A crisis of data? Value creation through transparency practices in data broker platforms
Topics: Economic Geography
, Digital Geographies
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Keywords: data, debt, transparency, finance, fintech
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 17
Authors:
Matthew Zook, University of Kentucky
Ian Spangler, University of Kentucky
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Abstract
Despite the prevalence of transparency discourses in economic life (e.g., post-crisis social reforms, Dodd Frank), scholarship is just beginning to analyze how these discourses produce new relations between market actors in platform economies. In this paper, we argue that in the context of financial markets and the political economy of data, transparency functions as a discursive construction that creates suitable conditions for the manufacture and extraction of data as an asset. First, we examine the role of transparency and opacity in various understandings of the 2007-08 great financial crisis. In doing so we link the emergence of FinTech firms to a careful ex post facto reconstruction of the GFC as what we term a “crisis of data.” Then, through problematizing the idea that transparent economic relations necessarily lead to greater accountability, equity, or public good, we argue that transparency is better understood as a relational practice which is continuously and contingently renegotiated. Taking up the example of debt data, we provide case studies of the data brokerage companies Blackrock and dv01 to analyze how transparency constitutes the material infrastructure of debt markets, which facilitates the construction of data assets for profitable circulation in a financialized political economy.
A crisis of data? Value creation through transparency practices in data broker platforms
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Virtual Paper Abstract
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