Commentary: Diogenes and the Tyrants of Data

I’m a Socrates kind of guy myself; like his giddy gaddy style, his ‘show me the money’ approach to belief; and I think maybe I understand his hemlock manoeuvre all too well. After all, democracy’s not for everyone, right?

But Diogenes! Now there’s a man who’d a handled this digital age rather effortlessly. Don’t get me wrong: Socrates and his relentless deconstructions were a hoot, but Diogenes had gumption and attitude. Debasing his Daddy’s dollars; strutting around with his daytime lamp looking for an honest man; homeless and sleeping in a ceramic jar (I once spent a winter’s night in a Goodwill box reading the Portable Nietzsche–does that count?); and generally revelling in his counter-culture ribaldry; he was a jester with a gesture the Romans later called digitus impudicus. O, one wakes up smiling at his antics and wanting to crow, “Up yours, too, Diogenes!” Brothers in arms, as it were.

While Socrates found democracy a little too Orwellian for his tastes and fell into a doubt pout, Diogenes goosed the rooster. He’d have been perfect for an age of Big Data and its appeal to pseudo-scientific analysis (for political purposes, of course) and the way people eat it up like manna, believing in the magic of its authorial voice. Indeed, we are fat with over-trusting authority – call it our collective obeis-ity. Too many people seem to accept that with Big Data we have reached the point of Singularity, where humans and machines may merge in a digital stream that makes dialectical materialism obsolete and ushers in the Final Paradigm of humanity. As Diogenes would say (and here I’m translating), “I got your paradigm. I got your paradigm right here,” followed by his own digital stream into the River Heraclitus.

He’d have known that what we’re witnessing with Big Data is just the latest gimmick for exploiting human desire that is so infused –even after millennia of civilizing influences – with fear and insecurity. We are witnessing the rise of global totalitarianism on the back of Big Data and its delivery system, the Internet – a central information system we plug into together that replaces our central nervous system. But it won’t matter.

Men will always play with the latest flint hammer toys and will always buy more beer if you sex up the suds. Women will struggle with being in the world -- with and without the need for such men. Little will change for the masses, with their not-so-quiet desperation; and the eggheads, who thought it all up, will crack into omelettes at the first sign of proffered ‘research’ cash and/or an ego octane boost. We may be addicted to da g’rithm, but Big Data is just one more system that will fail us for a number of reasons.

First, ‘data’ is not God, or, rather, it is. Powerful in its stim and absence of certainty, an absence necessitating oracles, gatekeepers and messiahs to fathom for us (see Voltaire). Data itself is meaningless without interpretation; and every system is built around an agenda that serves to constrain the interpretation. But also, a datum is not a fact, and a fact does not in itself indicate the presence of a truth. Life is in color, full of semiotic kaleidoscoping, no matter how much the controlling neocon symbolists see things in black and white.

This brings up the main problem with Big Data and its analysis – who controls the mode of production? The rise of Big Data is itself part of the process of normalizing the all-intrusive surveillance regime. The space between the ears of We the People is the final frontier and ripe for singular exploitation. Our brains are colonies, electrical storms of desire keened for exploitation.

The problem is not with Big Data, per se, which offers some astounding new ‘takes’ on the human experience (and I’m actually a Singularity fan-boy), but that, as always, the wrong people are in charge of the system. By and large, conservatives, back in the day, and neocons in the now, have used the system to force their agenda on the public, which has largely been in the role of world cop and interventionist (read: neoliberal expansionist) since about the time the US began developing their waterboarding techniques in the Philippines during the Spanish-American War. Thus, today, when you hear expressions from politicians that begin with, “The data tell us…,” you might want to scratch your bum and walk away. The data don’t tell us diddly: the filters do.

There are already plenty of examples of how data can be abused by the wrong people in charge. Take, for instance, the Florida debacle of the 2000 presidential election. Choicepoint, the database company that provided false felony indicators which illegally eliminated thousands of Democrat-leaning voters, was a company run by conservatives (old Cold Warrior and PNACker Richard Armitage was on its board until a few months before the election). And by, in essence, upholding the efficacy of the false data, the US Supreme Court decided the data didn’t matter, as it did not support the desired outcome (i.e., a Bush victory). Because they got away with it, similar voting data scandals have become more prevalent, as investigative Greg Palast recently exposed in an award-winning piece.

Another case of skewed data, with important public interest implications, was that cited by the Boston-based data analyst company, Recorded Future, which told Dina Temple-Raston of NPR, who uncritically passed the ‘analysis’ along to her drive-time constituency, that, based on their analysis of the data, Edward Snowden’s leaks were tantamount to treason and had ‘put lives at risk’. And while Glenn Greenwald was quick to take Dana to task for being a privileged sycophant of power, more emphasis should have been placed on the source of the analysis – Recorded Future, which specializes in predictive analysis of the type consistent with disposition matrices – was a Google-CIA start-up, with current contracts to national security interests. Presumably, this is an algorithmic detail.

However, it is the deleterious effect on privacy and creativity that make the Big Data phenomenon so existentially threatening to so many individuals around the world. While the neoliberals conquer what’s left of the free market economies of the world with tax underwritten derivative gambles and growing debt slavery for a growing percentage of the expanding population, the neocons have declared the Internet a battle zone, and democracies can’t exist on the battleground.

There was a time when the American Exceptionalist message had real traction, and, for a while, perhaps, for good reason, but those days are gone. Now the message to the world is: We don’t need congresses or parliaments or diets, when a more effective and expeditious means to getting things done is by Executive fiat based on ‘careful data analyses’. The message is the Supreme Court will ignore data that grinds against a partisan agenda. The message is its okay and necessary to spy on others as intrusively as possible, and as more spy apps hit the market our complicity in our own demise will soon be complete. The message is democracy is over.

As I ride closer and closer to the sunset, more like Sancho Panza than Quixote, frankly, it is with a sense of release from a phenomenal world that has proven to be largely beyond my ken. Actually, not like Sancho or the Don at all, but rather like Edward G. Robinson in those final moments of his last screen role in Soylent Green. If I depart with some sorrow, it is for those loved ones left behind who must face a world unnecessarily torn apart by dark and malevolent forces, by people you can no longer trust. I don’t envy the future; and maybe the most tragic twist of humankind is that the very people in control, who have worked so hard to destroy it all, will most likely be the world’s survivors, overseers of the molten Hell of their own creation.

There’s no use decrying Socrates’ hemlock. In the end, we all pick our own poison. And some sinking into soma will want to recall their roads not taken and their lover’s quarrel with world. But, me, I pray to Diogenes for the strength as I go under Beethoven’s 7th or Keith Jarrett’s Arbour Zena to raise my finger and take succour in its erectile diss function one last time.