Digital personal data is increasingly framed as the basis of contemporary economies, representing an important new asset class. Control over these data assets seems to explain the emergence and dominance of so-called “Big Tech” firms, consisting of Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google/Alphabet, and Facebook. These US-based firms are some of the largest in the world by market capitalization, a position that they retain despite growing policy and public condemnation—or “techlash”—of their market power based on their monopolistic control of personal data. We analyse the transformation of personal data into an asset in order to explore how personal data is accounted for, governed, and valued by Big Tech firms and other political-economic actors (e.g., investors). However, our findings show that Big Tech firms turn “users” and “user engagement” into assets through the performative measurement, governance, and valuation of user metrics (e.g., user numbers, user engagement), rather than extending ownership and control rights over personal data per se. We conceptualize this strategy as a form of “techcraft” to center attention on the means and mechanisms that Big Tech firms deploy to make users and user data measurable and legible as future revenue streams.
Indigenous-led movements have shifted oil transport infrastructure from the margins to the center of political contestation throughout North America. These campaigns include confrontation with pipeline financiers. We argue that there are both strategic and theoretical reasons to examine the complex relationship between finance and extractive infrastructure. We provide a broad description of this relationship, starting from the significance of finance in an analysis of colonial expansion and resource extraction, with an outline of the Canadian context generally and the tar sands specifically. We continue with an examination of the link between the banking sector and resource extraction in Canada, a history of financing arrangements for the first major pipelines built across Indigenous territories claimed by colonizers, and the basics of pipeline financing today. Finally, we give an overview of contemporary efforts to stop pipelines by constraining companies’ access to money, arguing that detailed understandings of industry dynamics strengthen such work. Most importantly, we contend that processes of financial valuation provide opportunities for political intervention.
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