In “The Materiality of Data as Property”, Jannice Käll examines how in modern culture personal data is being conceived as objects separate from people – similar to how some consider the mind and the body to separate – and a resource that is readily available to be extracted. This process is closely related to how data becomes a commodity, e.g. through intellectual property law, that can be bought and sold.

Käll writes that the aim of her article is “to formulate a more radical starting point than other recent focuses on privacy or regulations of “personal data.” This point is to treat data as something that does not even need to have its own materiality.”

For this purpose, she uses oil as a comparison. “Just like oil, data is perceived of as something that is merely out there to be extracted for the human good, producing new materialities of value for society. In critical hindsight, we know that oil has carried both colonialist and destructive effects on life. In the same way, data as an object may further the end of what we consider as human subjectivity by producing a posthuman life-form as persons and things become increasingly mixed together.”

Read “The Materiality of Data as Property” on harvardilj.org.

Jannice Käll will elaborate on this subject in a monograph, due for publication in 2021, with the working title “Posthuman Property and Law- Personhood in the Digitally Mediated Economy”. Learn more about Jannice Käll’s research on her personal page.