(19) CoC—Ch. 4, 115-133

chapter 4
The Hollowing Out of the Social

how the social world becomes newly knowable when data extraction is a basic mode for generating economic value.
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Data relations generate value in the very same movement in which they redescribe and remap the world, fusing knowledge production and value extraction.

we consider social knowledge forms in the North America and Europe of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Polanyi concluded that “a market economy can only exist in a market society,” which must be created through “highly artificial stimulants administered to the body social.”
	via  a double movement; first, a profound institutional reorganization made 		markets (in particular in labor, land, and finance) into social realities, turning 	“all transactions . . . into money transactions”; second, over time, a 			countermovement of compensatory mechanisms emerged to control market 		relations and make them socially livable.

Market (economic) transformations aren’t enough: social transformations are also required.

The commodity concept must prevail; social must be monetized; data relations and the knowledge they produce are keys.

under data colonialism, building on the previous advances of neoliberal politics, capitalism begins to imagine away any outside to the economy. Its distinctive forms of social knowledge describe a social world that is literally coextensive with economic life.

Social relations become the economic system and the ideology of datafication hides structures

A Brief History of Social Quantification

Prior to quantification, people groups were sorted by family structures or gross measures of wealth and/or poverty, as well as geographic differentiations. Religion played a strong role as well.

Our very notions of modern society are based on turning social relations into numbered entities. New practices of governmental accounting constructed the demographics of populations.

Such counting suggested regularities across people groups. Sciences based on statistics developed and provided additional rationalizations for analyzing people and their places in society.

Is "the norm" a real-world reference, a temporary aberration, or merely a goal?

Outside of abstract or applied science, the collections of data for these activities and viewpoints were accomplished by governments.

Lots of discrimination resulted from governmental data collection. Competing views over the meetings of statistical data became contested "facts." The result is the "invention of the social."

Social Quantification for Data Colonialism

the social conditions for science:

A Continuous Private Capacity
	-it is in the end a commercial business.
	commercializing the data collection removes many of the constraints experienced 	by governments trying to collect data
Opacity, Not Accountability
	-The wizard is behind the curtain; the black box cannot be questioned
	-that “as the citizen becomes more and more legible to the state, the state becomes 	more and more opaque to the citizen.” Put into current terms, corporations 		become more open eight to citizen as citizens become more legible to 			organizations
	-artificial intelligence/machine learning is the end product of this private capacity 	hidden in the dark – – few of any will understand or know about the decision-	making procedures enacted by artificial intelligence.

Prediction, Not Explanation
	Zuboff made this feature clear: prediction and control are the goals. A new social	epistemology arises and begins to shape human ontology.

Collecting everything
	-no samples – – just enumerations.
	-the result is “data behaviourism.”Social knowledge becomes whatever works to 	enable private or public actors to modulate others’ behavior in their own 		interests (not disinterested social knowledge but social capture).

An intimate knowledge	
	-Although quantification is a technology of distance, today’s data relations 		increasingly strive to erase the distance between the social actor’s body and the 	precisely targeted sensor system that serves it (or more accurately, that the body 	serves).
	-The new social knowledge is designed to target “measurable types” among 		individuals but not to reflect, let alone understand, a social world in which groups 	of human subjects live and reflect together.
	-this new social knowledge gives human actors few opportunities to exercise 		choice about the choices offered to them.
Quick personal story here about trying to understand options for content reception – – cable, fiber optics, satellite, and services that are carried over these. In the end, not only are the decisions made extremely difficult by providers – – often by providing too much information rather than too little – – but the outcomes are not as diverse as one would think. In the case of our family we might reduce our costs from $230 to perhaps $180. But then the cost of the hardware that we have to purchase enter the picture let alone the time we put into the conversion and/or/anything that goes wrong that we know how to fix ourselves. The overall savings might come to a lot across decades but won't be much across to year or two.

Playing the data game

	-We are becoming used to being addressed as documentation, as data, as the 		bearers of the selective descriptions that databases require.
	-The authors present an excellent example: why should anyone really care how a 	social media platform ranks them or causes them to "look or seem?" Social 		media platforms are not real and they do not present "really us." And yet, 		especially youth are driven to manage their appearances and brand in these 		environments. One would like to think that this is just driven by youthful naïveté; 	unfortunately adults do it too.

I'm always struck by how really dumb people look when they see themselves on television and start to act out. You would think after 60 years of television we would be over it by now. Social media replicates these environments for many people.

Caching the social

	-Supposedly, the new social world offers many possibilities of agency when in fact 	it closes them down

Everywhere a data cache
	-The goal is to cache the social at every available opportunity and then store the cached fragments for use in later targeted messages, offers, or ads.