Abstract:Data collaborations have gained currency over the last decade as a means for data-and skills-poor actors to thrive as a fourth paradigm takes hold in the sciences. Against this backdrop, this article traces the emergence of a collaborative subject position that strives to establish reciprocal and technical-oriented collaborations so as to catch up with the ongoing changes in research. Combining insights from the modernity/coloniality group, political theory and science and technology studies, the article argue… Show more
“…This implies asking its inhabitants what the returns of such data extractive operations are, and whether these returns are valuable enough to them to be worth the production of data. In this regard, it may be worth exploring proposals like that of Lehuedé (2021) regarding a move toward forms of data governance based on “collective autonomy.”…”
The public–private initiative Data Observatory Foundation was created to make large databases, such as those of astronomical observatories, available to expand and transfer of so-called “data-centric tasks” to various domains and thereby boost the development of the digital economy, data science and artificial intelligence in the country. However, in this article, we argue that data-centric initiatives like the Data Observatory Foundation may prove to be defuturing or enacting exhausted futures that reproduce the historical extractivism and coloniality of power in Latin America. Through a qualitative case study, we analyze the narrative and economic technologies of justification deployed by the Data Observatory Foundation to justify the value of its data and the organization itself. We discuss how the narratives and economic relationships developed by the Data Observatory Foundation manifest national wounds and technological dependency that enact a data-centric coloniality. Whether by attempting to define data as the copper of the future or establishing cloud computing credits as new salary tokens in the development of artificial intelligence, the Data Observatory Foundation reproduces past mentalities within innovation circuits. Rather than replicating futures based on modern colonial extractivist logics, we propose expanding possible engagements with data and speculating alternative designs.
“…This implies asking its inhabitants what the returns of such data extractive operations are, and whether these returns are valuable enough to them to be worth the production of data. In this regard, it may be worth exploring proposals like that of Lehuedé (2021) regarding a move toward forms of data governance based on “collective autonomy.”…”
The public–private initiative Data Observatory Foundation was created to make large databases, such as those of astronomical observatories, available to expand and transfer of so-called “data-centric tasks” to various domains and thereby boost the development of the digital economy, data science and artificial intelligence in the country. However, in this article, we argue that data-centric initiatives like the Data Observatory Foundation may prove to be defuturing or enacting exhausted futures that reproduce the historical extractivism and coloniality of power in Latin America. Through a qualitative case study, we analyze the narrative and economic technologies of justification deployed by the Data Observatory Foundation to justify the value of its data and the organization itself. We discuss how the narratives and economic relationships developed by the Data Observatory Foundation manifest national wounds and technological dependency that enact a data-centric coloniality. Whether by attempting to define data as the copper of the future or establishing cloud computing credits as new salary tokens in the development of artificial intelligence, the Data Observatory Foundation reproduces past mentalities within innovation circuits. Rather than replicating futures based on modern colonial extractivist logics, we propose expanding possible engagements with data and speculating alternative designs.
“…For example, scholarly work has considered how technology corporations' power is embedded within continuing (Aouragh and Chakravartty 2016;Au 2022;Madianou 2019) or new (Kwet 2019; Oyedemi 2021) forms of colonialism, or whether new communications infrastructure and technology such as platforms have created a kind of informational imperialism (Fuchs 2010;Jin 2013;Winseck 2017). Other works on contemporary data practices have used colonialism as a framing device with which to consider the role of data in the evolution of capitalism (Couldry and Mejias 2019;Thatcher, O'Sullivan, and Mahmoudi 2016) or considered how data colonialism interacts with other forms of coloniality (Lehuedé 2023;Ricaurte 2019). There have also been some compelling critiques of the data colonialism framework, which historicize how data practices are entangled within existing colonial relationships (Calzati 2021;Gray 2023).…”
Section: Company Space: Jeff Bezos' and Elon Musk's Celestial Coloniesmentioning
Although space colonization appears to belong to the world of science fiction, private corporations owned by Silicon Valley billionaires—and supported by the US state—have spent billions making it a reality. Analyses of space colonialism have sometimes viewed these projects as distinct from earthly histories of colonialism, instead locating them within traditions of libertarianism, neoliberalism, or techno-utopianism. By reconstructing technology elites’ political visions for celestial settlements within the literature on colonial-era corporations and property, this study argues that the idea of outer space as an empty frontier relies on the same logic of territorialization that was used to justify terrestrial colonialism and indigenous dispossession. It further traces how the idea of “engineering territory” has inspired wider Silicon Valley political exit projects such as cyberspace, seasteading, and network states, which, rather than creating spaces of anarchical freedom, are attempting to recreate the territorial state in new spaces.
When mattering is defined as being able to disseminate ideas on a global scale, not all universities and researchers matter equally. Along with many other factors, geographical location can be a source of inequality in the science system, which is characterized by a persistent core–semi-periphery–periphery structure. Collaboration between high-, middle-, and low-income countries, frequently enabled by the mobility of individual scientists, is a strategy that researchers pursue in building their scientific capital. The circumstances of and barriers to scientific collaboration between researchers in high-, middle-, and low-income countries can be described drawing on the theoretical concept of proximity in its spatial and non-spatial dimensions. However, as will be argued with this critical narrative review, the concept of proximity can explain how rather than why researchers collaborate in a science system that shows a pronounced concentration of opportunities to build scientific capital in its core regions. Because the proximity literature scarcely touches on aspects of inequality and tends to be limited in its scope to the experiences of higher-income countries, this chapter aims to explore how the concept can be expanded by incorporating findings from research on inequality in global academia. This will provide a more comprehensive approach to understanding international research collaboration.
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