By now we’ve probably all heard in endless detail about the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook story (depending on where you get your news, I guess). At this point it’s seems unclear to me this particular story is as important as its been made out to be, or if this is just another case of anything Donald Trump-related getting over reported because it’s good for ratings. In a lot of ways this story feels like another way to rationalize Trump’s upset victory in the 2016 election, despite the significance of this being basically unquantifiable. Some, for instance, have made good points about the actual effectiveness of CA’s marketing:
There are also plenty of parallels that have been drawn between the Trump campaign’s social media strategy and Barack Obama’s in during the previous two elections. But obviously the 2016 election has been more controversial than 2008 or 2012 and any potential wrongdoing or foreign interference by Trump’s campaign, CA, or anyone else makes this story exciting, even if it’s significance is not necessarily in proportion to how much it’s been reported on. It still seems unclear if any laws were broken, either in the US, UK, or elsewhere, although it feels safe to assume that this probably wasn’t the most illegal or even most questionable thing Donald Trump has done in recent memory, so hopefully whatever lessons we can take from this story don’t begin and end there.
What is more interesting to me is that I sort of assumed the things CA did were more common than they are. I don’t mean that in a “so what?” sort of way, but more that Facebook has always been in the business of harvesting data and selling it to advertisers, so the fact that someone bent the rules, got really good at pulling personal information off the site, and sold it to a political campaign seems like the next logical step. What I’m saying is that I might be kinda paranoid and (rightfully!) not trusting of Silicon Valley money.
Speaking of which… I’ve been re-reading Nick Srnicek’s 2017 book, Platform Capitalism, over the last couple of days and I’ve found his reframing of the role users play on digital platforms interesting in relation to the readings we did for this week.
Yet even limiting our attention to user-created data, it is right to call this activity labour? Within a Marxist framework, labour has a very particular meaning: it is an activity that generates a surplus value within a context of markets for labour and a production process oriented towards exchange… In examining the activities of users online, it is hard to make the case that what they do is labour, properly speaking. Beyond the intuitive hesitation to think that messaging friends is labour, any idea of socially necessary labour time – the implicit standard against which production processes are set – is lacking…
Rather than exploiting free labour, the position taken here is that advertising platforms appropriate data as a raw material. The activities of users and institutions, if they are recorded and transformed into data, become a raw material that can be refined and used in a variety of ways by platforms. With advertising platforms in particular, revenue is generated through the extraction of data from users’ activities online, from the analysis of those data, and from the auctioning of ad space to advertisers.” Platform Capitalism, 55-57
On a site like Facebook, then, users are neither the content producers, nor the audience for whom the content is produced, but instead generate the information which will become data in the hands of companies like Cambridge Analytica, or any of their more legitimate peers. Unlike the user experiences (UX) Patricia Sullivan describes in her chapter “Beckon, Encounter, Experience: The Danger of Control and the Promise of Encounters in the Study of User Experience”, we are not the researchers developing better environments nor the subjects of the experiments. On Facebook, its becoming increasingly clear, that the average user is not who the content of the site is created for and, despite being the most important part of the site, no individual is irreplaceable, or even all that important. As Srnicek explains in his book and in an abbreviated way in The Guardian, individuals can delete their accounts or move to other sites, but as long as one company maintains “critical mass” they will maintain dominate of their respective corner of the internet:
What Srnicek gets at in his writings and what hopefully follows from the Cambridge Analytica stories is not that our contemporary desire to “archive the moment” as William C. Kurlinkus describes Facebook primary use, is bad or good in it of itself, but that our archives are being mobilized for profit because users are increasingly losing the ability to define the terms of their experience.