Data and technological spatial politics

The chapter traces the contested politics of data, shifting scales from the transnational to the national and local levels: from questions of the (extra-)territoriality of data, the role of jurisdictions and contested ‘technical territories’ to the concrete lived spaces where data are produced, stored, and circulated. The different contributions thus zoom in from global geopolitical struggles over digital sovereignty and hegemony over data infrastructure to local contestations over subsea cable networks and landing stations, data centres, as well as neighbourhood gentrification driven by AI-development. This multiscalar approach to data politics aims to emphasize the tensions between the abstract global logics of data circulation and the local realities of data, between historical state and corporate projects of extending data territories as a form of ‘domination’, and the localized effects of such projects, including gentrification, expropriation, and the colonial erasure of local knowledges and sovereignty. At the micro level, several of the contributors to this volume explore community activism through a case study of Montreal, where local activists oppose processes of gentrification and displacement driven by an emerging AI ecosystem meant to boost Canada’s innovation and platform economies. We home in on instances of community mapping that produce data in a fair and equitable way; data that empower communities to resist gentrification and expropriation and to support situated knowledges.