The Idea of Data and European Constitutional Imaginaries: An Immanent Critique of the Data Governance Act

Data have gained ground as a metaphor for prosperity and innovation, promising to solve complex individual and societal problems. The EU is pursuing the ambitious strategy of reorganising the European economy and society around big data. As part of its data governance strategy, the EU has enacted the Data Governance Act (DGA). This legislation establishes a horizontal regime to unlock the re-use of certain categories of protected data held by the public sector, sets up data intermediation services, and promotes services based on data altruism for the public good. The DGA includes the first legal definition of non-personal data to enhance the circulation and usage of data. The DGA echoes issues of solidarity and distribution, treating data as the great equaliser in today’s surveillance-capitalistic society. However, drawing on critical and feminist data studies, this paper reveals that the concept of data remains unproblematised throughout the regulation. Data do not represent equally, nor can they be equally represented; thus, the paper argues that DGA fails to consider how data might misrepresent facts, social life and individuals, thereby risking the perpetuation of existing inequalities. Second, while the DGA advocates for greater redistribution, efficiency and prosperity, it still relies on corporate power to provide the digital infrastructure, and as such, risks tying the European economy to the control thereof. Then, by combining sociotechnical and constitutional imaginaries, this paper purports to show how the idea data as a source of powerful innovation and its access and circulation promising redistribution also work as a tool for the self-empowerment of the European constitutional project.