The subjects and regions of uneven datafication

Abstract

This commentary discusses Azedeh Akbari's “Uneven Datafication,” arguing that the article makes an important contribution to the study of data-centric technologies from the perspective of the Majority World. It suggests that in drawing on earlier literatures on uneven development, Akbari takes data seriously as both infrastructure and commodity of technological capitalisms. Data is not only extracted from global populations, but its creation and valuation as a commodity is dependent on longer colonial stories of expropriation and epistemic violence. Akbari develops methods by which data as a commodity can be tracked through moments of its valuation and revaluation and provides a lens through which to understand data as productive of wealth at many points and through the operations of U.S.-based multinationals. The essay further extends this insight by locating various kinds of subjectivity within this larger story of uneven datafication, from those that may emerge in opposition to unevenness to those that might be enrolled in its logics. It argues that locating variability within unevenness provides a fuller picture of datafication and its oppositions that is at the same time, empirically attuned to differences across the spaces and times of datafication.