The Biopolitical Public Domain

This chapter explores the emergence of a new factor of production in the informational economy—data flows relating to people and their activities—and identifies the legal construct that facilitates contemporary practices of personal data extraction and processing. The idea of a public domain of personal data has two interrelated effects. First, it constitutes personal data as available and potentially valuable, thereby supporting the reorganization of sociotechnical activity in ways directed toward extraction and appropriation. Second, it constitutes the personal data harvested within networked information environments as raw, thereby underwriting narratives of legal privilege that attach to the processing of personal data processing on an industrial scale and to the outputs of such operations.