Week 9: What counts: Ubiquitous communication networks, behavioral data, and value

ANTH 3608: Becoming cyborgs—Technology and society (Semester 2, 2025)
October 10, 2025

Main reading: Walford (2021)

Other reading: Bowker and Star (1999)

Notes

Data is the new money (Feng 2025; Ruwitch 2025). The next billionaires will have a net worth in thousands of petabytes. The nation that controls a population’s aggregate Netflix ratings and Tiktok follows controls the world.

Sure, I’ve got lots of data. I go out of my house every day and everything I see is data. So why does it feel like I brought a fistful of Disney Dollars to the grocery store?

If data is the new money, then data is

a store of value,
a unit of account,
a method of payment, and
a medium of exchange (see Polanyi 1957; Bohannan 1959; cf. Hart 1986)

How much like money is data (and how much like data is money)?

Agenda

Can data be owned and what difference does it make if it is or isn’t?
What is the materiality of data? What happens to data and what happens to its users when data is encoded and decoded?
What makes data reliable when it crosses between contexts?

Keywords

value, encoding

Learning outcomes

Understand classification and standardization as elements of social and technical processes and explain why this matters for understanding how social scientists interpret the social and cultural significance of data collection, computation, and modeling

References

Bohannan, Paul. 1959. “The Impact of Money on an African Subsistence Economy.” The Journal of Economic History 19 (4): 491–503. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022050700085946.

Bowker, Geoffrey C., and Susan Leigh Star. 1999. “Categorical Work and Boundary Infrastructures: Enriching Theories of Classification.” In Sorting things out: classification and its consequences, 285–317. Inside technology. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Feng, Emily. 2025. “The Race to Create AI Applications Is Creating Demand for Training Data in China.” National Public Radio, June 29, 2025, sec. World. https://www.npr.org/2025/06/29/nx-s1-5422330/the-race-to-create-ai-applications-is-creating-demand-for-training-data-in-china.

Hart, Keith. 1986. “Heads or Tails? Two Sides of the Coin.” Man 21 (4): 637–56. https://doi.org/10.2307/2802901.

Polanyi, Karl. 1957. “The Economy as an Instituted Process.” In Trade and Markets in Early Empires, edited by Karl Polanyi, Conrad M. Arensberg, and Harry W. Pearson, 243–70. New York: The Free Press. https://archive.org/details/in.gov.ignca.36501/page/243/mode/2up.

Ruwitch, John. 2025. “Judge OKs Sale of 23andMe — and Its Trove of DNA Data — to a Nonprofit Led by Its Founder.” National Public Radio, June 30, 2025, sec. Technology. https://www.npr.org/2025/06/30/nx-s1-5451398/23andme-sale-approved-dna-data.

Walford, Antonia. 2021. “Data – Ova – Gene – Data.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 27 (S1): 127–41. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.13484.