Digitalization of Society and Socio-political Issues 1

2Big Data as a Device for Generalized Decoding of the Social Field¹

Big Data² has often been described as a huge disruption in the social field. While profound changes are taking place here and there (generalized surveillance of goods and people, endless extension of sensors and connected objects, etc.), we could say that the much-anticipated “Big Data Revolution” has never really taken place. On the one hand, because its production never stops in all levels of the social field and sometimes on a molecular scale (e.g. data mining techniques that apply to the sequencing of the human genome). On the other hand, because this permanent revolution, often with indistinguishable effects, is part of a dynamic that is nothing new: the search for new spheres of market value. In this way, Big Data expresses the tendency to integrate more and more things from the lifeworld³ in the process of valorization and commodification.

Big Data is reviving with ever greater urgency the theory of the colonization of the world experienced by the subsystems of economics and the State, whose regulatory means, money and power, penetrate even the most intimate aspects of subjectivity. This colonization was thematized by Deleuze and Guattari by the notions of coding, decoding and axiomatization; aspects to which I propose to return to shed a singular light on Big Data.

2.1. Coding, decoding and axiomatization

Deleuzoguattarian anthropology is marked by a singular reading of Marx, marked by a series of ...