On Separating Data from People: Reflections on Indigenous Digital Exhaust, Transparency, and Constitutive Relationality

ABSTRACT

This essay invites readers to think through the carelessness and care-lessness of data extraction regimes under surveillance capitalism with regard to notions of care produced with and against these systems. It does so by first narrating Joanna Radin’s analysis of how the Akimel O’Odhum came to be separated from their data as “exhaust,” despite the indigenous data sovereignty movement. It then shifts registers to spotlight the kinds of care evident under datafied logics of transparency in organic cotton supply chains in the Global South, contrasting it with the holistic and constitutively relational care articulated by indigenous communities who produce cotton. It concludes by arguing for the ethical and political urgency of enacting practices that center the relation and connectedness between people, place and data.

KEYWORDS:

• Data
• indigeneity
• transparency
• digital exhaust
• constitutive relationality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Despite its presentation as such in this brief introduction, the idea that digital is material should not be reducted to a simplistic binary between physical and virtual. For an estimation of the emissions produced by digital exhaust, refer Widdicks et al. (2022).

2 For a comprehensive discussion and critique of Neel’s work, refer Radin (2017b).

3 Two early examples of the use of the term “digital exhaust” can be found in La Rosa et al. (2009), and in Krough (2009).

4 This is a point implied by the Care Collective (2020) and Pezzulo (2023).

5 For an overview of the work of this collective, refer to Kukutai and Taylor (2016).

6 For an analysis of this framework, refer Robinson et al. (2021).

7 The Care Manifesto.

8 This project was approved by the research ethics office at my university.

9 Andrew Barry (2004) refers to ethical capitalism in governmental terms: as a set of techniques and discursive practices that surface and ultimately comprise the ethical content of capitalist enterprises, rather than a prima facie claim that capitalism itself is more or less “ethical”.

10 As my colleague Jutta Haider observed in conversation, such benevolence is not only a manifestation of global white pastoral power, it undermines and prevents other forms of self-organization, including unionization.

11 My colleague Sharmila Rudrappa has written about this evocatively in her discussion about the relationship between garment work and surrogate motherhood in India.

12 Robin Wall Kimmerer’s influential book Braiding Sweetgrass vividly conceptualizes and illustrates this deep relationality.

13 The Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation for example calculated that server power consumtion in the US has increased 266% since 2017 and now takes up about 3% of global electricity consumption.

14 This stance is in keeping with scholarly work on shifting peripheries in the global north-south dialectic that suggests that one can exist within the other.

15 Refer Ramasubramanian and Dutta (2023) for a framework for data justice which implicitly inshrines this principle.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Mistra, the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research's Environmental Communication program.