From: Salon
The tech world talks of liberty and innovation while invading privacy and surveilling us all. It must end now
Why has Big Data so quickly become a part of industry dogma? Beyond the tremendous amounts of money being thrown at Big Data initiatives, both in research dollars and marketing efforts designed to convince enterprise clients of Big Data’s efficacy, the analytics industry plays into long-held cultural notions about the value of information. Despite Americans’ overall religiosity, our embrace of myth and superstition, our surprisingly enduring movements against evolution, vaccines, and climate change, we are a country infatuated with empiricism. “A widespread revolt against reason is as much a feature of our world as our faith in science and technology,” as Christopher Lasch said. We emphasize facts, raw data, best practices, instruction manuals, exact directions, instant replay, all the thousand types of precise knowledge. Even our love for gossip, secrets, and conspiracy theories can be seen as a desire for more privileged, inside types of information— a truer, more rarified knowledge. And when this knowledge can come to us through a machine—never mind that it’s a computer program designed by very fallible human beings—it can seem like truth of the highest order, computationally exact. Add to that a heavy dollop of consumerism (if it can be turned into a commodity, Americans are interested), and we’re ready to ride the Big Data train.
Information is comforting; merely possessing it grounds us in an otherwise unstable, confusing world. It’s a store to draw on, and we take threats to it seriously. Unlike our European brethren, we evince little tolerance for the peculiarities of genre or the full, fluid spectrum between truth and lies. We regularly kick aside cultural figures (though, rarely, politicians) who we’ve determined have misled us.
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