Re: <nettime> Proposition on Peak Data

Sometimes I think all attempts to distinguish, using a typology or not, helpful from harmful data is a displacement of the political question of "in whose hands"?

Even Carlo's responses, loaded with reference to "wrong hands" and "unchosen few" return always to the hope that there is invasive and non-invasive data. For me the problem is that all data is intimate because, for better or for worse, people have intimate relationships with things (e.g. the street they grew up on, on Open Street Maps)...or if you want to split hairs, they care very much about things because things mediate their intimate connection with themselves and others.

I actually think that the data-oil analogy is apt for exactly the same reason. They both muddle inside and outside, and their use affects everyone negatively in the long run while giving many, many people (in massive disproportion, according to their existing wealth) the means to more expedient accomplishment of their short term goals.

This is because data is the "how" and not the "what" of meaningful action. It does not and can not set an agenda for human beings at the outset (much like sense data is meaningful for an organism only on the basis of its preexisting organization, what it loves and what it hates). Data justifies agendas and facilitates their coming to fruition.

Data "scientists" and entrepreneurs who claim that data suggests courses of action simply seek to use the veil of technology, attributing their already sickeningly disproportionate power over others to the machine's suggestions about what's next. Data is a tool of interpretive/ideological power. I think this is the brunt of the claim that data has taken over the predictive ability of the humanities.

I find "impressionist data approaches" a very potentially fruitful avenue. Thank you, Geert. It brings to mind two possibilities, the first (unrealistic one) is that people who already have the (computing) power to interpret swathes of big data use interpretive lenses...say, psychoanalytic or other humanitarian ones, in order to think twice (or three or n times) about how behavior does not equal intention. Currently the predictive "power" of data can tell us e.g. that an alcoholic is likely to have another drink but obviously doesn't say anything about how much he wants to stop.

The second is an impressionist approach..but not to "data". I guess it's an impressionist approach to the projects for which data, that is always personal in the sense that it affects us collectively, are used. I am not a data naturalist in the sense Joe describes (matter, energy, data), or rather, agree that biodata is the only natural form of data. Data emerges as relevant from the world soup to something that already has an agenda (be it an organism, a corporation, a country). So, I wish for a world of project proposals - agendas laid bare - which people can support by giving the power of their data and data collection means. Some crypto projects seem to want to go in this direction but then become instead for routes to trivially monetize data, browser by browser, or only enable collective choice through data about token holding. There are plenty of data commons frameworks, and Elinor Ostrom has some excellent writings from a couple decades ago on managing contributions and use of e.g. university archives.

I don't know what this looks like "out in the wild", but maybe it's the difference between Facebook's emotional manipulation study and the standards for consent required of researchers using human subjects? If only the market were regulated, and had the associated humility, of this standard of consent! I guess the message to data "scientists" is: if you're really a scientist, let research standards regulate you! We dare you!

-Emaline

On Sun, Apr 24, 2022 at 10:27 AM Joseph Rabie <joe@overmydeadbody.org> wrote:

The denunciation of Big Data published by Geert Lovink a few weeks ago continues to fidget uncomfortably in my mind (as with Carlo, it would seem). While Geert makes a convincing case for throwing off the tyrannical shackles that data enslaves us with, his position is very much absolutist. He does not propose a categorisation of data typologies, that might allow one to distinguish between what is harmful, and what has proven to be helpful. The condemnation is categoric. And while Geert does not appear to call for the abolition of all data, he definitely considers it a negative thing whose place in society must be severely curtailed.

This assertion of the globally negative nature of data has been the occasion for some contradictory musings on my part. Is data part of the capitalistic-industrial complex that is destroying the planet, as Geert writes? Or does it have redeeming features, or much more than that, can one possibly consider data as being a component of the “natural” order of things?

There are continual comparisons between how the mind handles data and the way computers do it. It has been pointed out, for instance, that the workings of the mind itself is algorithmic in nature. And while this is presented as a “revelation” (pleasant or unpleasant), it should not come as a surprise, since humans clearly invented computers in our own image. Or at least in the image of rational, technical reasoning, that dimension of our psychic existence that is readily replicated by the execution of a computer programme. The computer provides an abstract, conceptual environment capable of mediating human interpretations of things, in which data plays a primordial role.

It’s this comparison between the mind and the computer that incites a coterie of hyper-wealthy individuals to espouse the technicist myth of a so-called singularity, achieving a sufficiently sophisticated computer that will enable them to upload the contents of their brain, somehow translating neuron-data into digital data. After which they’ll be able to live forever, released from the limitations of their naturally degrading bodies.

Harari wrote critically about this in “Homo Deus”, pointing out the spurious conceit of such an endeavour, because we have no scientific grasp on the nature of consciousness, which will not be transferred magically into the machine. Human minds are endowed with meaning, while so-called artificial intelligence makes calculations whose very meaning needs an alive human being in order to be understood.

It’s the question of data in the cosmos that is so fascinating. The natural world is more than a duality between matter and energy. Data exists naturally, to the point that it would not be exaggerated to characterise the universe as being composed of a trilogy: matter, energy and data.

For the moment, the only natural data we know of is biodata. This is so with neurons stocking and manipulating the myriad informations that occupy each of our heads, as evoked above. Maybe in this respect consciousness is just an operating system, in a mechanistic view of our psyches. Or maybe speculation about the existence of a human soul are founded, who knows! Apart from thought processing information wilfully, our body uses data to function (move about, run itself, process food and energy, repair itself…).

What goes beyond this is how biodata in the form of genetic code defines us as creatures (and all other creatures), how it contains the blueprint that specifies us as organisms in enormously sophisticated detail. How at the moment of inception is set into action a programme (an application?) that goes about “automatically” executing the fabrication of what nine months later will constitute a viable human being.

>From the point of view of our current level of scientific knowledge, such a process that uses energy to convert data into living matter appears to be miraculous.

Best wishes -
Joe.

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