Data Serfdom in the Modern Age

Data Serfdom in the Modern Age:
Creating a Neo-Feudal Order
Jeremy Antley -- peasantmuse.com
@jsantley #b2

i.r. Shipmaster Lana
✦ Jeremy King, “The Nationalization of East
“
Central Europe: Ethnicism, Ethnicity, and
Beyond”
✦ 1879 Statue, built in Budejovice

(slavic/germanic language border)
✦ 1917 became Czech symbol, 1942 Nazi

symbol, taken down by Communists and
returned in 1989

✦How did so many interpretations of one
man's life come to the fore so often?

✦ Interpretation of the Data Self.
(actually it’s Pushkin)
@jsantley #b2

And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains.

- Percy Byssey Shelley, 1818
- Percy Byssey Shelley, 1818 Data Self.
Depiction of Ancient
Note the lack of data about Ozy.

@jsantley #b2

The Documentary Drive and the
creation of the modern Data Self

- Hinged on getting people to accept asynchronicity
of Textual Dualism
- Extension of the rational, enlightenment quest to know reality
- Extension of the rational, enlightenment quest to know reality @jsantley #b2

No longer just a data self issue, but
also a data serf issue.
@jsantley #b2

Dual Aspects of Data Serfdom,
or why we toil for the Data Lords

First Aspect: Promise of becoming your own Data Lord.
[Most appealing]

Second Aspect: Promise of revealing to yourself a
reality you didn’t know existed. Verisimilitude is
revealed through the data self. [Most sustaining]

@jsantley #b2

“But while we wait for a standard format, an open API, or really
any semblance of symbiosis in this industry, I think it’s important
to remember that my data is my data. It doesn’t belong to a
bracelet, or an app, or a company. While we wait for these
services to evolve, we shouldn’t have to wait to access the
data that’s tracked about our bodies.” (emphasis mine)

- Paul Miller, Body Request: give me back my Fitness Data

@jsantley #b2

"Stacks. In 2012 it made less and less sense to talk
about "the Internet," "the PC business,"
"telephones," "Silicon Valley," or "the media," and
much more sense to just study Google, Apple,
Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft. These big five
American vertically organized silos are re-making
the world in their image."
- Bruce Sterling
"Your technology will work perfectly within the silo
and with an individual stacks's (temporary) allies.
But it will be perfectly broken at the interfaces
between itself and its competitors."
- Alexis Madrigal

@jsantley #b2

QuickTime™ and a
decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

@jsantley #b2

Taken from actualfacebookgraphsearches.tumblr.com

This shift, from a book of faces to an indexed catalogue of varying
living and non-living objects, means Facebook can update me on
things as well as people...It’s a total deconstruction of my
augmented life.

- David Banks, First Impressions of Graph Search

@jsantley #b2

Why does the data self, much less
data serfdom, remain so appealing?
@jsantley #b2

Social media systematically efface the
distinctions between forms of attention,
positing it as uniformly positive and thus
universally desirable. They do a poor job of
allowing us to calibrate our exposure, which
is always theoretically infinite despite
whatever temporary barrier privacy settings
erect. Their entire logic militates against it.

That sort of attention constitutes us as a
particular kind of sharing subject, confirming
that we are “being ourselves” when we
produce data, validating the primacy of
documents over immediate lived
experience. (emphasis mine)

- Rob Horning, Hi Haters!

@jsantley #b2

First Aspect: Promise of becoming your own Data Lord. --->
This is augmented. But will acceptance ameliorate the crisis
encountered below?
Second Aspect: Promise of revealing to yourself a reality you
didn’t know existed. ---> This is in crisis. Asynchronicity is high.
People can detect signs of ‘Ossified Self’.
@jsantley #b2

First Aspect: Promise of becoming your own Data Lord. --->
This is mostly removed. Exists now as a form of favoritism, a
currency of ephemeral nostalgia. Bondage remains.
Second Aspect: Promise of revealing to yourself a reality
you didn’t know existed. ---> This is mostly removed. Lived
Self freed from constraints of Data Self. Collection
continues.
@jsantley #b2

Captured Snaps from snapchatsfrommymom.tumblr.com
@jsantley #b2

Data Serfdom in the Modern Age

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