Imaginaries of democratization and the value of open environmental data: Analysis of Microsoft's planetary computer

Abstract

The proliferation of environmentally oriented programs within the tech industry, and the industry's coinciding efforts toward data and technology democratization, generate concerns about the status of environmental data within digital economy. While the accumulation of digital personal data has been a cornerstone of domination of the data analytics industry, many believe environmental data to be a source of “untapped potential.” The potential of environmental data, the argument goes, would benefit equally the digital economy, environmental sciences, and academic data and artificial intelligence experts. This article analyzes the proliferation of the rhetoric about open environmental data by focusing on Microsoft's Planetary Computer cloud computing program and computer vision experts who curate and use biodiversity data stored on Microsoft's servers. Through an analytical framework of sociotechnical imaginaries, the article draws connections between visions of future for environmental knowledge production and governance promoted by Microsoft and the work of computer vision experts intending to benefit from the potential of environmental data as machine learning training sets while at the same time helping environmental sciences. Although environmental data on the Planetary Computer is democratized, it nonetheless becomes a valued asset to data economy, but often with unintended consequences, such as enabling citizen science biodiversity data to be used by state surveillance apparatus. The article challenges the view that data's democratization is unproblematically serving environmental sciences by examining the consequences of imaginaries of democratization emerging from the data industry leaders and processes of nonmonetary valuation of environmental data by experts who curate these datasets.