Title of Talk: (Millions of) Threads: The business and bureaucracy of personal data.

Abstract: Earlier this year Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta launched a “new, separate space for real-time updates and public conversations” named, Threads. Whilst as many as 30 million people around the world, including the US and UK, initially took up the opportunity to join the new social network (so long as they already had an Instagram account to link to their new Threads account, that is), the launch in the European Union is being delayed because of concerns regarding compatibility with new rules on linked accounts and personal data sharing set-out in the Digital Markets Act (DMA). Moreover, the impact this potential incompatibility has concerning the status of “gatekeeper” that Meta, along with other major tech giants including Google and Apple, assume under the DMA. Zuckerberg’s commercial motivations to leverage the “market for eyeballs” as against an increasingly fragile and discredited X (née Twitter) are clear. The case for another social network, one that appears to do little to re-imagine social networking beyond the now well-trodden and somewhat sullied experience of X, perhaps less so. However, because of this competitive positioning, I find myself once again pondering what is at stake from the unrelenting mission of these so-called “gatekeepers” to tap value stores of personal data, and what law and regulation can and is doing at the borderlands of private and public interests to address it.

Given the (initially) high numbers subscribing to Threads, a willingness or appetite for data subjects to offer personal data – what I have referred to elsewhere as data subjects as sourced – seems to persist. And in most jurisdictions now does so without the protections, if indeed they should be viewed as such, available to EU citizens. Whilst there is clear, material legal and regulatory issues to explore here, the latest raft of EU law in conjunction with the approach to Meta/Threads brings into focus, once again, the very nature of data subjectivity as such. Through the lens of the EU’s prioritisation of markets in particular, data subjectivity appears to vacillate between the legal, economic, and political. But globally, how sure of itself, its place, its significance, its power, is the data subject? To follow Heidegger, we must ask if we are now at or have passed the point where data subjectivity must be taken as de facto (and arguably also de jure) “standing reserve”, which in the final analysis is a relegation of Being to stockpile.

To structure my discussion and importantly also to put a critical frame around it, I return to the following illustration of the business of personal data that I have re-purposed from Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s attack on Soviet bureaucracy in his novel Cancer Ward, one that seems particularly germane to understanding data subjectivity in the contemporary age of global information capitalism, not least in the context of Threads:

‘As every man goes through life, he fills in a number of forms for the record, each containing a number of questions. A man’s answer to one question on one form becomes a little thread, permanently connecting him to the local centre of personnel records administration. There are thus hundreds of little threads radiating from every man, millions of threads in all. If these threads were suddenly to become visible, the whole sky would look like a spider's web ... They are not visible, they are not material, but every man is constantly aware of their existence.’