The Snowden leaks, first published in June 2013, provided unprecedented insights into the operations of state-corporate surveillance, highlighting the extent to which everyday communication is integrated into an extensive regime of control that relies on the 'datafication' of social life. Whilst such data-driven forms of governance have significant implications for citizenship and society, resistance to surveillance in the wake of the Snowden leaks has predominantly centred on techno-legal responses relating to the development and use of encryption and policy advocacy around privacy and data protection. Based on in-depth interviews with a range of social justice activists, we argue that there is a significant level of ambiguity around this kind of anti-surveillance resistance in relation to broader activist practices, and critical responses to the Snowden leaks have been confined within particular expert communities. Introducing the notion of 'data justice', we therefore go on to make the case that resistance to surveillance needs to be (re)conceptualized on terms that can address the implications of this data-driven form of governance in relation to broader social justice agendas. Such an approach is needed, we suggest, in light of a shift to surveillance capitalism in which the collection, use and analysis of our data increasingly comes to shape the opportunities and possibilities available to us and the kind of society we live in.
Drawing on the first comprehensive investigation into the uses of data analytics in UK public services, this article outlines developments and practices surrounding the upsurge in data-driven forms of what we term 'citizen scoring'. This refers to the use of data analytics in government for the purposes of categorisation, assessment and prediction at both individual and population level. Combining Freedom of Information requests and semi-structured interviews with public sector workers and civil society organisations, we detail the practices surrounding these developments and the nature of concerns expressed by different stakeholder groups as a way to elicit the heterogeneity, tensions and negotiations that shape the contemporary landscape of data-driven governance. Described by practitioners as a way to achieve a 'golden view' of populations, we argue that data systems need to be situated in this context in order to understand the wider politics of such a 'view' and the implications this has for state-citizen relations in the scoring society.
Social media and big data uses form part of a broader shift from ‘reactive’ to ‘proactive’ forms of governance in which state bodies engage in analysis to predict, pre-empt and respond in real time to a range of social problems. Drawing on research with British police, we contextualize these algorithmic processes within actual police practices, focusing on protest policing. Although aspects of algorithmic decision-making have become prominent in police practice, our research shows that they are embedded within a continuous human–computer negotiation that incorporates a rooted claim to ‘professional judgement’, an integrated intelligence context and a significant level of discretion. This context, we argue, transforms conceptions of threats. We focus particularly on three challenges: the inclusion of pre-existing biases and agendas, the prominence of marketing-driven software, and the interpretation of unpredictability. Such a contextualized analysis of data uses provides important insights for the shifting terrain of possibilities for dissent.
New forms of networked action and informal collaboration are challenging traditional notions of civil society. Based on the proliferation of new technologies, and spurred by the spread of transborder delocalized communities and the increasing disillusionment with traditional forms of political organization, civic action is becoming increasingly flexible, temporary, and elusive. This type of nontraditionally organized collective action often stays below the radar of public discourse, unless it is propelled to the spotlight because of international political developments such as the WikiLeaks case (and the related actions by the cyberactivist network Anonymous) and the mass protests in Northern Africa and the Middle East (and the role of social networking tools in these uprisings). In this article, we investigate the interactions and (in)compatibilities of Internet-based networked collective action with institutionalized spaces of policy debate. We begin by characterizing online networked action as an emerging form of organized civil society, focusing on the realm of cyberactivists who are building and using cyber-infrastructure ("grassroots tech groups"). In particular, we examine their values, identity features, and organizational forms. Based on this analysis, we explore two dimensions in which cyberactivism challenges established forms of institutionalized policy debate: the structural dimension and the realm of action repertoires. We ask whether these new forms of civil society are structurally compatible with current multistakeholder governance, and we discuss their repertoires of action with regard to policy advocacy and policy interventions, and thus the level and type of their engagement with governance processes and institutions.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.