Patrice Riemens on Mon, 26 May 2014 15:53:16 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> Ippolita Collective, In the Facebook Aquarium Part Two, |
Ippolita Collective, In the Facebook Aquarium, Part Two The Libertarian World Domination Project: Hacking, Social Network(s), Activism and Institutional Politics Social networks as seen through the anarcho-capitalist lens - or the management of sociality through Big Data. (section 4, continued) Profiling marks the pledge for automatic, instant freedom: contextualised ads, research into the users' sentiments so that everyone gets a personalised, 'bespoken' ad, so as to promptly realize a click-thru sale, followed by the disposal of the purchase as soon as possible in order to ... order a new one. We, the users, are in this all 'suspects' of sorts, whose most intimate details must be known so as to satisfy our compulsive craving for ever new, yet instantly obsolete objects. The fake issue of confidentiality is also regularly being bandied about, but the issue itself seems only to arise for real once confidentiality has been breached. This usually goes together with shocked, shocked rants about the shameful and pushy immorality of a system that divides people into categories. And high-octane paranoid (conspiracy) theories are rife in the era of Big Data. But the real, much more concrete, and also much more concerning issue is about the individuals themselves, not the amorphous mass we are all part of. On the one hand, people want to be profiled, and on the other, whatever we do in order to avoid profiling, our digital footprint sticks to us like glue: no way we can opt out once enlisted in the army of the data-feeding-data-suppliers, aka /prosumers/ (all at once producers and consumers). For some time already, a massive debate has been raging about the gross abuse of the /data mining/ that takes place to make profiling possible [31]. New lines of digital discrimination are being created, related to the degree of access: which researchers, which institutions, which groups have actually both the means and the opportunity to put these data to use? What are the rules, what are the limits - and: who decides? Here is not the place to go into all these issues in detail [32]. Let's stick to our main point. This is not about going against progress (and its promise of a brilliant future), nor to escape into ludism, or into its exact opposite: crypto(graphy). To hide serves no purpose, neither does the refusal to make concessions to the present (order of things). What should be done is to get a clear understanding of Big Data and profiling, in so far as they are part and parcel of concrete strategies to arrive at a society shaped by anarcho-capitalism, the ideology according to which everyone is 'free' to ransack everybody else. We do not dig this 'utopia', for sure. We rather would call it a dystopia of control and auto(self)-control. (Yet) We are, bit by bit, and very swiftly nonetheless, going from a world endowed with signification, rich as it is with relationships we are developing for our own benefit, to one that finds significance only through relationships (pre-)determined by machines. It looks like as if we no longer need neither theories nor practices that are grounded in personal belief and validated by personal experience. The status of knowledge is thereby transformed, now that data are supposed to speak for themselves. Knowledge suddenly becomes self-evident and impose itself as a certainty. Statistical correlations determine existing links between things and direct relationships between people. We do no longer shape a discourse: the data have taken over the floor. This is the pipe dream of a society ruled by data, where the role of the human subject has been blanked out to all practical purposes. All the human remnant needs to do is to obediently accept to be 'freed' (of everything), including from the possibility to choose and to desire. Give us ever more powerful machines, hand over all your data, be transparent with the machines, and we will be able to foretell the (radiant) future - the future of the market, of course. We fly above the world, we observe it from the outside, we see oceans of data, expanding at a vertiginous rate, only to be swamped by tsunamis of social crazes, as sudden as fleeting, occupying all available space before making room for the next upstart. Mass sentiment can be analyzed, and the aggregate opinion is easy to distill by way of /sentiment analysis/ and /opinion mining/ [33]. All this while we, as enthusiast and willing victims, love to be 'free' consumers: generalised, global recording is the price to be paid if we want to be truly 'free' to choose. The algorithm will tell us what we really want: it already advises us on which book to buy on Amazon.com, it edits our searches on Google, it suggests us which just-out film we should see, and it tells us which music best suits our taste. It is an algorithm which points out our potential friends on Google+ and on LinkedIn, and also those subscribers we might want to follow on Twitter. Algorithms are paying attention in our stead, and encourage us to socialise the right way. (Before soon) It will be no longer necessary to desire whatever what, since the algorithm will see and foresee for us. Which will be the equivalent of seeing with 'the eye of God', who is able to read the future in the crystal ball in which the information deluge rages. Open your heart, let your body be cut and formatted in usable chunks, speak out your mind, tell us where you are (now), what you are doing (there) and who is your current company. Don't think, say it all, now, and you will obtain all you desire, even without knowing yet what you actually desire. Inexpressible vertigo (in the literal sense of what 'cannot be expressed'), infantile enthusiasm (in the original sense of 'infans': the one who doesn't talk yet), mystical ecstasy in front of the Matrix uncoiling under our very eyes. The words and the pictures referring to Big Data often take on a religious tone, and that a bit too often to be just fortuitous. The fetish dangling behind the knowledge society of the Big Data belongs to a populist, techno-fascist religiousness, since once a sufficient quantity of data has been gathered, any hypothesis can be proven. Just as with the Bible, the Q'uran, the Torah, or any sacred book, the scope for interpretation is endless. And it is precisely because Big data embrace incredibly more stuff, that each and every assumption can be held up and proven. Statistics vouch for everything, but prove nothing, they are allegedly scientific proofs of highly ideologic presupposition. (to be continued) Next time: real and digital life explained ... -------------- [31] Dino Pedreschi et al., "Big data mining, fairness and privacy. A vision statement towards an interdisciplinary roadmap of research" ?Privacy Observatory/ 2011 http://www.kdnuggets.com/2011/10/big-data-mining-fairness-privacy.html No wonder mainstream publications like /The Economist/ call for more transparency for the sake of security, confusing thereby security with extension of control and surveillance - perhaps deliberately so. http://www.economist.com/node/15579717 "The data deluge: Businesses, governments and society are only starting to tap its vast potential" [32] For a good approach to this issue see Dana Boyd & Kate Crawford: "Six Provocations for Big Data", /A Decade in Internet Time: Symposium on the Dynamics of the Internet and Society/, September 2011 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1926431 [33] The last-born device for the automated analysis of sentiments and opinions by way of semantic systems (at time of publication of the original book in Italian -transl) was the Sentics Computing: http://sentic.net ("Helping machines to learn, leverage, love.") WKP entry on Sentiment Analysis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentiment_analysis (for recent developments and a lot sources) ----------------------------- Translated by Patrice Riemens This translation project is supported and facilitated by: The Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/portal/) The Antenna Foundation, Nijmegen (http://www.antenna.nl - Dutch site) (http://www.antenna.nl/indexeng.html - english site under construction) Casa Nostra, Vogogna-Ossola, Italy # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org