directly mediate the labor and material resources of individual temporary workers to customers one-on-one, and from this they monopolize the platform's matching profit. While online-based platforms capture and extract the limitless data emerging from netizens' activities and consciousness to generate profit, the latter — O2O businesses and similar online–offline platforms — are reborn as brokers of a new kind of human market that exploits the sweat of temporary workers carrying out their daily lives. In this way, today on platforms, the collaborative value of users grows exponentially, while ownership and control are concentrated in a small number of brokers, amplifying new forms of inequality and contradiction. Both the global temporary labor of the real material world and the data excretions of netizens in the immaterial world are being sucked rapidly into the platform apparatus as the most violent "data vortex" of late capitalism.
Critique of the Data Society (Lee Kwang-Seok, KOREATECH) p. 49
데이터 사회 비판
빅데이터 및 테크놀로지 문화 연구가 이광석 교수는 &t;데이터 사회 비판>을 통해 혁신이라는 의도에만 치중해 그동안 등한시되었던 기술이 어떻게 우리 일상에 영향을 미치고 있는지 되살피면
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꿀벌의 우화
애덤 스미스를 비롯해 후대 경제학자에게 미친 영향력의 측면에서는 물론 사상사적으로도 중요한 위치를 차지하는 버나드 맨더빌의《꿀벌의 우화》의 국내 최초 번역본. 자본주의 발전의 초입
www.aladin.co.kr
The Italian philosopher and media theorist Bifo described the post-human ontological situation of contemporary people, who are becoming "bio-info-machines" in this composite state, as follows:
The machine is now inside us. We are no longer captured by machines outside us. Instead, the "info-machine" now intersects with the nervous system of society, and the "bio-machine" interacts with the genetic generation of the human body. Digital technology and biotechnology have transformed the steel exterior machine into an internalized recombinant machine of the bio-info age. The bio-info-machine is no longer separated from our bodies and minds. It is because the machine is no longer an external tool, but an internal transforming device that transforms our bodies and minds — an augmentation device that enhances our linguistic-cognitive capacities. (...) The machine is precisely us.
Now, as data machines and life machines are being inscribed into our bodies, we are entering a new reality of human-species mutation. At this point, more than the bizarre birth of a body-machine-life mutant Sapiens, we are made even more uncomfortable by the new techno-power regime that seeks to manage us by turning these into governance terminals.
By modulating the individual brain and body onto the internet and onto specific servers, the capitalist market order, which until now had stayed outside the body, is now crawling inside it. Today, the discussion of the "posthuman" must begin from this very recognition: of the human subject who has become a bio-info-machine. For example, most of the health and biorhythm data generated by the medical-industry logic of digital healthcare or by "self-tracking" devices is making contemporary people into "quantified selves." This vividly demonstrates the process by which body data is newly defined and structured into a market by the capitalist system. In fact, transnational corporations like Apple, Google, and Samsung are competing fiercely in the global market to seize digital healthcare and body-management platforms early. These new medical-platform operators try to upload, in real time to virtual cloud servers, biometric data and personal health data recognized by wearable devices like smartwatches and Fitbits, and to build algorithmic regimes that integrate and manage this data and information into client systems. In other words, a data society is coming in which corporations manage and look after our biological status information 24/7 through cognitive sensors attached to the post-human body. Today's capitalism, crossing online and offline, is now inscribing the market order of electronic platforms onto its final stage — the human body itself. 64
