Data Power in Action: Urban Data Politics in Times of Crisis

Abstract

While working on this book, one of the editors had to handle the consequences of a cyberattack of his university server by Conti, an infamous Russian group of malevolent hackers. As a consequence, he had no access to all his files for weeks, and some of his personal data were accessible on the darknet. Faculty members were left to speculate why their university was targeted, what the hackers hoped to get out of this, and if a ransom was addressed to the direction of the university. This is one of many instances where our contemporary dependence on data and our related vulnerability becomes very tangible. It shows that data is everywhere, increasingly mediating and shaping all domains of life (work, leisure, kinship, friendship, sexuality).Hacking, the term officially used to describe the above incident, seems inadequate though. This is a form of data theft in which personal data becomes the new currency of international criminal activity. Even as data flows through our handheld devices, communications towers, satellites, undersea cables, and the whole assemblage of infrastructures that make data flows possible, personal data itself provides the accumulatory capacities of capital of our current global condition -a condition that Manuel Castells had labelled as the 'informational capital' in the network age. Personal data, of course, is also subjective -it is marked by the conditions of production of our bodies in digital space. Personal data marks the onset of knowledge about people, spaces, and places, and therefore speaks to the political condition of our current moment. Whether we consider widely mediatized events, such as the role of Cambridge Analytica in