Cycling in the Time of the Biodigital: Small Acts Toward a Conscious Uncoupling From Non-Regenerative Digitized Economies

• In Event: Bio-Informational Philosophy and Postdigital Knowledge Ecologies

Abstract

This paper considers data creation and use within the context of a cycling group. It investigates how interaction with digital devices is ubiquitous in human activity and has become mundane. This makes the cyclist a member of the biodigital milieu where human activity and experience is collected, aggregated, shared and sold, classified as behaviours and purposed for a variety of uses that support both the social - communal and digital economy.
The paper uses Actor Network Theory to map the existing terrain of an emergent biodigital economy. Actor Network Theory is about how combine human and non-human actors combine to produce societal effects. Looking at a particular social assembly (the cycling group) and the variety of heterogenous actors that constitute it should reveal both analogue and digital actors, bio varieties of these and the sociotechnical. It will argue that the biodigital age and an emergent bioeconomy are already manifest but conversely still integrated with non-sustainable industries. To align fully with a bioeconomic future requires the development of individual digital and data consciousness in order to realise the consequences of personal interactions with supply chains and decouple from resource exploitation and environmental impacts.
The notion of data trespass is also important here which can be aligned with the concept of physical trespass. Trespass is often equated with an unauthorised use of private land as opposed to the use of common goods such as water, air, land etc., where resources, which should not be owned privately, are accessible to all members of society. A part of trespass law is also trespass against the person which alongside physical acts is also used to defend rights and civil liberties. The question in this context is about the rendering of personal activity as data which is then used for other purposes and whether the data subjects are fully aware of this use and have given their permission. Another aspect is the increasing enclosure of the digital commons by technology companies for their own purposes. Zuboff (2019) equates this with the negation of rights by the commodification of information which is occurring apace within the digital economy often by the ubiquitous use of ‘click to accept’ strategies which obscure the consequences of such actions.
The paper calls for small acts of resistance that could reconfigure the biodigital connections that are now part of the everyday by realising how data flows can influence production and redress the acts of data trespass against the person that are commonplace. Rather like the political cycling groups of the industrial age, the paper calls for change and an adopting, not of political class consciousness but of data consciousness, rights, and ownership.


References
Zuboff, S. (2019). ‘We Make Them Dance’: Surveillance Capitalism, the Rise of Instrumentarian Power, and the Threat to Human Rights. In R. F. Jørgensen, R.F., Human rights in the age of platforms (pp. 3-53). Cambridge, MA and London, UK: MIT Press.

Author

• Karl Royle, University of Wolverhampton