Thursday, 26 October, 5pm UKT / 6pm CET

James Steinhoff is an Assistant Professor / Lecturer and Ad Astra Fellow in the School of Information and Communication Studies at the University College Dublin. His research focuses on the political economy of algorithmic technologies, data and digital labour, and draws on resources from media studies, science and technology studies and labour studies.

Discussants:

Phoebe Moore, Professor of Management and the Futures of Work at the University of Essex Business School

Justin Joque, Visualisation Librarian and Adjunct Lecturer at the Digital Studies Institute, University of Michigan

The article is available here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14614448221099217

Abstract

Surveillance of human subjects is how data-intensive companies obtain much of their data, yet surveillance increasingly meets with social and regulatory resistance. Data-intensive companies are thus seeking other ways to meet their data needs. This article explores one of these: the creation of synthetic data, or data produced artificially as an alternative to real-world data. I show that capital is already heavily invested in synthetic data. I argue that its appeal goes beyond circumventing surveillance to accord with a structural tendency within capitalism toward the autonomization of the circuit of capital. By severing data from human subjectivity, synthetic data contributes to the automation of the production of automation technologies like machine learning. A shift from surveillance to synthesis, I argue, has epistemological, ontological, and political economic consequences for a society increasingly structured around data-intensive capital.