Whose data? Problematizing the ‘gift’ of social labour

Abstract

Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Google, and Jared Cohen, Founder and Director of Google Ideas, contend that ‘for governments and companies’, the user-generated content that constitutes big data is ‘a gift, enabling them to better respond to citizen and customer concerns, and, within the emergent field of predictive analysis, to predict what the future will hold’. In this article, I interrogate what it means for data from our social lives to be interpreted as a ‘gift’ by private enterprises such as Google. Who is giving what to whom? What is the nature of the transaction? Whose property is this data? By putting into conversation Schmidt and Cohen’s gift thesis with an analysis of the ‘value’ of participation in digital communication networks, this article seeks to uncover an intellectual property conundrum that legitimizes the rise of new kinds of labour vulnerabilities in the digital age; intensifying the extension of the logic of privatization into our digital social lives; and, in doing so, the importance of intellectual property as a language of critique and resistance.

Literacy in the Time of Artificial Intelligence

“…Far from opening out a public square or "creative commons" (Lessig 2004), internet barons have taken it upon themselves to micromanage our sociability. The reasonably paid journalists and television producers of the mass media have been displaced by the unpaid creative work of users in social media (Kalantzis-Cope 2016). On the backs of unpaid laborers, the new media barons have made themselves fabulously rich.…”

“…The differences in interpretation based on the varied life experiences and interests of learning are of greater pedagogical significance than the capacity to repeat factual details from a text. The design alternative focuses on change, agency, difference, and the world-transformative capacities of every meaning-maker (Cope and Kalantzis 2023c, Kalantzis et al 2012[2016, New London Group 1996). But we're saying it again now because there's a point we need to add about Generative AI.…”

Artificial intelligence in the long view: from mechanical intelligence to cyber-social systems

“…The "gig economy" and self-employed platform-coordinated economies are driven by dynamics of fear and uncertainty, sometimes motivating self-exploitation and over-work, while casting people into underwork at other times. Platforms also depend for their profitability on the "reputational" economy, absorbing enormous amounts of unpaid labor [65]. The reasonably paid work of journalists in a previous era, for instance, is being replaced by a mass of unpaid news reporters, even when that news is just our latest meal or a half-substantiated political opinion.…”

Property, Licenses and Labor when MemoryInstitutions Converge with Informational Capitalism

“…Bonde Thylstrup 2018; Dijck, Poell, and de Waal 2018; Valtysson and Holdgaard 2019). This predicament brings us back to Kalantzis-Cope's (2016; argument that the digital economy postulates that a gift for the common good is simultaneously a gift to informational capitalism.…”