On Separating Data from People: Reflections on Indigenous Digital Exhaust, Transparency, and Constitutive Relationality

Abstract

This essay invites readers to think through the carelessness and care-lessness of data extraction regimes under surveillance capitalism with regard to notions of care produced with and against these systems. It does so by first narrating Joanna Radin’s analysis of how the Akimel O’Odhum came to be separated from their data as “exhaust,” despite the indigenous data sovereignty movement. It then shifts registers to spotlight the kinds of care evident under datafied logics of transparency in organic cotton supply chains in the Global South, contrasting it with the holistic and constitutively relational care articulated by indigenous communities who produce cotton. It concludes by arguing for the ethical and political urgency of enacting practices that center the relation and connectedness between people, place and data.