The Market Will Have You: The Arts of Market Attachment in a Digital Economy

What can it possibly mean to say that the market will have you? Accustomed as we are to hearing about the havoc markets wreak upon social institutions, communities and individuals, it could perhaps signal the thuggishness of markets as in ‘h’ dropped, the market “is gonna ‘ave you”. There is of course a whole tradition in economic sociology and anthropology from Polanyi onwards of seeing what markets do this way. But our concern is with how market exchange produces, rather than dissolves or proceeds from, social ties so that is not the path we take.

Another possibility is that ‘having us’ signals the dystopian future that many commentators think is almost upon us. This is a future in which markets will use their new toolkits to produce digital doppelgangers, doubles or DNA replicas to predict, place, preorder and even purchase things without any action on our part. This is the vision of accessibility, surveillance and modelling referenced in KD’s Headless novel and famously in Spielberg’s 2002 film depiction of a 2054 obsessed with prediction and saturated with scanners that identify, monitor and target consumers in Minority Report. With Amazon in 2015 patenting ‘anticipatory shipping’, a logistics system designed to ship products before they are purchased, and with a catalogue of ‘smart’ technologies from face recognizing advertising billboards to self re-filling refrigerators already in existence, not to mention the conventional use of data mining and digital customer relationship management strategies across a variety of domains, these visions can even seem a bit conservative. Since Savage and Borrows published their prescient analysis of the challenges posed by digital transactional data in 2007, there has been a proliferation in the means of analyzing what sovereignty over what we now known as “Big Data” implies for social science, for citizens and for consumers (Savage and Burrows, 2007; 2009; Burrows and Savage, 2014; Ruppert & Isin, 2015; Marres, 2015; Marres & Moats 2015; Gregory and Bowker, 2016). There are now at least seven academic journals with ‘big data’ in their title (none of them in more than their third volume); Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Apple and Intel all have research facilities employing social scientists; digital methods, digital humanities and social science appointments and departments are springing up at universities everywhere and funders have announced a series of programmes designed to sponsor research in the area. Data science has become hip.

What all this might mean for market attachment, whether it does indeed signal a step change in commercial capabilities to access, to know, even to ‘have’ their customers, is one of our concerns in this paper. In the last decade the capacity of the transactional data routinely gathered through retailers’ loyalty schemes and users’ online behaviour to cluster associations between products, and between products and customers, has been causally linked to commercial efficacy. The ‘gang of four’, Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook are, in this view, what they are, in large part because of their success in orchestrating these associations. This included for example wrangling with data associations to figure out the probability that purchasing X means that shopper Y will purchase Z next. Such is the potency of successful strategies, it has been claimed, that we are conditioned not only to buy certain things, but to buy at particular times, in response to particular sorts of offer, in particular volumes and for occasions defined not by a priori social ties but through commercial signals that certain relationships should matter enough to mark with a gift.

The digital toolkits and the vast datasets behind such strategies are certainly new and they certainly aim to foster relationships with customers that might lead to stable attachments. Yet amidst all the hype about the power of big data, the consequences of who has the means to access, own, manage and control it, the epistemological and ontological possibilities of being able to simultaneously derive breadth and depth, quantitative and qualitative, insights from the same data-set, there has been little concrete, historically informed discussion of what it is exactly about market attachment that these changes change. Critics raise big questions about surveillance, privacy, dignity, rights and exploitation as Google, Apple, Facebook etc. own and enclose more and more of ‘our’ data. This kind of challenge to techno-utopianism, as Bill Maurer (2015) has recently argued, is appealing. And yet it leaves out some really big questions about the nature of the data and the associations produced in digital networks. What if, Maurer ponders, instead of an era of enclosure and accumulation, this is one of assisted reproduction in which new beings and new kinds of relations are being created? Questions about relations, rather than ownership per se, then might become what matters most.

Using the forgotten, then remembered, sociologist Gabriel Tarde’s provocation that what we are, our identities, are not a matter of ‘being’ but of ‘having’, we explore the idea that markets can only exist through this ‘having’. The art of markets lies in how having - of data, relations, associations, ties, ‘us’  - is practically accomplished. It is possible, and it has been argued by Latour and Lepinay (2009), that Tarde is a sociologist whose time has finally come more than a century after his death. The current general prevalence of digitization now at last provides the conditions to test his initial hypotheses that qualitative quantification is possible. This chimes with the critical trend that sees digitisation as pumping up the domain corporations have over us. Yet, if this is what is changing, this is an historical change that needs to be, well, historicised.