Individual data-rights enforcement cannot succeed without collective action

Evidence

Dehaye is an activist, and his aim is not only to access data but also to document the arduousness and even absurdity of the undertaking. Given these realities, he suggests that the data-protection regulations are comparable to freedom-of-information laws. The procedures for requesting and receiving information under these laws are imperfect and onerous, typically undertaken by legal specialists, but nevertheless essential to democratic freedom. Although effective contest will require determined individuals, the individual alone cannot shoulder the burden of justice, any more than an individual worker in the first years of the twentieth century could bear the burden of fighting for fair wages and working conditions. Those twentieth-century challenges required collective action, and so do our own. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1548

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the labor-union analogy threaded through the book (worker vs user, wage vs data) and Milgrom’s argument that institutions rather than individuals sustain cooperative regimes. — connects to: Individual resistance acts against data colonialism must be reframed as collective projects — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 634; Distributed commercial data collection is structurally opaque and hard to contest — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 389; Cooperative platforms cannot compete with entrenched data monopolies — Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism, 100 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Large anonymous groups cannot sustain collective action without some enforcing mechanism #corroborates (0.90) — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 412