'The problem of innovation in technoscientific capitalism: data rentiership and the policy implications of turning personal digital data into a private asset' by
Kean Birch, Margaret Chiappetta and Anna Artyushina in (2020)
Policy Studies comments
A spate of recent scandals concerning personal digital data illustrates the extent to which innovation and finance are thoroughly entangled with one another. The innovation-finance nexus is an example of an emerging dynamic in technoscientific capitalism in which innovation is increasingly driven by the pursuit of “economic rents”. Unlike innovation that delivers new products, services, and markets, innovation as rentiership is defined by the extraction and capture of value through different modes of ownership and control over resources and assets. This shift towards rentiership is evident in the transformation of personal digital data into a private asset. In light of this assetization, it is necessary to unpack how innovation itself might be a problem, rather than a solution to a range of global challenges. Our aim in this paper is to conceptualize this relationship between innovation, finance, and data rentiership, and examine the policy implications of this pursuit of economic rents as a deliberate research and innovation strategy in data-driven technology sectors.
The authors argue
In May 2019, the Canadian Federal Government launched its new Digital Charter amidst a flurry of metaphors likening personal digital data (henceforth “personal data”) as the “new oil” or “new electricity”. As such, the framing of personal data in the Digital Charter reflects broader political and policy imaginaries of personal (and other) data as the key driver of twenty-first century economies; and hence legitimating the need to step in now and shape future policy contexts and frameworks. This Canadian example is not an isolated incident by any means. It reflects previous attempts by the European Union (EU), for example, to strengthen their data privacy and protection regulations with the 2018 General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (Edwards 2018; Marelli, Lievevrouw, and van Hoyweghen 2020). Other actors like the World Economic Forum (Schwab 2017), the Centre for International Governance Innovation (Ciuriak 2018), the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF 2019), and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD 2019) have also waded into these policy debates about data governance, presenting their various takes on the policies and regulations needed to support an emerging “data-driven” economy. Yet, a range of academic, political, and civil society voices are also raising concerns about the use and abuse of personal data, now and in the future. A particular concern, which is exemplified by Zuboff’s (2019) new book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, is with the ethical, political, and social issues surrounding privacy, consent, and behavioural influence implied in the centralized control of personal data by a few, monopolistic “Big Tech” companies (e.g. Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, etc.).
Our intention in this paper is not to delve into the ethical, legal, and social concerns raised by “datafication”; others are doing and have done this already (e.g. boyd and Crawford 2012; Edwards 2018; Beer 2019; Morozov 2019; Lupton 2020; Prainsack 2020a). We also do not intend to engage in debates about the ethical and social implications of algorithms and algorithmic processes (e.g. Neyland 2016; Noble 2018). Rather, our complementary focus is on the (so-called) resource that underpins said algorithms; that is, digital personal data. Analytically, our aim is to examine the political economy of personal data as this relates to the changing innovation-finance nexus of technoscientific capitalism. In doing so, we want to answer the question: what are the (policy) implications of turning our personal data into a privatized, political-economic resource? We ask this question in order to understand how the allocation of financial capital to research and innovation comes to shape that research and innovation in problematic ways (Hackett 2014).
Underpinning this transformation of personal data is the policy assumption that innovation entails the commercialization of science and technology, thereby legitimating policy-making configured by market (or business) forces and logics. In response, a range of academic, political, and policy critiques of these market-centred assumptions about innovation have emerged over the last couple of decades. Different social actors have put forward a range of responses and solutions to the problems resulting from market-driven innovation. An early example is the notion of “open innovation” posited by Chesbrough (2003) and taken up by a range of policy-makers and stakeholders in different forms (e.g. “open science”). They stress the need to breakdown the internal organization of innovation (e.g. in R&D labs) by encouraging the distribution of innovation across multiple organizations and communities; this tends to be based on overcoming restrictive intellectual property rights (IPRs). A later example is the idea of the “entrepreneurial state” put forward by Mazzucato (2013), which has proved especially popular amongst policy-makers. Her main argument is that the state plays a vital role in supporting innovation, and this role is often ignored or downplayed. And a final example is the “responsible research and innovation” (RRI) programme, now a well-developed research theme and evaluation approach within science and technology studies (STS) and embedded in EU policy frameworks (see Stilgoe, Owen, and Macnaghten 2013). RRI emerges from a concern that research and innovation should directly address societal problems.
Notwithstanding their contributions to ongoing academic and policy debates, these three responses highlight a series of problems with innovation that can only be explained by analysing the changes to the innovation-finance nexus at the heart of contemporary, technoscientific capitalism. By finance, we mean the social actors (e.g. venture capital), knowledges (e.g. financial economics), instruments (e.g. securities), and processes (e.g. discounting) that underpin the allocation of private capital investment in society; for example, the investment in technoscientific development. According to key scholars (e.g. Krippner 2005), finance plays an increasingly significant role in policy-making – and societal organization more generally – primarily as the result of the insertion of financial logics, knowledges, and practices in policy decisions (e.g. creating a macroeconomic environment that ensures stable returns on investment).
Our overall argument is that contemporary, technoscientific capitalism entails innovation-financial logics, knowledges, and practices configured by “rentiership” – or the extraction and capture of value through different modes of ownership and control over resources and assets (Birch 2017a, 2017b, 2020). A number of policy actors have highlighted the negative and problematic implications of this shift towards rentiership, especially as it relates to innovation and its financing – for example, increasing market concentration and power, new technological monopolies, rising inequalities, etc. (e.g. Jacobs 2015; UNCTAD 2016). So, while technological innovation is often lauded as the watchword of progress and the fount of economic growth by politicians and policy-makers (e.g. ISED 2019), there is increasing concern that what we call innovation is not solving or even mitigating the key societal challenges we are all facing around the world; for example, climate change, stagnating incomes, rising inequality and social distrust, increasing political polarization, etc. (Tyfield 2017). This appears not to be a problem with current innovation policy per se, but rather a problem of innovation itself, precisely as it has become increasingly entangled with finance and driven by diverse forms of rentiership. The aforementioned responses to problems with innovation provide only a partial response to our concerns, since they are all underpinned by a continuing faith in the capacity to reorient the finance-innovation nexus towards socially beneficial ends. We are more sceptical.
To start then, we draw attention to the underlying emphasis on the commercialization of technoscience in contemporary research and innovation policy. In particular, we highlight the increasing entanglement of innovation with finance. In the following section we outline what this innovation-finance nexus means for our thinking about innovation, especially the idea that innovation itself is the problem. We highlight the importance of data rentiership here as a way to understand this problem when it comes to the political economy of personal data; by data rentiership we mean the pursuit of innovation strategies designed to capture or extract value through ownership and control of data as an asset. Finally, we turn to the policy responses to the innovation-finance nexus mentioned above and the specific policy implications of data rentiership in contemporary, technoscientific capitalism.
