Data out of place: Toxic traces and the politics of recycling

Abstract

It has become increasingly common to talk about “digital traces”. The idea that we leak, drop and leave traces wherever we go has given rise to a culture of traceability, and this culture of traceability, I argue, is intimately entangled with a socio-economics of data disposability and recycling. While the culture of traceability has often been theorised in terms of, and in relation to, privacy, I offer another approach, framing digital traces instead as a question of waste. This perspective, I argue, allows us to connect to, extend and nuance existing discussions of digital traces. It shows us that data traces raise questions about not only how data capitalism tracks individual and multiple data behaviours, but also how it links to social and environmental toxicities in the form of abuse and environmental pollution, which follow gendered and colonial structures of violence.

Digital placemaking and the datafication of forced migrants

“…Migrants' digital place is contingent on hierarchies of representation (O'Neill, 2016;Thylstrup, 2019). The criminal migrant forcing his way into Europe is part of these hierarchies (Eberl et al, 2018).…”

Between administration and research: Understanding data management practices in an institutional context

“…Accordingly, data are not valued in and of themselves. Thylstrup (2019) suggested to understand the culture of traceability surrounding Big Data in terms of waste. These excerpts suggest that there is another explanation: While some fields regard data as potential future evidence (Leonelli, 2016), others regard data as a means to an end; once the end (e.g., a prototype) is achieved, the data become a mere milestone on the way.…”

Of dog kennels, magnets, and hard drives: Dealing with Big Data peripheries

“…The social, political, and ecological conditions undergirding the availability of these technologies are perpetually unstable, and tech companies must navigate and negotiate with this ongoing precarity to hold those conditions in place. Big Data appears globally distributed, but the determinants of its material form are propped up by old nationalisms, colonial violence, and geopolitical frictions, all of which leave deep traces in our data infrastructures (Thylstrup, 2019), if only we know how and where to look.…”

“…In foregrounding how logistical mobilities weaving in and out of the Global South shape the material forms of Big Data infrastructure, the concept of data peripheries attempts to think beyond current relations of datafication (Milan and Treré, 2019) by bringing questions of supply relations, and their associated frictions and mobilities, deeper into conversations about the socio-material impacts of what Hogan (forthcoming) calls the “data center industrial complex”. In this regard, building on Thylstrup’s (2019) notion of “data toxicity” or “data-out-of-place,” I bring Big Data’s peripheries into relief through the industrial “traces” and imprints left in the wake of its supply chain. In exploring these “traces”, I chart Big Data’s tentacular industrial relations, questioning how they might be reimagined from the bottom-up, and from the outside-in.…”