Introduction to Part IV

Abstract

Data is discard: in an uneven world of cloudsourced devices, we are rendered data factories, spilling our information in real time to anyone who might be listening. Everything we tweet, “like,” or Google has become a marketized product to be salvaged, mined, and rendered capital. Never before has the volume and velocity of data been so available and so open to manipulation. Some have argued that data has replaced oil as the world’s most valuable commodity (The Economist 2017): a resource that can pollute politics and link power and big business in unforeseen ways. While it might be wrong to imagine “a prelapsarian past in which truth legitimately preceded and guided politics” (Jasanoff and Simmet 2017, 753), today, the rise of “big data” has opened up new avenues for “posttruth” to thrive, with potential environmental consequences. The success of populist movements such as Trump and Brexit, as well as political campaigns in Kenya and Nigeria, have all been linked to the data analytics of political consulting firms such as Cambridge Analytica (Persily 2017); future elections, it seems, may be won and lost by the crunch of code. If data is the new oil, when it comes to actual pollution, data also plays a vital role. The pollution data produced by multinational companies and environmental regulators is often at odds with the lived experience of frontline communities. In response, environmental justice activists have often attempted to record their own data about toxic hazards using a gamut of citizen science techniques. This is especially important considering that the burden of proof of