Data Control Wars: Collaborative Fiction, Transition Design and Technological Sovereignty

Abstract

Data Control Wars seeks to explore the development of different futures regarding the extraction, management and exploitation of data and its political, economic and cultural consequences. It has been designed as a research-action device through play, generative conflict, collaborative fiction and performance with three specific objectives: to observe social expectations regarding the relationship between industry, democracy, citizenship and data; to stimulate social imagination through the simulation of sociotechnical scenarios, thus decolonising imaginaries captured by techno-capitalist logic; and to rehearsal transition strategies towards technological sovereignty. This article presents the Data Control Wars case study and explains its functioning. Moreover, it sets out the theoretical scaffolding – which goes from post-human philosophy to critical design passing through the sociology of expectations – that supports it and presents some of the results. After three activations in three different contexts, Data Control Wars has proven useful as an educational tool to address the potential positive and negative effects of using data, as a space for testing strategies on transition design, as a method to identify some of the myths articulated by the social perception of the technological industry and the power of agency that we hold over it and, finally, as a device to question techno-capitalist cultural hegemony through the construction of other stories about what the technosocial body can be.

Keywords

• technology-fiction
• transition design
• research-action
• sociotechnical imaginaries
• technological sovereignty
• data