Counter-Archiving: Combating Data Colonialism

We live in an era of data colonialism in which tech giants appropriate data as territory and act as self-appointed archons in the recording of history. To combat this, we should learn from post-colonial theory and counter-archiving as resistance, says sociologist Dr Anat Ben-David.

The Internet never forgets: this may be the biggest myth keeping and preventing access to information that might be of the digital age. The reality is that the Web and everything that lives on it is extremely ephemeral. In 2015, Myspace for instance lost 50 million songs during a server migration of data, and the average website disappears after just 18 months. Humanity still hasn’t found a better way to preserve information than to carve it into stone. “The Internet is suicidal,” says Dr Anat Ben-David, political sociologist at the Open University of Israel, where she researches the geopolitics of the Internet. She opens our conversation by stating:

“We have a preservation problem. World heritage organisation UNESCO predicts that future generations will know more about what life was like at the beginning of the 20th century than they will know about the early 21st century. We live in a Digital Dark Age, which is like the Middle Ages in terms of how little documentation we leave for the future about what went on in this period.”

According to her, the issue is not just the ephemeral nature of the Web, but the fact that digital data is increasingly owned by a few large platforms. In describing this problem to me, she references the term data colonialism, coined by Nick Couldry, which suggests that the era of dataism in which we live is not just a new phase of capitalism, but a new phase of colonialism:

“What I found intriguing in the notion of data colonialism is the connection it makes between data, space and knowledge. It is the idea that the way tech giants today appropriate data and use it to control populations strongly resembles the way in which colonial powers in the past appropriated natural resources such as land, human beings and mines. It makes sense to think of data as space and as a geographical concept of territory that is occupied and controlled by certain actors enacting epistemic power upon people living in a piece of land. This analogy allows us to see that the social media behave like colonial powers in the way they confiscate land and appropriate more and more data territory by buying more and more infrastructure — like Facebook buying WhatsApp and Instagram. We can see that as an act of colonialization; appropriating more and more infrastructure and opportunities to collect data on users. This is one way of looking at it. Another is to look at tech giants as colonial agents not just in their desire to acquire data, but also in how they mediate epistemic processes.”

One example you give in your research is that of Facebook, which you describe as a ‘self-appointed archon’. What do you mean by that, and what does archival theory add to the conversation?

“Derrida and Azouley both traced the origins of the archive and investigated the role of the archon as the guardian of public records. Derrida traced back the connection between knowledge and space to the archon as the magistrate; as someone who keeps records at his private household. So the household of the archon was actually the physical place where public documents were kept, and they only received their lawful status as public records once they entered the archive. Critiquing Derrida, Azouley ties epistemic power not only to space but also to time, showing that it was not only the space of the archive that defined the authority of the archon; it was also the role of the archon to prevent access by those who wished to enter the archive while records were still sensitive. So according to Azouley, the archon has this role of gatekeeping and preventing access to information that might be of political relevance in real time. We think of archives as places where we can access knowledge, but in fact, archives act as gatekeepers that restrict the publics’ access to records until they are no longer sensitive. Similarly, we can look at Facebook as an archon both in terms of being a space of knowledge, and as the gatekeeper that determines what can be learned now, later, or never. Once you post something on Facebook, they own it. It is no longer public. They save data that encapsulates communicative acts that have thus far been considered public. Political communications. Discussions of news. Movements like Black Lives Matter or collective experiences like the COVID pandemic. Any form of public communication that had previously been considered public. Facebook makes it proprietary, and then decides whether it benevolently wishes to give the public access to it.”

So if we compare tech giants to colonialist powers, who loses in their data exploitation?

“Well, it might be superficial to say, but democracy loses. Because we lose the ability to argue about facts and to fact-check. We lose the ability to have informed discussions about the origin of ideas and opinions and knowledge. We see this now with the COVID pandemic. Numbers are shared online every day, but we have no means of tracing them back to their logic or origin in the public debate. We have no means of debating who is circulating them and why. If we can only see the effects of communicative actions but cannot identify or map the origins of those acts, then we cannot have a proper debate about it. We have difficulty debating truths, and so the very foundation of democracy is deteriorating. My critique of the concentration of power in these platforms is that in the long-term perspective this involves the risk of the total colonisation of public knowledge by commercial platforms. If we are already incapable of discussing facts, then how will we be able to look back on this period in the future and understand what happened, culturally, politically and socially? We simply can’t, if we only have the data that social media platforms decide to give us access to. That is something we learn from post-colonial theory: The gaze of the colonial eye was the one that determined what archives would look like, and which parts of history would be kept for the future.”

The post-colonial critique has also been that entire populations from the African continent lost their ability to know their own history, because the colonial powers deliberately or non-deliberately did not care to keep records of African culture. Now, several hundred years later, we are realising what this has meant — and continues to mean — for African identities. A key learning seems to be that knowing your past is key to being able to shape your future. With that in mind, should we be afraid that something similar is happening in today’s data colonialism?

“Digital traces are only preserved when someone has an interest in persevering them. So we must ask: What information do social media platforms have an interest in archiving? It seems unlikely that their commercial interests would match what is generally in the public interest. That’s why we have to ask: Who are the archival institutions of today? Who decides what parts of history-in-the-making will be kept for posterity? You have the traditional knowledge brokers and knowledge institutions such as museums, archives and libraries, and they come with all the traditional problems of colonialization and national interests, and all the questions that we already know how to critique. But now we also have new actors: the commercial platforms that are proprietarily appropriating data about every digital aspect of our communicative, cultural, social and political activities that we would normally consider public domain. So the important struggle lies in figuring out who owns the records of today and can narrate the history of tomorrow. One way, I propose, to unlock that conversation is through counter-archiving as activism and resistance to data colonialism.”

What do you see as counter-archiving, and what does it offer to this struggle?

“The principle of counter-archiving is to engage in alternative modes of knowledge production that re-open the discussion about what is public knowledge. It is provocation. Resistance. The idea is to tease out what we actually don’t know, by building alternative archives and showing what we could have known differently at the time, to invoke public debate about what it is that we would like to know. What we ought to know, to be a viable society. It is not just about collecting and preserving data from social media platforms. If we simply do that, we only capture, but we don’t provoke the logic of social media. You reproduce its epistemic hegemony, in a sense. A counter-archive would for instance be to document how the ministries of health in various countries around the world manipulate numbers on the COVID issue. Or something similar. Then you shift the gaze from those who are normally being constructed as data subjects and turn it onto those who use data for various power purposes, to reveal the epistemic power enacted upon the world by these tech giants. And this is important: Counter-archiving is not about documenting everything. Instead, it is a small-scale boutique-style ambition of un- covering what it is that we actually cannot know, as long as knowledge is largely produced and determined by these few large platforms. It is about recording something in a way that shows a different point of view on an event or issue than what powerful knowledge brokers like social media platforms allow us to know, revealing how that might affect what we will be able to know in the future.”

Two examples of counter-archives produced by Ben-David herself are Polibook, a public archive of the Israeli parliament on Facebook in the years 2015 to 2019, and Meturgatim, a crowdsourced archive of screenshots of political ads collected during the two rounds of the Israeli election in 2019. Another archival experiment can be found in the Memory of Mankind project by Martin Kunze, who has built a time capsule of information for the future, stored on ceramic tiles and buried deep in old salt mines in Austria. The time capsule is a co-created archive, inviting anyone to suggest a text that they wish to present future generations with 5,000 years from now, to enlighten them on the culture and politics of knowledge production in the 21st century. Curious, I ask Ben-David what she thinks of that:

“What matters is making epistemic alternatives possible and raising questions about how differentiated access to data determines what knowledge can be produced. My hope is that we can engage researchers more to take an active stance in the battle of defining what is public knowledge. To decentralise the epistemic power of the archon, which is now concentrated in a few tech giants, and instead, have more scholars thinking about preserving and providing access to multi-faceted data on events and issues so that we can have nuanced debates about it. Researchers must realise that our role is not just to obtain data, analyse it and publish articles about it, but to make that data accessible to others, to preserve it and return that data to the public. With platforms like Facebook closing their APIs and shutting out researchers and journalists, we have to be creative and access data in other ways. Not just creative: we have to be activists. It is the public knocking on the doors of the archive, and the archive not letting us in. But then we try to find a back door. This is the struggle we must engage in to combat data colonialism.”

In this struggle, what other challenges do you see emerging on the horizon that will be key to how we archive public life in the future?

“We are witnessing a displacement of public debate outside of the public realm. It is already nearly impossible to perform universal searches on social media because of personalised algorithms. So there is a breaking apart of universal knowledge into small atoms and bits. This concerns me greatly when looking into the future: How do you record the history of an era, when each of us has our atomic and personalised window into the present? There is no way of narrating a collective history now. Or if there is, it is determined entirely by commercial platforms. This poses a fundamental problem for our future ability to have a collective, coherent sense of history. Coupled with surveillance, what we have is a new formation of power and governance. As the public debate has relocated, first from the social media feed to peer-to-peer, then from peer-to-peer to direct messaging apps, and from there onto to secure channels such as Telegram, it is being pushed into the semi-private digital spaces of tech giants, where it becomes even more difficult for researchers to follow. In essence, we are not only seeing colonisation by tech giants of the concept of public knowledge, but the emergence of a new non-public public. This makes it difficult for researchers and anyone other than the platforms to investigate how and what shapes public opinion.”

Concluding our conversation, I ask Ben-David what she thinks we can expect from the future. To this, she laughs: “If we follow the thesis of surveillance capitalism, then we are already doomed. But I do wish to remain optimistic and believe in the power of decentralisation and that early ethos of the Internet. And recently, we are seeing the beginnings of transformations happening in reaction to the global pandemic and systemic racism. Tectonic shifts are taking place at the moment, so we can only hope that the existence of some kind of bound-together public will somehow prevail, and that counter-archiving as resistance might chart a path to a different future, where tech giants will not hold a colonialist monopoly on archiving public life.”¢

Dr Anat Ben-David is a senior lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Political Science and Communication at The Open University of Israel. She is co-founder of the Open University's Open Media and Information Lab (OMILab).

This story was originally published in Scenario Magazine.