The hidden power of data dominance

Tech CEOs have built tremendous wealth and power by abusing massive amounts of personal data. What would happen if we took collective action to stop unlimited data extraction?

In the last few weeks, we’ve collectively watched a new cadre of the ruling class, stacked with tech billionaires and CEOs, take their seats at the White House. Since the start of the new administration, they’ve caused panic and confusion by shutting down government websites and revoking access to important databases, as they strive to reconstruct a federal government in a more punitive and profitable image.

For years, scholars, artists, and public intellectuals have been trying to show us that the tech industry manipulates society and builds power by dominating the attention economy, which keeps the general public distracted and young people hooked on algorithms that fuel depression and anxiety. They do this so that their CEOs can continue to amass personal wealth, widening the already huge gaps in income inequality across industries.

Tech leaders have also gained massive global influence through the exploitation of surveillance capitalism. They’ve ensured that a majority of industries are now dependent on personal data, collected through large-scale media platforms used as tools of surveillance. They sell our data through a ballooning advertising industry with global reach that in turn serves tech leaders’ interests.

I’ve trapped my friends in enough rants in enough living rooms. I know that thinking about these structures tends to leave people overwhelmed with a headache. Perceiving the hugeness without understanding what tools would help us undermine this system paralyzes us out of taking action.

It’s a fair question: If Google, Meta, X, Amazon and other tech giants wield such tremendous corporate power that they can buy out any company and swing any election, how can we have any power ourselves?

The answer is in the culture that the tech industry has built around itself. A culture of complete and utter reliance on data that is extracted through fundamentally unethical means.

Across industries and sectors, not just in tech and not just in the private sector, companies and governments have shifted their entire organizational strategies toward “data dominance”. This term appears in consulting decks and business magazines across the internet; it has been woven into the fabric of how corporate America operates.

Data dominance is actually a military term that describes “the ability to swiftly acquire, process, and act on information.” According to the World Economic Forum, "Dominant firms are those who have the most data that can be deployed behind the most profitable business models."

We can see it manifest differently in different contexts. Real estate developers can wield data dominance to make strategic investments that will lead to the gentrification and displacement of entire communities, and health insurance providers use black box algorithms to more efficiently and secretively deny healthcare claims.

In addition to fueling strategic decisions across sectors, data extraction is also a significant chunk of every major tech platforms’ overall revenue and therefore a foundational part of their business models. About 98% of Meta’s revenue in 2023 came from advertising. The ads effectively sell products because they target consumers using their own personal data — personal data that was collected without meaningful consent and with the intention of generating profit.

The tech lobby is extremely active against any kind of legislation that would lessen corporate power to extract and abuse unlimited amounts of data. They are specifically interested in avoiding and blocking conversations about data rights in any sphere because unrestricted access to information is the source of their power.

Governments have been knowingly or unknowingly complicit in the tech industry’s agenda. All levels of US government have been influenced by decades of conservative and moderate administrative reforms, which say that the government should run like a business.

Government administration fundamentally runs on data (or forms if you prefer to think of it that way). So their methods of data collection directly impact the governing decisions that leaders make. But when many governments made the transition from paper forms to digital, they were heavily influenced by the data collection standards of the tech and consulting industries, which have been responsible for building most government software.

It’s natural then that government leaders think they need tech leaders on their side, taking the corporate way to most tech solutions, embracing public-private partnerships, and avoiding investment in truly community-owned or cooperative public solutions. As a result, governments also avoid and block conversations about data rights because they don’t want to overhaul their data collection practices, and they don’t prioritize legislation that would protect people from systemic abuses of data. (The feds have mostly legislated to make government data use more efficient.)

While the US has some legal protections around health information and student information, these protections are extremely basic. Without more meaningful protections, the extensive government data systems built to manage everything from food stamps to immigration asylum requests to school attendance are easily weaponized for surveillance or policing depending on the goals of different administrations.

Data is a tool that governments are happy to help law enforcement agencies and the criminal legal system use to track people who are receiving public benefits for so-called fraud prevention purposes, or to track and separate families through the “child welfare system.” Data is also a fundamental tool in the dehumanization process when governments hold people in jails and prisons, reducing human beings to cases and numbers.

If governments really cared to protect people from abuses of their data, wouldn’t they have put some legal barriers in place to prevent these and other harmful uses? Like so many other issues of our world, the answer is left in the peoples’ hands.

If we want to stop abuses of data enabled by the broad reach of the tech industry, we have to look more closely at the source of their power. The source of their power is us.

Seeing how many companies and institutions strive for data dominance, we might also start to see the power we have at the bottom of the terrible food chain. Unfortunately tech leaders have proven you can get rich and famous on the back of systemic abuses of data while many people don’t even realize what is happening. This freedom to exploit had enabled the data rush around AI and increased the urgency for many companies to achieve data dominance. But we are the “data subjects” that power the data systems that fuel these industries.

Refusing data extraction would be equivalent to turning off the tap. Extractive data practices that reinforce corporate data dominance are so widespread that we’re faced with probably dozens of opportunities every day to refuse in ways that could help us start to build power.

The challenge is that because these companies and their data capacities are so huge, individual action isn‘t enough. Of course it still helps to do things like reading terms and conditions, turning off your location data, or declining facial recognition at the airport. But we have to get better at identifying the opportunities for collective intervention in data extraction.

This is where I stop having answers. I’m always looking to my friends and peers to help ideate about what collective mobilization against data extraction could look like. That’s the exciting work that lies ahead for us. We could dream up data strikes or data unions. Community organizations that we trust could help form the first lines of community data defense.

We need more and different ways to inform people about the channels of data extraction that are touching them in their own lives. Like other forms of collective bargaining, this could mean helping people come together to negotiate for dividends of the profits from data sales or to demand changes they want to see in systems of power.

Because data dominance as a practice is already so widespread, there are countless industries that would be hamstrung by probably even minimal collective action against data extraction. Payday lenders might have to stop using personal data to decide where to set up shop. For-profit universities might have to stop using it to target susceptible students with false claims about their schools. An overall cooling cultural shift away from data extraction would also help make the big social media platforms obsolete, since data collection is almost their sole purpose.

So — see! There are options. But first, we have to do the work of understanding and identifying how companies are flexing their data dominance in our lives.

We have to understand that our data has value and is worth protecting. It is a product of us and our communities. Companies may weaponize our data to build more efficient means of extracting labor and capital, but the reverse is also true — that without our participation, these data systems would be nothing. They'd wither away in the wind. Something to consider the next time you're asked to consent.