Left to Other Peoples’ Devices? A Political Economy Perspective on the Big Data Revolution in Development

This article brings a political economy perspective to the field of Data for Development (D4D). It highlights the fact that many projects involve extracting data from African‐based organizations for expert analysis in advanced economies. This extraction is justified on the basis that it is being used for humanitarian purposes. Key actors including the UN Global Pulse and World Economic Forum have lobbied for a governance framework emphasizing greater emission, personalization and centralization of data. The article shows how this approach enables the strategies of multinational corporations which are aiming to become data custodians of Africa's emerging economies. Little attention has been paid to the geographical distribution of capacity building nor to the ways in which data‐driven restructuring may alter existing livelihoods. As African economies become increasingly ‘digital’, data will become a source of power in economic governance. Current frameworks amount to a kind of industrial policy that supports the learning and innovation of foreign firms. The article aims to move D4D away from the focus on humanitarianism towards economic development, considering the opportunities for African citizens to benefit from their data as a source of revenue, knowledge and power. The conclusion suggests lines of inquiry for taking research further.     

A Negative Geography of Necessity

Abstract: One of the many unfortunate results of the long‐lived misconception that Marx was a “determinist” is a lack of engagement with his ideas of necessity and negation. Reading the Grundrisse's famous comments on the annihilation of space by time, I trace the Hegelian roots of these concepts to show that for both Marx ahd Hegel, negation is the very act of critique itself, and necessity is properly understood not as the force of history, but as the object of historical explanation–what makes things the way they are and not another. It is therefore crucial to critical geography's efforts to identify the possibilities for social change, for that analysis must be predicated on an understanding for how things have emerged in their present form, i.e. the one we have to work with. I argue that a negative geography of necessity is the essential basis for anything we might call a communist geography, a geography of “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things”.