In a context of pervasive datafication, an essential component of the quest for ‘data justice’ (Dencik et al 2016) is to establish a framework of rights that can safeguard
fundamental freedoms for the ‘data citizen’. As Isin & Ruppert (2015) make clear, however, the performance of rights claims makes the data citizen both a subversive and a submissive figure: simultaneously
making demands and submitting to authority. It is my contention that the rights claims of the data citizen, and the dominant imaginaries that surround them, are often best defined as submissive to informational capitalism,
rather than subverting it. They are submissive because the core rights, usually centred on dimensions of privacy and expression, fail to connect to broader social struggles and over-emphasize individualist and technical solutions.
Moreover, I contend that we can better understand this failure to adequately challenge the systemic injustices implied in the mass capture of citizen data if we examine the earlier lineage of digital rights frameworks, from
WSIS to the present day.
In this paper, I examine how the dominant paradigm of digital rights, rather than establishing safeguards, may have actually enabled our current moment in which data justice has been
so systematically trampled. Ultimately, while we have been clamouring for our rights to freedom of online expression, individual privacy and network neutrality, the larger system based on the commodification of data, of users
themselves, continued unabated.
The first order digital rights enshrined in various global and national charters, are as Marianne Franklin contends, “encapsulated by the trope of freedom” (2013). They prioritize individual autonomy, creativity, expression, and they constitute depoliticized, market-friendly, technical fixes. These characteristics can be explained in part by the
discourses of neoliberalism and libertarianism that helped to shape them, ones that also served another powerful function: that of legitimating a system of informational capitalism.
Indeed, I contend that it is through examining the discursive construction of digital rights that we can begin to understand how inadequate they have been in advancing data justice,
and identifying the beneficiaries of this failure. Perhaps most importantly, by examining the dominant discourses at work, we can also recognise the alternative discourses that have been marginalized along the way. These
signal how a more substantive reckoning of digital rights is possible, one that might realign digital communication to serve rather than undermine democracy. A crude shorthand for this discursive struggle is in my title:
Internet freedom vs Data justice.
I probe that juxtaposition by examining the configurations of political-economic power, the cultural currents and the dominant discourses that have underpinned the digital rights paradigm.
Using a poststructuralist political economy approach (Schoonmaker 2009) - that takes into account discursive as well as political-economic components – I trace the trajectory of digital rights, from the lost potential
of NWICO, to the turning point of WSIS, and the proliferation of rights charters over the last ten years. Undertaking this genealogy is, I argue, an essential step towards the realization of data justice.