Toward a Minor Tech:Niederberger5000

Claiming distance. User subjectivity in data driven environments and trans*feminist imaginations of doing otherwise

Abstract

In the last years, critical data studies has brought forward a body of work analysing the ramifications of the developing data driven digital environments that structure large part of our digital practice today. However, the position of the user has been only little developed in this field, especially in regard to questions of subjectivity and agency.

In this paper, I discuss the ways digital infrastructures create user subjectivity on different levels of technology. I start with the observation of a crisis in user subjectivity manifesting in the migratory waves from Twitter to Mastodon end of 2022, that highlights the role of infrastructure for user subjectivity. The return of the server with Mastodon stands for a relational subjectivity that foregrounds connections and communities, rather than the abstract autonomous identity of the user of cloud based services. Through this I examine the broader contemporary neoliberal subjectivity that is deeply shaped by an understanding of identity construction as part of consumer culture. I then contrasts this with the empty subject that is projected through data regimes itself. I argue that this new governmentality of data is radically extending neoliberal subjectivity of disconnectedness. I reclaim this space of distance as field for cultural practice of resistance and alternatives ways of doing technology. Through a small case study of Feminist Servers I discuss artistic and activist practice of articulation of relationality to technology both conceptually, and practically as lived practice.

Tags

subjectivity, data, infrastructure, practice, Feminist Servers, Trans*Feminist Servers, platforms, surveillance, social media, Twitter, Mastodon, feminism

Introduction

Critical Data Studies is a new field in Media Studies, and has developed a substantial body of work about the cultural and political ramification of data driven environments (Boyd and Crawford; Iliadis and Russo). It raised important questions of flaws and bias in data (Eubanks), how data driven systems are enhancing inequality (O’Neil), extend colonial modes of exploitation and thingification (Couldry and Mejias), and install new forms of discrimination (Benjamin). But the user position remains underdeveloped in this field, even though the ever growing body of circulating data is collected from user interaction with digital platforms,

The user is being conceptualised in another emerging field of what I call “user studies”, a body of work in anthropology, especially in regard to sense making processes of algorithms (Siles et al.; Bucher; Rader and Gray; Devendorf and Goodman). These concepts articulate technology not as essentialist independent artefacts, but something that is created through shared praxis, as culture (Seaver). These studies are an important contribution to the understanding of the position users have in the contemporary data driven digital world.

However, through their focus on users as individuals, they often fail to address the political dimensions. User subjectivity is a cultural form – a shared imagination of what technological practice is meant when we talk about users. This imagination is deeply political, because it is not only a bottom up sense-making process as investigated by Users Studies, but subjectivity is exactly the place where the social – including power relations in technology as analysed in Critical Data Studies – are inscribed in the self-understanding of users.

How then is this subjectivity of users structured through their contemporary environment of data driven platforms? How can we think both through subjectivity as a place of being affected, and also a place of claiming agency? And what can we learn from artistic-activist practice about addressing subjectivity and opening space for action, for being user differently?

The Twitter crisis

After Elon Musk bought Twitter at the end of October 2022, people started discussing alternatives. One of the alternatives was Mastodon, a micro-blogging service like Twitter. In contrast to Twitter, Mastodon is not corporate owned. It is a network of connected servers, which are often run by small collectives and non-profit organisations. After the acquisition of Twitter by Musk and during every wave of policy change that followed it, the Mastodon network showed waves of new registrations. During little more than three months, the Mastodon network grew from 4.5 to 9 million users and more significantly, from 3’700 to 17’000 servers¹. To contrast: Twitter has 238 million users², so even with the steady growth of Mastodon’s user count, changing from Twitter to Mastodon still is a movement trough technological scale.

And from the users side, it was often experienced as a crisis in subjectivity:

Screenshot of a Twitter post of a friend of mine, saying that “as long the alternatives (formulated pointedly) are ‘from nerds for nerds’, this discussion is of little use. […].” (my translation)

It is important to understand that is not only a personal crisis. My friend articulating here that he is not a nerd, and thus Mastodon is not for him is not only about him. It also is about the cultural form of the user being different than that of the nerd.

1 User Count Bot for all known Mastodon instances @mastodonusercount@mastodon.social

2 https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/