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Digital alienation as the foundation of online privacy concerns
Dainow B. ACM SIGCAS Computers and Society45 (3):109-117,2015.Type:Article
Date Reviewed: Aug 1 2016

The issue of digital alienation, or alienation online, is discussed in this paper, specifically in terms of the Marxist concept of alienation, historically based on the realm of the factory, where labor activity is “coerced into alienated forms in order to produce products estranged from the producer.” Dainow wisely recognizes the problematic analogy between the factory and the digital context, which supposes the same structures and mechanisms within both contexts. If keeping in line with this analogy, digital alienation should have to be framed through the necessary conditions demanded by the traditional Marxist approach to alienation: coercion, labor, and estrangement from the product. The difficulties with the analogy are clearly pointed out: (1) people seem to freely (instead of being coerced) engage in the digital context; (2) it seems inadequate to consider as labor the people’s unpaid production of content in social networks; and (3) it is difficult to understand how people could be estranged from the authorial expressions of themselves. Dainow concludes that “the features of digital alienation are so different from traditional alienation that a new account is necessary.”

His commendable attempt for a new account starts by proposing that nothing in Marx’s conceptualization “locks alienation to labour except as a historically contingent feature of nineteenth century capitalism.” In a clever move, Dainow proposes to shift the focus on digital alienation from labor to property relations regarding data. The digital context is then turned into the domain of the “surveillance economy” where digital profiles, the digital representations of individuals, are the central commodities. The existence of a commodity characterizes a production process whose product, the data, does not belong to its producer, thus configuring alienation in Dainow’s new account through a reinterpreted Marxian concept of alienation.

Two interesting and complementary concepts become central to Dainow’s account: the digital persona, “the body of digital material created by an individual through acts of online communication,” and the data shadow, “the information generated by someone as a side effect of their use of digital technology.” Hence, alienation is characterized as the expropriation of data shadows by a network of commercial surveillance agencies through tracking technologies permeating digital services, and coercion appears as the lack of choice to avoid surveillance. The Marxist concept of alienation is then rescued to the new account.

The last concept, a sociotechnical one, invoked by Dainow is that of affordance “to explain the interaction between people and the technical artefacts” and the competition between the user and the owners of the technology for “domination of the affordances dictating how that technology is understood and used.” In Dainow’s new account, the user model for the Web 2.0 services, as “private, unmediated, and natural” services, clashes with the surveillance model based on technologies designed for data gathering and commodification.

But Dainow’s conclusions unfortunately embrace an extremely problematic technopolitical determinism: “in using affordances tuned to atomizing, quantifying, and commodifying the depiction of people, social media systems like Facebook alienate the digital persona.” This diagnostic does not fit with what happens for example in Brazil, where much of the political resistance and call for mobilization against what has been considered a parliamentary right-wing coup (since 2016) flows through Facebook, especially information that the dominant conservative media hides from the public. Not to mention the 2013 vast popular mobilization in Brazil for political protests, indeed a mobilization that took place in many other countries, thus contesting Dainow’s reductionist depiction of a “manipulated content environment that reinforces and promotes ongoing commodification, and therefore embeds the alienated digital persona with an alienated social environment.”

To conclude, Dainow proposes two solutions. The first is based on software developed to resist the oppressive affordances of surveillance technologies, which means that, in disagreement with his picture of the almost invincible “restricted affordances within expressive Web 2.0 technologies which promote a commodity fetishism of personal characteristics and interpersonal relationships,” there is room for nonalienated users who, through their participation in social and political movements engaged in fighting these restricted affordances, produce effective options of lines of flight from the surveilled cyberspace.

The second solution is totally problematic, as it demands a significant change in cyberspace architecture, which could indeed change the whole picture concerning alienation, but which in Dainow’s proposal merely allows the user to manage his/her commodification more profitably. In a move toward self-commodification, and therefore to self-alienation, Dainow believes that “a system of micropayments for access to personal data would create a data economy enabling individuals to earn money through the gathering and storing of their own data.” Defying the hegemony of the surveillance economy surely calls for a strong engagement of collective social and political resistance in pressing for architectural and regulatory changes concerning cyberspace, but Dainow seems to concede the leading role to individuals that would “negotiate the terms of the relationship they have with their digital service providers.”

In sum, if the paper begins with a richly articulated presentation of digital alienation issues, it surprisingly ends with a debilitated framing for the possibilities of surpassing their oppression.

Reviewer:  Henrique Cukierman Review #: CR144654 (1612-0941)
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