DIGITAL COLONIZATION AND DATA POLITICS

Data is what matters now. It has the massive power to divert the dynamics and destiny of an individual and a community. Seven of the top eight companies by market cap globally are data-based, which was a decade before dominated by oil- giants and industrial giants. The infiltration to one’s personal data especially of one’s hostile enemies to use it as a political tool is not something novel or uncommon. The spying and quest for other’s personal data have a long history.

CHEQUERED HISTORY

                King John Un, wherever he goes, takes a mobile toilet with him as he is well aware of his stool’s worth in terms of its potential to illustrate his health, personal traits, attitudes etc. French spy Count Alenxandre de Mareches spied Leonie Brezhnev during his visit to Copenhagen dismantling the flushing and collecting the sample of his stool after he had booked the suit below that of Brezhnev. Operation Tamarisk, an attempt by soviet allies to get wind of soviet liaison in East Germany also adds to its history. When Syrian leader Hafez Al- Assad visited Jordan for funeral of King Hussein in 1999 was spied by Mossad and Jordanian Intelligence who identified afterwards the shortage of his life and shaped their bilateral policy accordingly. These accounts of scatological spying , current two-horse race between China and US, countries’ infiltration into the personal data of citizens and local attempts all bolster the fact that personal data has been attributed great significance and gained currency recently.

                Google, Amazon, Uber, Facebook, Instagram and  the like collect the personal data of its users and by default treat it as private property except in case of the countries who legalized strictly on the rights of the country to own the data of its citizens. Uber, Airbnb and etc have just owned data about customers and commute patterns and a proprietary algorithm that translated them into useful goods. So the data especially the accumulated data constituted the core of financialisation and digitization of an economy.

DIGITAL COLONIZATION

                Nick Choudary and Ulises Ali Mejias used the term “digital colonization” in their book “The Costs of Connection; How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism” following the classical colonization. The both can’t be compared in terms of its massiveness of the atrocities involved but both comprises of the elements of “extraction, exploitation and dispossession”. While US preserve the occidental supremacy through virtual colonization the developing countries have to legalize on their citizen’s data ownership.

                While Amazon, Facebook, Uber treat Indian’s data as their private property after vacuuming out, India has to assert the community’s legal right over data produced from the community, which is the basis of the concept of community data in India’s draft e-commerce policy, as data is the basis of deep and detailed intelligence about a community. Even though the computer philosopher Jaron Lancier and US presidential candidate Andrew Yang argued the individuals being paid for their individual data, it will herald the diminishing value of accumulated data. So it is high time that countries asserted the community rights over their data in order to resist the emerging phase of virtual colonization. Unless such ventures are not taken the producer of data, in this case the individuals and community will be threatened by their own product, data which leads to one kind of surveillance dystopia.

FARHATHULLA K