Data and political change
Writing around 1915, the sociologist Georg Simmel observed that ‘the vast intensive and extensive growth of our technology…entangles us in a web of means, and means toward means, more and more intermediate stages, causing us to lose sight of our real ultimate ends’. These reflections on the role of technology in what he referred to as the crisis of culture were, of course, a response to very different political times, yet the sentiment of this passage echoes on. Our technological systems have increased in intensity, moving deeper into our lives, whilst spreading outwards into networks. Our media push inwards whilst reaching out. The result, for Simmel, is that we are entangled in these systems, they add layer upon layer, making it hard to separate out the means from the ends. His point is that amongst all these layered technologies and fragments of information we actually lose sight of our sense of purpose. In short, the problem modernity brings is that we get so caught up in what we can do, so distracted by the layers of tasks, interactions and process, that it becomes hard to maintain a sense of direction or focus.
Few writers had a better grasp of the gathering forces of modernity than Simmel. David Frisby went as far as to describe him as the ‘first sociologist of modernity’. Simmel who died in 1918, wrote on varied topics, from fashion and food to city life and secret societies, but he always had an eye on the unfolding consequences of modernity that he could see around him. With sensitivity to those early shifts, his writings carry a sense of the direction things were heading.
Simmel had long been interested in how modern life was changing everyday experiences. In a piece from the early 1900s he reflected on what these changes meant for the senses (described in a bit more detail in this piece). His conclusion was that we end up becoming ‘short-sensed’. Meaning that we feel things up close ever more intensely whilst feeling distant from the wider world. We simply can’t cope with the sensory overload brought by the unfathomable information and the many experiential stimuli, so we focus more intently on the immediate. With modernity life was taking on an increasingly ‘fragmentary character’, he later argued. The more fragments we are faced with, he claimed in his later works, the more we are able to assemble the bits to suit and reinforce our conception of the world — our conception of the world gives a frame for those fragments, which in turn, over time, shape that frame. In a wide-ranging and thoughtful piece on the changing relations between technology and democracy, Jamie Bartlett points out that the ability to find examples that we can curate or compile to support our views is a bigger issue than the so called ‘fake news’. This ability to manoeuvre the fragments in support of an idealised or particular world-view was something Simmel observed and began to conceptualise. The greater the range of fragments the greater the possibilities for cementing those perspectives, and also the greater the possibility for people to assemble very different world views from the shards of information. In his final book, published in 1918, he wrote that:
‘“world” is a form through which we assemble the whole of the given — actual or potential — into a unity. Depending upon the ultimate concept directing this unification, multiple worlds arise out of the same material: the world of knowledge, the artistic, the religious’.
If this is the case, then we can imagine how, with our current personalised, on-demand and algorithmic media, the fragmentary character of life Simmel was observing will have escalated along with the possibilites for world making. Not only are there far more fragments, the way we encounter those fragments has changed in recent years.
Over the last 20 years we have built a massive data infrastructure around ourselves, with mobile devices, algorithmic processing, social media, online shopping, GPS tracking and so on. In the late 1980s the social theorist Donna Haraway had a strong sense of what was on the horizon. We would end up, Haraway foresaw, interfaced into our environment in multiple and inescapable ways. This would change the boundary conditions, the points where we connect into the world. As Haraway predicted, there is an inescapable quality to the connections that have emerged with these interfaces changing our social lives, our leisure, our work, our bodies. The context in which politics is playing out has been irrevocably changed. This has been exposed in various ways in recent months, triggering concern about how data and tech might be eroding the structures of a functioning democracy. As well as the more obvious cases of data misuse, the bizarre recent stories of the microtargeting of the social media feeds of Corbyn and his inner circle to mislead them about the Labour Party campaign adverts, gives a flavour of how the rules are being redrawn. That is, of course, the tip of a big data iceberg that is producing all kinds of outcomes and twists, as well as piling many more layers of the type Simmel was referring to.
Within this broader context of fragmentary media, new power structures and connectivity, data analysis is no bit part player. In recent years it has become a central character driving the scenes, plots and dialogue of social life. The spread of data-led thinking and analytic technologies seems unrelenting. As those involved in data analytics pursue an uninterrupted vision of the world, our lives are increasingly exposed to its unyielding stare.
The book I’ve recently completed, The Data Gaze: Capitalism, Power and Perception, looks at how visions of the power of data are woven into the infrastructures and practices of data analytics. A persuasive set of promises are attached to data analytics that both perpetuate and deploy certain visions of knowledge, life and the future. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this is a vision in which data will enable us to be better, quicker, more entrepreneurial, more efficient and more competitive. These persuasive ideals not only speak to a wider ideology, they also afford the expansion and intensification of data analytics. The analytics industry seeks to promote certain ideals and visions in order to afford the spread of their products. The result is that these ideals and ways of thinking become coded into the very data intensive infrastructures and spaces that we now occupy — they become part of how data are used, how we are judged through our data and so on. These ideals are often in keeping with what is often referred to as a neoliberal rationality, where a kind of model of the market is rolled out into the social world, but it would be a mistake to see them only through this lens. The ideals coded into these infrastructures are various and mutating, meaning that we can’t simply turn to neoliberalism to explain away these changes.
To pick one example, one dominant idea is that the world is speeding up and that the real-time view provided by data analytics is the only way that we might possibly keep up. The notion that the world is getting quicker is perpetuated as a way of embedding the ideals of rapid data-informed decision making into organisational and social structures. The core idea is that data enable people to get ahead of the game or that these analytics provide them with an edge on their competitors. Here we see the model of the market and notions of hyper-competitiveness solidifying — alongside these we are told that we need to constantly be picking up the pace. Such ideas are coded into the way that the software projects behind data analytics are imagined and designed which, in turn, transfers into the implementation of these systems. The software on which data analytics relies is locked into a perpetual pursuit of the perfect insight, with numerous updates and new projects evolving all the time. Similarly, the data analyst is pushed to clean and render the data ready for decision making to occur in the quickest possible time. Competitive speediness is just one dimension of a range of embedded ideals (which are discussed in detail in The Data Gaze); these have also become a material part of how we live, with these ideals shaping the way that analytics are engineered and integrated into organisations of various types.
If ideologies and ideals are coded into our infrastructures in this way, then it becomes hard to imagine how they might be shifted without unpicking and rebuilding the systems that mediate our consumption, our social networks, our interactions, our institutions and our workplaces. The dense layering of technolgicially afforded ‘means’ that Simmel spoke about make such a task almost unimaginable. It is hard to envision an entirely new infrastructure emerging from beneath our feet, especially given the time and resources behind these data rich architectures.
If we shift the broader rhetoric in a different direction and if political change happens on the level of ideology, we might wonder if our data-rich infrastructures will hold back genuine change at the level of our social structures, organisations and everyday experiences. The problem might be that the rhetoric becomes completly detached form the mediated materiality of our everyday lives — with change being created in the discourse without a sense of how these vast intensive and extensive infrastructures might be challenged and reworked. Genuine change would be quite require quite a shift in direction. Not only are data analytics so deep within our commercial, state and organisational structures, so are the modes of thinking that accompany them.
As our infrastructures have become more active and with so much thinking embedded in them, from algorithmic modelling through to notions of AI and machine learning, so the possibilities for a more rigid codification of ideologies has emerged. If we seek social and political change, then we can’t just think in terms of ideology, we will also need to reimagine the data analytic structures in which we live. The means of knowing is as important in this context as the means of production — in fact, these two things blur together where data underpins capitalism. Leaving our infrastructures as they are, even if we shift our political tones and governance, might render that change superficial. The ends would remian detached from these layers of means. We will continue to live with a kind of distributed power that is no longer really led by any central ideological force but which is so entrenched that it roams headless across our lives. Becuse it is so embededded in organisational strcutures, power can work through data without a central nervous system and so can only really be disrupted by attending to its tacit presence and limits.
The ICO has already called for new electoral rules around data use, alongside this we need a more forward thinking and anticipatory regulatory approach. On the larger scale regulation and restructuring are needed together — there are some creative emerging ideas on how to regulate platforms, such as in the recent report published by IPPR. New policies around the ownership and use of data, platforms, algorithms and the like, from social media to workplace rights, will be crucial. But we need to also work across different scales, down to the everyday and organisational level. Here we will need new rules about the use of data in the workplace, in service provision, in transaction and credit. We will also need to rethink how data are used in public institutions and systems of governance. Beyond this we need a new radical educational agenda — a data citizenship programme in schools and colleges perhaps — that enables people to understand this changing environment, what it means for them and what it means for society. This data citizenship programme could be used to create an understanding and awareness of the uses and impact of data — which can then feed into how these are tackled, managed, reshaped and approached in the future. Political vision is crucial but so is an attentiveness to the infrastructures we occupy. If we continue to be entangled in our technology in the way that Simmel observed, then any political movement that seeks genuine change will need to be data savvy. Only then might we be in a position to change the coding of inequality, to reshape these systems towards progressive goals and to separate out the layered means from our ultimate ends.
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The Data Gaze can now be preordered in paperback from the usual outlets. A piece describing the writing of the book can be found here.
