Clicks and particulates: Value, alienation, and attunement as unifying themes in big data studies

Critiques of data colonialism and surveillance capitalism focus on data collected from online behavior. We propose that analytical concepts from these critiques—namely, regimes of value and patterns of alienation and attunement—could be applied more widely to better understand the threats that datafication poses to equity and democracy in the social and environmental realms. Regimes of value, which include the institutions and technologies that make data meaningful and render them selectively available for appropriation, are relevant both to for-profit companies’ data practices and to states’ participation in the datafication of the environment; examining regimes of value raises questions about how data are exploited and how they are neglected. Patterns of alienation associated with datafication include the potential for alienation from the environment; however, at least in some value regimes, alienation may be accompanied by possibilities for attunement to natural and social phenomena that might otherwise have escaped notice.