engleski

Big Data, Control & Dominance: Towards a Marcusean Approach to Surveillance

Foucault (1984) famously stated that the economic system that promotes the accumulation of capital and the system of power that ordains the accumulation of men are inseparable phenomena since the seventeenth century on. Yet capitalist development was never one of Foucault's main concerns. Today we find ourselves looking at these processes as inseparable from the perspective of analytically-driven organisations in digital capitalism. Streamlining the labour process, increasing labour productivity, reducing costs, increasing surplus value and profit rates are parallel strategies of workplace surveillance and the accumulation of capital. Digitalized workspaces involve the use of platforms and algorithms ; data is used for management decisions ; performance and reputation of the workers is continuously monitored and carried out by software (Moore, 2018). More broadly, the transformation of capitalism includes the increasing use of platforms and data in what some have called platform capitalism (Srnicek, 2017). Surplus value accumulation within the business strategies of major global companies is enabled by algorithms co-constructed by computer-scientists, engineers, internet users and human trainers (Bilić 2018). Enormous economic gains fuel the digital discourse (Fisher, 2010) and also produce many side-effects and concerns for socially responsible and democratically governed development (Fenton and Freedman, 2017). The concept of technological rationality developed by Marcuse (1941) can help us understand such broader processes of organisational control and dominance. Yet, technological, data driven control is fragile and porous. Automated mechanisms carry with them the biases of their makers and enable the multiplication of socially unintended consequences. Within this presentation, I will evoke some of the theoretical ideas developed by Marcuse and also provide some empirical examples of worker surveillance in analytically driven organisations.

Big data, surveillance, advertising, search engines

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