Abstract
Digital personal data are a political-economic object: technoscientific capitalism increasingly depends upon data as its underlying resource base. However, I argue that data are not a commodity, in that they are not fungible since they are an artefact or construction of digital collection architectures that usually have very specific and particular purposes. Different businesses construct data to serve their own business models and innovation strategies, including online advertising, cloud computing, ecommerce, platform delivery, and social media. Data are better understood as an asset, meaning capitalizable property that can be owned and/or controlled by a person or organization and from which future economic benefits accrue without a necessary sale. Assets are techno-economic configurations of legal rights, knowledge claims, management practices, and especially contractual arrangements, all of which configure data in specific ways entailing several problematic policy implications.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
WEF (2011) Personal Data: The Emergence of a New Asset Class, Geneva: World Economic Forum.
- 2.
IMF (2021) Towards a Global Approach to Data in the Digital Age, Washington DC: International Monetary Fund; and World Bank (2021) World Development Report: Data For Better Lives, Washington DC: World Bank Group.
- 3.
See Birch, K. and Muniesa, F. (eds) (2020) Assetization: Turning Things into Assets in Technoscientific Capitalism, Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
- 4.
- 5.
The literature on assetization is growing all the time, so it’s difficult to provide a good selection of materials here; instead, I’ll point the reader to one of my earlier books dealing with it, Birch, K. (2015) We Have Never Been Neoliberal: A Manifesto for a Doomed Youth, Winchester: Zer0 Books, and to a more recent review of the assetization literature, Birch, K. and Ward, C. (2022) Assetization and the ‘new asset geographies’, Dialogues in Human Geography, https://doi.org/10.1177/20438206221130807.
- 6.
An example of this is Beauvisage, T. and Mellet, K. (2020) Datassets: Assetizing and marketizing personal data, in K. Birch and F. Muniesa (eds), Assetization, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, pp. 75–95.
- 7.
Birch, K. and Muniesa, F. (eds) (2020) Assetization: Turning Things into Assets in Technoscientific Capitalism, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, p. 2.
- 8.
- 9.
Polanyi, K. (2001 [1944]) The Great Transformation, Boston: Beacon Press.
- 10.
Helmond, A. (2015) The platformization of the web: Making web data platform ready, Social Media + Society 1(2): 1–11.
- 11.
See my previous work on this: Birch, K., Cochrane, D. and Ward, C. (2021) Data as asset? The measurement, governance, and valuation of digital personal data by Big Tech, Big Data & Society 8(1), https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211017308.
- 12.
Cherizola, J.S. (2021) From commodities to assets: Capital as power and the ontology of finance, Review of Capital as Power 2(1): 1–29.
- 13.
An example of this is the 2021 ‘Dasgupta Report’: HM Treasury (2021) The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review, London: HM Treasury.
- 14.
These aspects are spelled out in: Birch, K. and Tyfield, D. (2013) Theorizing the bioeconomy: Biovalue, biocapital, bioeconomics or …what? Science, Technology and Human Values 38(3): 299–327; and Birch, K. (2017) Rethinking value in the bio-economy: Finance, assetization and the management of value, Science, Technology and Human Values 42(3): 460–490.
- 15.
- 16.
Chiapello, E. (2023) So what is assetization? Filling some theoretical gaps, Dialogues in Human Geography, https://doi.org/10.1177/20438206231157913.
- 17.
- 18.
See, for example, Haskel, J. and Westlake, S. (2018) Capitalism without Capital, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
- 19.
See: Lev, B. (2019) Ending the accounting-for-intangibles status quo, European Accounting Review 28(4): 713–736; and see Durand, C. and Milberg, W. (2020) Intellectual monopoly in global value chains, Review of International Political Economy 27(2): 404–429; Rikap, C. (2021) Capitalism, Power and Innovation, London: Routledge; and Schwartz, H.M. (2022) Intellectual property, technorents and the labour share of production, Competition & Change 26(3–4): 415–435.
- 20.
Birch, K., Cochrane, D., & Ward, C. (2021) Data as asset? The measurement, governance, and valuation of digital personal data by Big Tech, Big Data & Society 8(1), https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211017308.
- 21.
Lev, B. (2001) Intangibles: Management, Measurement, and Reporting, Washington DC: The Brookings Institution.
- 22.
Birch, K., Cochrane, D. and Ward, C. (2021) Data as asset? The measurement, governance, and valuation of digital personal data by Big Tech, Big Data & Society 8(1), https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211017308.
- 23.
Thanks to Jacob Hellman for collecting and collating this empirical material, which we haven’t published yet.
- 24.
See also, Parsons, A. (forthcoming) The Shifting Economic Allegiance of Capital Gains, Florida Tax Review 26; U of Colorado Law Legal Studies Research Paper No. 22–19, available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4152114 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4152114.
- 25.
Goldenfein, J. and McGuigan, L. (forthcoming) Managed Sovereigns: How Inconsistent Accounts of the Human Rationalize Platform Advertising (March 18, 2023), Journal of Law and Political Economy, available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4392875 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4392875.
- 26.
It’s important to emphasize that ‘data’ may not always have been or been considered an asset; Sabina Leonelli provides a short but interesting outline of the history of scientific data as it moved from being institutionalized as a commodity in the nineteenth century to becoming a reusable asset in the twenty-first century: Leonelli, S. (2019) Data—from objects to assets, Nature 574, 317–320.
- 27.
Determann, L. (2018) No one owns data, Hastings Law Journal 70(1): 1–43; Cohen, J. (2019) Between Truth and Power, Oxford: Oxford University Press; Pistor, K. (2020) Rule by data: The end of markets? Law and Contemporary Problems 83: 101–124; and Drexl, J. (2021) Data access as a means to promote consumer interests and public welfare—An introduction, in German Federal Ministry of Justice & Consumer Protection and MPI for Innovation & Competition (eds), Data Access, Consumer Interests and Public Welfare, Baden: NOMOS.
- 28.
Birch, K. (2017) A Research Agenda for Neoliberalism, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
- 29.
Determann, L. (2018) No one owns data, Hastings Law Journal 70(1): 1–43.
- 30.
- 31.
Birch, K. and Muniesa, F. (eds) (2020) Assetization: Turning Things into Assets in Technoscientific Capitalism, Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
- 32.
Zech, H. (2017) Data as a tradeable commodity—Implications for contract law (September 2017), in J. Drexl (ed.), Proceedings of the 18th EIPIN Congress: The New Data Economy between Data Ownership, Privacy and Safeguarding Competition, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3063153.
- 33.
Metzger, A. (2017) Data as Counter-Performance: What Rights and Duties do Parties Have? JIPITEC 8(1): 2–8.
- 34.
Eben, M. (2018) Market definition and free online services: The prospect of personal data as price, I/A: A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society 14(2): 227–281.
- 35.
Dreyfuss, R. and Frankel, S. (2015) From incentive to commodity to asset: How international law is reconceptualizing intellectual property, Michigan Journal of International Law 36 (4): 557–602.
- 36.
Bian, C. (2022) Data as asset in foreign direct investment: Is China’s national data governance compatible with its international investment agreements? Asian Journal of International Law, https://doi.org/10.1017/S2044251322000595
- 37.
Horvath, E. and Klinkmuller, S. (2019) The concept of ‘investment’ in the digital economy: The case of social media companies, Journal of World Investment and Trade 20: 577–617.
- 38.
Birch, K., Chiappetta, M. and Artyushina, A. (2020) The problem of innovation in technoscientific capitalism: Data rentiership and the policy implications of turning personal digital data into a private asset, Policy Studies 41(5): 468–487.
- 39.
Birch, K. and Adediji, D. (2023) Rethinking Canada’s Competition Policy in the Digital Economy, ITS Policy Report #01–2023, available at: https://www.yorku.ca/research/its/wp-content/uploads/sites/728/2023/02/ITS-Policy-Report-01-2023-Rethinking-Competition-d2-2.pdf.
- 40.
Birch, K. and Cochrane, D.T. (2022) Big Tech: Four emerging forms of digital rentiership, Science as Culture 31(1): 44–58.
- 41.
Perzanowski, A. and Schultz, J. (2016) The End of Ownership, Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Birch, K. (2023). Data Assets. In: Data Enclaves. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46402-7_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46402-7_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-46401-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-46402-7
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)