I think that history is a way of dealing with
data.
One of the things I’m really struck by when
I give lectures in Silicon Valley, for example,
or when I talk to people who are doing things—that
I’m very impressed by, and I’m not going
to say that I completely understand them—but
one of the things I’m struck by is a certain
kind of naïveté that data automatically
produces knowledge, which it doesn’t at
all.
I mean the total amount of data in the universe
is the total amount of data in the universe.
How we choose to conceptualize it, categorize
it, that’s up to us.
And creating larger and larger databases doesn’t
actually solve that problem.
On the contrary, it can persuade people that
quantity is somehow going to automatically
become quality, which just isn’t so; it’s
just not true.
One of the things I’ve become a little bit
stuck on or even obsessed with is the idea
that people who are, for example, going to
be computer science majors or engineering
majors should take some kind of humanities
minor, that there should be a history or a
philosophy or whatever, a minor or major so
that they don’t stop thinking about the
questions of right and wrong, or the questions
of the why and not just the how.
Because people who are very accomplished in
fields that involve data, I’m going to put
this very directly, they often sound very
naïve when they talk about questions of why.
And this is true of people who have made a
lot of money in fields involving data as well;
they get to a point where they can have a
great deal of influence on the world, but
often, and again I’m just going to be very
direct about this, the way they talk about
the world and the way they’re going to exercise
an influence on it can be startlingly naïve
from a humanities point of view.
There are going to be whole swaths of the
world which they think they see but they really
don’t.
And there’s a whole second problem here,
which I’m just going to name and you can
do with it what you want, and that is the
way that we are data producers and not just
data consumers.
I think that freedom involves the ability
to know something about how your own data
is being used; or one way in the 20th century
to think about freedom is: what’s the balance
between the data I’m unknowingly launching
out into the world all the time and the data
that’s coming back at me?
One way to think about the current risk of
un-freedom in this country and it generally
is “I am leaking all kinds of objective
stuff, which can be used against me.”
I mean in trivial ways like by giving me a
worse hotel room or whatever, but also in
significant ways by targeting political messages
to me.
But what’s coming back to me may be very
subjective in the sense that it’s designed
to manipulate how I see the world.
Getting that balance right I think is essential
to freedom.
I mean some of the stuff that launches out
for me should not just be data that’s going
to allow people to run protocols to figure
out how to manipulate me, some of the stuff
that comes out for me should be like, what’s
really good for me?
And some of the stuff that comes back to me
shouldn’t just be these manipulative indices,
it should be the facts that I actually need
to be a good citizen.
For me that’s an interesting balance between
humanities and technology.
And what I’ve noticed is that since we don’t
think about it this way we basically punted
on the whole question by accepting this “politics
of inevitability” that the Internet is going
to mean enlightenment, more data means better
understanding, and so on.
Since we punt on that question we find ourselves
I think in a very precarious position where
that humans are actually just kind of holding
on by their fingernails to a sense of being
individuals while a whole lot of data is basically
being used against them all the time.
So again, I don’t want to be a fatalist
about this, I think it can be solved, but
I think thinking about it that way like as
a balance where the data that comes out of
me has to be governed by some notion of rights.
And I would also say the data that comes back
at me has to be governed by some notion of
rights.
I think people do have a basic right of access
to factuality or maybe we should be thinking
about a basic right of access to factuality
because without that, without access to data
that makes sense to an average citizen at
the right time it’s very hard to have any
of the other rights, or the other rights,
I think, are very hard to maintain.
