The proliferation of environmentally oriented programs within the tech industry, and the industry's coinciding efforts toward data and technology democratization, generate concerns about the status of environmental data within digital economy. While the accumulation of digital personal data has been a cornerstone of domination of the data analytics industry, many believe environmental data to be a source of “untapped potential.” The potential of environmental data, the argument goes, would benefit equally the digital economy, environmental sciences, and academic data and artificial intelligence experts. This article analyzes the proliferation of the rhetoric about open environmental data by focusing on Microsoft's Planetary Computer cloud computing program and computer vision experts who curate and use biodiversity data stored on Microsoft's servers. Through an analytical framework of sociotechnical imaginaries, the article draws connections between visions of future for environmental knowledge production and governance promoted by Microsoft and the work of computer vision experts intending to benefit from the potential of environmental data as machine learning training sets while at the same time helping environmental sciences. Although environmental data on the Planetary Computer is democratized, it nonetheless becomes a valued asset to data economy, but often with unintended consequences, such as enabling citizen science biodiversity data to be used by state surveillance apparatus. The article challenges the view that data's democratization is unproblematically serving environmental sciences by examining the consequences of imaginaries of democratization emerging from the data industry leaders and processes of nonmonetary valuation of environmental data by experts who curate these datasets.

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民主化的想象和开放环境数据的价值：微软行星计算机分析

科技行业内以环境为导向的项目的激增，以及该行业对数据和技术民主化的同时努力，引发了人们对数字经济中环境数据状况的担忧。虽然数字个人数据的积累一直是数据分析行业主导地位的基石，但许多人认为环境数据是“未开发潜力”的来源。有人认为，环境数据的潜力将使数字经济、环境科学、学术数据和人工智能专家同样受益。本文通过重点关注微软的行星计算机云计算程序以及管理和使用存储在微软服务器上的生物多样性数据的计算机视觉专家，分析了有关开放环境数据的言论激增。通过社会技术想象的分析框架，本文将微软推动的环境知识生产和治理的未来愿景与计算机视觉专家的工作联系起来，这些专家打算从环境数据作为机器学习训练集的潜力中受益，同时时间帮助环境科学。尽管行星计算机上的环境数据已经民主化，但它仍然成为数据经济的宝贵资产，但往往会带来意想不到的后果，例如使国家监视机构能够使用公民科学生物多样性数据。本文通过研究数据行业领导者出现的民主化想象的后果以及管理这些数据集的专家对环境数据的非货币评估过程，对数据民主化毫无问题地服务于环境科学的观点提出了挑战。