there are two important paradigms for collecting and sharing data:

• one which is focused on sovereignty, privacy, consent, autonomy, and locality/local-first - this is the decentralised utopian image of data politics;

• another which is focused on intelligence, power, leverage, scale, aggregation, abstraction - this is the inherently centralised or agglomerated, tactical and greedy zero sum game of extracting as much information as possible in order to know more than your competitors or enemies.

People interested in what I would broadly call ‘Data politics’ focuses a lot, for good reason, on espousing the merits of the first paradigm and the evils of the second. Without a doubt this is how the world should be, and it also happens to be fairly acceptable within mainstream liberal discourse to say such things - personal privacy, consent, and autonomy are good things, shamefully snatched away from us by big tech (occasionally, governments might also face such critiques). Noticing and minimising the many ways we are being tracked and surveilled is very worthwhile, especially for activists, and new technologies making this easier are more than welcome.

But a radical political movement, as in class war, also needs the second approach. After all, it is war against capitalism, and the capitalists have many such resources at their disposal. When people learn about the extent to which our movements are tracked and surveilled, a tendency is to throw up their hands and accept that the war is unwinnable. It’s not. It just needs to be approached a bit more seriously.

Counter-Intelligence