On Oct. 26, 2013, demonstrators rallied near the US Capitol in Washington to protest against mass surveillance undertaken by the National Security Agency.

 

Corporations and governments were engaged in data collection long before the term “big data” emerged. An era of big data is taking shape as the capacity to produce and store data grows exponentially. In technical terms, it involves collecting, analyzing, connecting and comparing massive data sets as well as maximizing calculating power and accuracy. In terms of real-life applications, big data technologies can be used to detect the underlying patterns of economic, social, technological and legal development to inform critical decisions.

It is widely believed that big data technologies will give rise to advanced intelligence and knowledge as well as a higher level of objectivity and accuracy. Political decisions, marketing and everyday life—it seems that everything will be inevitably be affected by big data innovation. Or will it?

 

‘Dataveillance,’ profiling
On the one hand, big data is seen as a panacea for many types of social dysfunctions. But on the other, it has been called a threat to privacy and civil liberties, an ill omen of government and corporate hegemony.

What the intelligentsia and the public worry about the most is the fact that big data technologies can be used for political surveillance. Such anxiety was fueled by George Orwell’s (1903-1950) masterpiece 1984 and Michel Foucault’s (1926-1984) notion of Panopticism. Yet, the two-way television portrayed in 1984 was already behind the times, as economist Roger Clarke pointed out, given the ubiquity of personal and mass “dataveillance,” which refers to the systematic surveillance of an individual’s data trail.
 

Sociologist David Lyon clarified that the mechanism of contemporary surveillance has resulted in new forms of exclusion instead of control through exclusion, which played a distinctive role in Foucault’s understanding of the Benthamite Panopticon. Even worse, dataveillance may collapse the foundations of the social contract. “Even the thin understanding of cooperation required for a minimalist social contract can be undermined in a monopolistic circumstance,” said philosopher Nayef Al-Rodhan.
 

From the vantage point of the political economy of communications, information and big data technologies can be construed as a new form of power embedded in neo-capitalism. In his book How to Think about Information, communication scholar Dan Schiller made it clear that the commodification of information is a prerequisite for the expansion of capital on a global scale. In this light, technology is never neutral. To be more specific, any technology is an independent power structure in its own right. Human beings are shaped by the technologies they use. Out of the interactions among big data technologies, political subjects and power, a new type of politics comes into being.

In the modern world, governance depends heavily on government-directed surveys. Demographic information and public opinion data form the foundation of policymaking. Old-fashioned government surveys were usually periodical and procedural in nature, and their objective was to obtain descriptive statistics. In the big data era, government-directed information collection has been made routine, given that it can be done anywhere at any time.
 

The latent motive of the new undertaking is to identify correlations to determine the probability of certain mass behaviors. Moreover, big data technologies make social categorization possible, which Lyon argues may breed discrimination and exclusion. Beneath the guise of “accuracy” and “objectivity,” big data may feed and enforce political preference and ideology.

 

Monopoly
Business consultant Bernard Marr noted the consolidation of the corporate and government monopoly on data resources. Big Internet companies are able to gather a vast quantity of information on Internet users through background processing. Apparently, corporations are the major stakeholders in the data science revolution, considering that an overwhelming amount of data science research focuses on marketing.

In terms of information gathering, governments are even more powerful than Internet giants. Sociologist Anthony Giddens said it is fundamentally important to note that all countries can be characterized as information societies since state power presupposes the reproduction of reflexive monitoring, which involves the systematic collection, storage and control of information. Apparently, big data technologies are more than instruments of state governance. They are a means by which the government infiltrates individual and social life.

 

End of public politics
Homo politicus expresses himself or herself in public space. This is the defining feature of public politics. In 18th-century Europe, salons and coffee houses were the major venues for public politics. Since the late 19th century, the locus of public discussion was shifted to the mass media. In the past few years, intellectual debate has revolved around whether the Internet can be defined as public space. In light of the ongoing data revolution, the concept of “public politics” appears to be increasingly irrelevant, considering all the covert data collection and calculation undertaken by governments behind the scenes.

Needless to say, public politics is about “the public,” which is the gravitational center of Western political thought. Controversies concerning the nature of “the public” are at the heart of Western political and intellectual debates. While Walter Lippmann desacralized “the public,” John Dewey stood firm in its defense. To Jürgen Habermas, it is pivotal to democracy for “the public” to be capable of rational communicative actions. But, as for the big data era, in which the center of democracy will be inevitably reduced into a series of numerical symbols, public dialogue may be rendered trivial.
 

Evidently, big data technologies will neutralize public space and meanwhile allow for the flourishing of backroom deals. Communicative and deliberative politics will be replaced by unidirectional control. Homo politicus will be enslaved by data of all sorts, and a technocracy will take shape.

 

Measures
Undeniably, big data technologies can nurture political development since accurate information can streamline the consultative process. To achieve such an end, more legislation and policies must be put into effect. Data collection and utilization must be regulated while stakeholders, such as governments and corporations, must comply with public morality, and the state and corporate monopoly must be ended. The impetus for change lies in the power of democracy.

 

Yuan Guangfeng is an assistant research fellow from the School of Journalism and Communication at Nanjing University.