An Autonomía Perspective on Chile’s Astronomical Data Industry

The final speaker in this AoIR 2022 session is Sebastián Lehuedé, whose focus is on data governance in astronomical data, with particular focus on the astronomical installations in the Atacama desert in Chile. The Atacama now hosts a large number of such observatories (often run by US and EU organisations), due to its remoteness; they produce some 16.5 petabytes of data per year, and the Atacama has been described as the Silicon Valley of data science. The state of Chile has also encouraged these developments, while Chilean researchers are granted only 10% of observatory time.

This is also seen as part of Chile’s ambitions to become a knowledge economy, and projects such as the Chilean Virtual Observatory, the Data Observatory, and Datagonia advance beyond the focus on astronomical data to mainstream data centre and data processing industries in Chile. Many such initiatives work with international government and industry partners.

These initiatives show the high degree of inventiveness that has been put into practice, but all exist under a framework of ‘development’ that replicates western understandings of capitalist progress. Perhaps it is necessary to learn instead from the history of struggle in Latin America (or Abha Yala, to give it its pre-colonial name) as we think about data governance.

This can be explored through the notion of Autonomía, or collective self-determination. This is a form of social organisation and a relational understanding of communities and territories, and autonomous especially from the heteropatriachal capitalist modern or colonial world system. From this perspective, data governance is different from the open data and data sovereignty approaches that are prevalent in western critical data studies.

This perspective of Autonomía reveals three key frameworks. One dominant framework in data science is one of epistemic obedience: to create an aspiration to become collaborators, to engender sources of epistemic obedience, to disembed data producers from their local contexts, and to promote data conformism – in the present case, for instance, to turn the observatories into neutral data producers without an agenda of their own. A second concern is extractivism: perpetuating a centuries-old dynamic of appropriating raw resources, and promoting both technoscientific extractivism that involves scientists and engineers and ontological extractivism that ignores Indigenous peoples. And a third concern is territorial struggle: as the physical infrastructure encroaches further on Indigenous lands, it creates a conflict between perceptions of territory as an asset to be controlled, or as a system of relations between stakeholders.

The Autonomía perspective, then, changes the content and terms of the debate; is non-aligned (neither with the US or China, in the present context), it follows the decolonial turn, internalises, moves beyond personal data, and provides alternative proposals; and it builds community networks and free software. We need to think about data and technology from the perspective of theories and concepts that speak to the histories of struggle in the local contexts, especially in the Global South.