While it is often claimed that the emerging digital governmentality functions as a new apparatus of surveillance, the aim of this paper is to characterise this regime in relation to Foucault’s disc...

In this article, we explore how digital marketers think about marketing in the age of Big Data surveillance, automatic computational analyses, and algorithmic shaping of choice contexts. Our starting point is a contradiction at the heart of digital marketing namely that digital marketing brings about unprecedented levels of consumer empowerment and autonomy and total control over and manipulation of consumer decision-making. We argue that this contradiction of digital marketing is resolved via the notion of relevance, which represents what Fredric Jameson (...) calls a symbolic act. The notion of the symbolic act lets us see the centering of relevance as a creative act of digital marketers who undertake to symbolically resolve a contradiction that cannot otherwise be resolved. Specifically, we suggest that relevance allows marketers to believe that in the age of surveillance capitalism, the manipulation of choice contexts and decision-making is the same as consumer empowerment. Put differently, relevance is the moment when marketing manipulation disappears and all that is left is the empowered consumer. To create relevant manipulations that are experienced as empowering by the consumer requires always-on surveillance, massive analyses of consumer data and hyper-targeted responses, in short, a persistent marketing presence. The vision of digital marketing is therefore a fascinating one: marketing disappears at precisely the moment when it extends throughout the life without limit. (shrink)

Purpose Privacy has been understood as about one’s own information, information that is not one’s own is not typically considered with regards to an individual’s privacy. This paper aims to draw attention to this issue for conceptualizing privacy when one’s privacy is breached by others’ information. Design/methodology/approach To illustrate the issue that others' information can breach one's own privacy, this paper uses real-world applications of forensic genealogy and recommender systems to motivate the discussion. Findings In both forensic genealogy and recommender (...) systems, the individual’s privacy is breached by information that is not one’s own. The information that breached one’s privacy, by its nature, is beyond the scope of an individual, which is a phenomenon that has already been captured by emerging discussions about group privacy. This paper further argues that the underlying issue reflected by the examples of forensic genealogy is an extreme case even under the consideration of group privacy. This is because, unlike recommender systems that rely on large amounts of data to make inferences about an individual, forensic genealogy exposes one’s identity by using only one other individual’s information. This paper echoes existing discussions that this peculiar situation where others’ information breaches one’s own privacy reveals the problematic nature of conceptualizing privacy relying only on individualistic assumptions. Moreover, this paper suggests a relational perspective as an alternative for theorizing privacy. Originality/value This situation that others’ information breached one’s own privacy calls for an updated understanding of not only privacy but also the relationship between the person and their information. Privacy scholars need to renew their ethical language and vocabularies to properly understand the issue, which recent privacy conceptualizations are already doing (e.g. group privacy). (shrink)

Research on algorithms tends to focus on American companies and on the effects their algorithms have on Western users, while such algorithms are in fact developed in various geographical locations and used in highly diverse socio-cultural contexts. That is, the spatial trajectories through which algorithms operate and the distances and differences between the people who develop such algorithms and the users their algorithms affect remain overlooked. Moreover, while the power of big data algorithms has been recently compared to colonialism (Couldry (...) and Mejias 2019), the move from the colonial gaze (Yegenoglu 1998) to the algorithmic gaze (Graham 2010) has yet to be fully discussed. This article aims to fill these gaps by exploring the attempts to algorithmically conceptualize “the Other”. Based on the case study of an Israeli user-profiling company and its attempts to sell its services to East Asian corporations, I show that the algorithmic gaze—algorithms’ ability to characterize, conceptualize, and affect users—stems from a complex combination between opposing-but-complimentary perspectives: that it is simultaneously a continuation of the colonial gaze and its complete opposite. The ways in which algorithms are being programmed to see the Other, the ways algorithmic categories are named to depict the Other, and the ways people who design such algorithms describe and understand the Other are all different but deeply interrelated factors in how algorithms “see.” I accordingly argue that the story of algorithms is an intercultural one, and that the power of algorithms perpetually flows back and forth—between East and West, South and North. (shrink)

This paper examines a case where Amazon’s cloud-based AI assistant Alexa accidentally ordered a dollhouse for a 6-year-old girl. In the press, the case was defined as a technical recognition problem. Building on this idea, we argue that the dollhouse case helps us to analyze the limits of current AI applications. By drawing on the writings of Gilles Deleuze and François Laruelle, we argue that these limits are not merely technical but more deeply embedded in the structures where the thinking (...) of AI can potentially happen. We point out that AI research has been compromised by the concepts of what constitutes both ‘artificial’ and by what constitutes ‘intelligence’. First, we use the notion of artificial non-intelligence to explain how different modes of digital capitalism such as voice commerce establish limits for AI. Second, we use the notion of non-artificial intelligence to illustrate the limits of associating AI’s modes of thinking with human thought. (shrink)

In this article, we address the case of self-tracking as a practice in which two meaningful backgrounds play an important role as the spatial dimension of human practices. Using a phenomenological approach, we show how quantification multiplies backgrounds, while at the same time generating data about the user. As a result, we can no longer speak of a unified background of human activity, but of multiple dimensions of this background, which, additionally, is perceived as having no pivotal role in the (...) process, often being hidden, situated beyond human consciousness, or taken for granted. Consequently, the phenomenological experience of the background turns into a hermeneutic practice focused on the interpretation of representations and descriptions. By adopting a phenomenological approach, we show the problems and limitations of quantification of human activities occurring in self-tracking and the theoretical problems associated with the scheme of human-technology relations. (shrink)

In this article, we address the case of self-tracking as a practice in which two meaningful backgrounds (physical world and technological infrastructure) play an important role as the spatial dimension of human practices. Using a (post)phenomenological approach, we show how quantification multiplies backgrounds, while at the same time generating data about the user. As a result, we can no longer speak of a unified background of human activity, but of multiple dimensions of this background, which, additionally, is perceived as having (...) no pivotal role in the process, often being hidden, situated beyond human consciousness, or taken for granted. Consequently, the phenomenological experience of the background turns into a hermeneutic practice focused on the interpretation of representations and descriptions. By adopting a (post)phenomenological approach, we show the problems and limitations of quantification of human activities occurring in self-tracking and the theoretical problems associated with the scheme of human-technology relations. (shrink)