An Oppressive Economy

Category: Social and Cultural Issues

On the one hand, everything we do - our work, our data, or thoughts and emotions - is grist for the analytics engine. As Wattres writes (Watters, 2019), "In her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff calls this 'rendition,' the dispossession of human thoughts, emotions, and experiences by software companies, the reduction of the complexities and richness of human life to data, and the use of this data to build algorithms that shape and predict human behavior."

The products that depend on analytics engines — plagiarism detection, automated essay grading, and writing assistance software — are built using algorithms that are in turn built on students' work. And this work is often taken without consent, or (as the lawsuit affirming TurnItIn's right to use student essays) consent demanded as an educational requirement (Masnick, 2008).

Second, "Scholarship — both the content and the structure — is reduced to data, to a raw material used to produce a product sold back to the very institutions where scholars teach and learn." (Watters, 2019) And in a wider sense, everything is reduced to data, and the value of everything becomes the value of that data. People no longer simply create videos, they are "influencers". Courses are no longer locations for discussion and learning, they produce "outcomes".

Watters argues that teachers and administrators should not uncritically advocate data-driven products, but it is arguable that the wider danger to our culture and society is wider than whether or not this or that technology is good. How does one advocate, or not advocate, an entire economy?

Examples and Articles

Dx and IT Commodification: Beyond PaaS/Fail
Jim Phillips and Jim Williamson, Educause Review, July 30, 2020. "When services can be procured independently, campus concerns about data use policies, accessibility, privacy, technical integrations, budget requirements, etc., can be completely overlooked." Direct Link

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