Quand la #numérisation et l’#open-data se retournent contre les pauvres : Seeing Like a Geek — Crooked Timber
►http://crookedtimber.org/2012/06/25/seeing-like-a-geek
the Dalit claim was sideswiped by a Tamil Nadu government program to standardize, digitize and centralize land records. The program, promoted by the World Bank as a pro-poor, pro-transparency initiative, was undertaken to capitalize on the boom in nearby Chennai. The absence of clear land titles made extensive land purchases time consuming and expensive, and this was a bottleneck to large-scale development projects. As part of the program, the Tamil Nadu government declared that the #digitized records would be the only evidence admissable in court for land claims, so the older records and less precise data that formed the basis of the Dalit claims lost any legal footing they had, and their claim was sunk.2
A new generation of land developers grew up alongside the digitized records: firms with the skills and information to make efficient use of this new resource. These developers lobbied effectively for records and spatial data to be made open, and then used their advantages to displace smaller firms who, as Raman writes, “relied on their knowledge of local histories and relationships to assemble land for development”. The effects went far beyond the three-acre plot near Marakkanan: newly visible master plans became used as “the reference point to label legal and illegal spaces and as a justification for evicting the poor from their economic and residential spaces.” The “pro-poor” initiative turned out to be anything but.
#pauvreté #développement #propriété #profit #informatique #cdp
Development studies scholar Kevin Donovan12 sees similarities between open data efforts and the demands of the state as described in James Scott’s “Seeing Like a State”.13 Open standards and structured, machine-readable data are key parts of the open data programme.14 For Donovan this formalization and standardization is “far more value-laden than typically considered”. Open data programmes, like the state, seek to “make society legible through simplification”. Standardized data, like the state, “operate[s] over a multitude of communities and attempt[s] to eliminate cultural norms through standardization”. He writes:
Eliminating illegibilty in this way reduces the public’s political autonomy because it enables powerful entities to act on a greater scale. Scott argued, ‘A thoroughly legible society eliminates local monopolies of information and creates a kind of national transparency through the uniformity of codes, identities, statistics, regulations and measures. At the same time it is likely to create new positional advantages for those at the apex who have the knowledge and access to easily decipher the new state-created format’
Open data undermines the power of those who benefit from “the idiosyncracies and complexities of communities… Local residents [who] understand the complexity of their community due to prolonged exposure.”
et en conclusion :
Unfortunately the Open Data Movement demands that data be provided without borders and in a uniform way: machine processable, available to anyone, and license-free.21 It mandates non-discriminatory licensing, focuses on standards-based formats, and generally insists that data be accessible to rich and poor alike, like justice and the Ritz. It insists that any measures governments would like to take to favour—-for example—-non-commercial users or local users, be taken off the table. It strikes me as bizarre that this logic has gained such a significant hold among left-leaning digital enthusiasts that it has become orthodoxy.
