The advance of digital technology further and further into the nooks and crannies of our lives is based on an elementary trade-off. It supplies us with a great deal of convenience: It lets us communicate with one another wherever and whenever we want to. It provides us with instantaneous access to and limitless storage of media, everything from personal photos to films to most of the history of recorded music on a terabyte hard drive. It’s capable of building in a level of redundancy in our lives, preserving what we might otherwise forget and protecting us from oversights — if you lose tickets to an event, chances are the barcode on them can be canceled and new tickets issued to you. And if your credit card number is stolen, the bank may very well recognize suspicious purchases and notify you.
But in exchange for all this convenience, we sacrifice privacy and spontaneity. We permit all our public actions to be cataloged and processed, and we make ourselves completely and instantly accessible not just to our friends and family, but to marketers who seek to guide our behavior in contexts that they can detect and analyze perhaps even before we have a chance to, and also to the state, which may seek to stifle dissent before it has the opportunity to assemble and gather force. By allowing ourselves to be tracked and recorded and analyzed, we become willing parties to our own reification, to our assimilation into the giant digital data machine.
Obviously there is pleasure in this, not only in the way commercial interests take great pains to tailor the world for us, but also in the thrill of losing ourselves, of ceding responsibility. As the various entities processing our data coalesce, it will seem as though an all-powerful deity-like entity feeds us what it thinks we need to know to be happy in whatever situation we end up in. In short, we have an easier time navigating the world as we experience it because it has been preformatted by the institutions that surround us. Unfortunately our interests are more or less tangential to these institutions, whose primary concern is their own survival and growth.
Technology threatens to render our wishes irrelevant even as it pretends to cater to them — that is, it serves our needs as long as they are boiled down to the need for convenience, to consume faster and with maximum indiscriminateness. I feel this acutely when I find myself spending more time tagging and arranging my music files than I spend listening to my music. Part of that is a cognitive illusion, but a telling one — I’m listening to music the entire time I’m doing the iTunes bookkeeping work, but I’m concentrating on the data, not on the intricacies, harmonies, melodies, and hooks of the music. It barely breaks through, usually only when what’s playing is so irritating, I have to skip it.
What’s more, because of the general cultural push to digitize everything, I could conceivably work things so that I never again listen to a song I’ve already heard before. Not that anyone would do this, but the fact that it’s even possible confronts us with a entire new kind of pressure: to justify our contentment with what we have in the face of all we can get, most of the time for free. Our impatience with what we know intensifies when we know we can experience something new with little effort.
As a result, we start to face a time crunch. Knowing all that’s out there waiting for us, we start to try to consume faster, and one way of accomplishing that is to consume information about goods rather than allow goods to facilitate sensuous experiences. To authorize our moving on to the next thing, we need to satisfy ourselves that we are done with what we have. Processing it as data does just that.
Through my eagerness to process more and more stuff, I’ve ended up amassing an embarrassingly thorough knowledge of the surface details of pop culture — who wrote what and who sang what and who played on whose record and when this show was canceled or had this or that guest star or whatever. Worse, I tend to invest far too much significance in brandishing this knowledge in conversation as some kind of accomplishment, as if life were a big game of Jeopardy. This useless depot of detail is what a show like Family Guy tries to reward me for having accumulated. Getting to laugh at the show is a sort of booby prize.
Philosopher Theodor Adorno seemed to anticipate these problems with information, of the trap set for us of substituting clerical data processing for thought and experience in “The Schema of Mass Culture“, whose title alone suggests its pertinence to wholesale cultural digitization.
About culture, Adorno was something of a pessimist. He argued that mass culture, a reflection and paradigmatic example of monopoly capitalism, served to nullify the radical potential in art, debasing its forms and methods while acclimating audiences to mediocrity, alienation, hopelessness, and a paucity of imagination. It works to form individuals into a mass, integrating them into the manufactured culture, snuffing out alternative and potentially seditious ways for people to interact with one another while facilitating an ersatz goodwill for the existing order. “As far as mass culture is concerned, reification is no metaphor: It makes the human beings that it reproduces resemble things even where their teeth do not represent toothpaste and their careworn wrinkles do not evoke cosmetics.” The contours of our consciousness are produced by our culture, and advertisements reflect those dimensions while fostering their reproduction.
Adorno argues that art, in being manufactured for the masses, is reduced to the data about itself, in order to undermine art’s subversive potential: “The sensuous moment of art transforms itself under the eyes of mass culture into the measurement, comparison and assessment of physical phenomena.” As all of culture is being systemized during its digital conversion, it is becoming, at a key level, essentially the same, so much metadata to be tabulated in databases and organized on hard drives.
The underlying sameness of the medium for culture reveals the truth about the phantasmal differences in form and genre. As Adorno puts it, in his inimitable way, “the technicized forms of modern consciousness…transform culture into a total lie, but this untruth confesses the truth about the socio-economic base with which it has now become identical.” This means that we consumers can enact the same self-referential decoding process — figuring out which formulas and genres it is referencing, tabulating the attendant trivia — and this reinforces the same lesson of eternal sameness, in our best of all possible worlds.
The more the film-goer, the hit-song enthusiast, the reader of detective and magazine stories anticipates the outcome, the solution, the structure, and so on, the more his attention is displaced toward the question of how the nugatory result is achieved, to the rebus-like details involved, and in this searching process of displacement the hieroglyphic meaning suddenly reveals itself. It articulates every phenomenon right down to the subtlest nuance according to a simplistic two-term logic of “dos and don’ts,” and by virtue of this reduction of everything alien and unintelligible it overtakes the consumers.
The bounty of entertainment that the Internet and digitization has brought us is what Adorno would call “official culture” — that which is made to be reviewed and talked about by professional commentators and promoted by professional marketers and consumed commercially. With so much to know, so much novelty, it seems as though no one in their right mind could question the benevolence of this plenitude. There’s so much, you’d have to be nuts to not derive some satisfaction from it all. Think of all the stuff you can download!
However, participation in official culture, Adorno argues, becomes a matter of data collecting and the “culture business” then plays out as a contest. Products “require extreme accomplishments that can be precisely measured.” And in the numerical conversion, all the movements of the individual spirit become degraded and tamed and assimilated to the mass-produced cultural products on offer, which ultimately fail to gratify and perpetuate a spiritual hunger while occluding the resources that might have actually sated it. Pleasure becomes “fun”, thought becomes “information”, desire becomes “curiosity”.
But what could be wrong with curiosity? It seems like it should be an unadulterated good, a way of openly engaging with the world. Adorno, in a feat of rhetorical jujitsu, wants to have us believe it means the opposite. Because it is attuned not to anything more substantive than pop-culture trivia, curiosity “refers constantly to what is preformed, to what others already know.” It is not analytical or synthetic; it simply aggregates. “To be informed about something implies an enforced solidarity with what has already been judged.”
Everything worth knowing about, from a social perspective — anything you might talk about with acquaintances, say — has already been endorsed, is already presented as cool even before anyone had that authentic reaction to it. Cultural product is made with “cool” in mind, whereas authentic cool, from an Adornoesque standpoint anyway, must always be a by-product.
At the same time, curiosity suppresses genuine change, supplanting for it ersatz excitement for cynical repetitions — think of the fashion cycle, in which everything changes on the surface but nothing really changes. “Curiosity is the enemy of the new which is not permitted anyway,” Adorno writes. “It lives off the claim that there cannot be anything new and that what presents itself as new is already predisposed to subsumption on the part of the well-informed.” This means attention to surface details, which prompts “a taboo against inaccurate information, a charge that can be invoked against any thought.” Basically this means that in our cultural climate, your thoughts about, say, Eric Clapton’s guitar playing are invalid unless you know what model guitar he was playing and what studio he was recording in at the time. Trivia is used to silence the “inexpert”.
As a result “the curiosity for information cannot be separated from the opinionated mentality of those who know it all,” Adorno argues. Curiosity is “not concerned with what is known but the fact of knowing it, with having, with knowledge as a possession.” Life becomes a collection of data, and “as facts they are arranged in such a way that they can be grasped as quickly and easily as possible” — in a spreadsheet, for example, or a PowerPoint presentation. These media suit facts as opposed to thoughts, and encourage us to groom our data sheets for completeness and clarity rather than insight. “Wrenched from all context, detached from thought, they are made instantly accessible to an infantile grasp. They may never be broadened or transcended” — the metadata fields are unchangeable — “but like favorite dishes they must obey the rule of identity if they are not to be rejected as false or alien.” Works don’t seek to be understood; they only seek to be identified, tagged, labeled accordingly to make them superficially accessible.
What’s missing amid all the tags and labels and metadata fields is the space for a genuine aesthetic experience, a moment of negativity in which an alternative to what exists, what registers as “realistic” can be conceived. Instead, one feels obliged to keep up with official culture so as to not find oneself an outcast. People go along with what is not necessarily because they love pop culture but because “they know or suspect that this is where they are taught the mores they will surely need as their passport in a monopolized life.”
Pop-culture knowledge becomes a prerequisite for certain social opportunities, a way of signaling one’s normality, or one’s go-along-get-along nature. “Today, anyone incapable of talking in the prescribed fashion, that is of effortlessly reproducing the formulas, conventions and judgments of mass culture as if they were his own, is threatened in his very existence, suspected of being an idiot or an intellectual.”
That seems an exaggerated pronouncement, but when it comes up that someone has never knowingly heard a Coldplay or John Mayer song, or hasn’t seen an episode of American Idol I can find myself thinking, Really? Have you been under a rock? Are you lying? Why this makes me suspicious rather than elated for them, I don’t know. Adorno’s view reminds me of when I was a record reviewer and I tried to pretend there was inherent significance in the commercial output of E.L.O. or the Drive-By Truckers. But at the same time as the information about pop culture proliferates, and we all hold one another accountable for mastering it, we become more ignorant about politics and basic facts about how our economy operates.
The reduction of thought to data allows us to consume culture faster, enhance our throughput, and focus on accumulating more. The idea that you would concentrate on one work and explore it deeply, thoroughly, is negated; more and more, it becomes unthinkable, something it wouldn’t occur to anyone to try. “Curiosity” demands we press on fervently, in search of the next novelty.
Bearing all of this in mind, it would seem diligent to regard technology’s encroachments into our private lives with circumspection and skepticism. Because information technology makes so much of our private lives public and because it flattens our experience into a universal code of ones and zeros that threatens to annihilate our sense of its uniqueness, it’s natural and prudent to be ambivalent about IT and the dislocating change it incurs.
But The Numerati, a collection of profiles of mathematician data miners by frequent BusinessWeek contributor Stephen Baker, offers mostly token displays of such ambivalence. The book — whose chapters explore how digitized data about us can be used to make us the target for ads and political appeals, how it can be used to better surveil us at work and capture terrorists (or at least casino cheaters), how it can expose our health issues, and how it can predict the fate of our relationships — is not really for skeptics, though it does take some pains not to cheerlead. The book affords a comprehensive look at the ways in which the digitization of culture has inspired the thorough digitization of human behavior, recognizing both the potential benefits and the detriments.
Author: Stephen Baker
Book: Numerati
US publication date: 2008-08
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Formats: Hardcover
ISBN: 9780618784608
Image: http://images.popmatters.com/book_cover_art/b/baker-nuemerati.jpg
Length: 256
Price: $26.00
But Baker tends to regard invasive business practices as inevitable, the inescapable result of increased competition. Companies need to spy on their own customers, the logic goes, in order to know what they will want just in time to provide it to them, maximizing whatever logistical competitive advantage can thereby be derived. “Retailers simply cannot afford to keep herding us blindly through stores and malls, flashing discounts on Pampers to widowers in wheelchairs,” Baker warns in a typical passage. If you are not primarily worried about what companies can or can’t “afford”, the values implicit in the book can become bothersome.
Not all readers will celebrate when a company learns to shed its “barnacle” customers — i.e., the ones that try to keep companies to their word and make them deliver on their promises. Some might not be excited by the news that shopping carts can persuade people to buy more at the supermarket than they otherwise would have. Some won’t cheer the notion that computers can figure out who we vote for based on contextual clues, opening them up to a new slew of fundraising appeals (and possible discrimination).
Baker registers how dehumanizing and awful the world of surveillance and forced digitalization of our lives could turn out to be, but generally the instincts of the business journalist take over, and he tends to present corporate management’s side as the final word — our inevitable fate that we may as well start loving since we are powerless to alter it.
Think of the endless rows of workers threading together electronic cables in a Mexican assembly plant or the thousands of soldiers rushing into machine-gun fire at Verdun — even the blissed out crowd pushing through the turnstiles at a Grateful Dead concert. From management’s point of view, all of us in these scenarios might as well be nameless and faceless. Turning us into simple numbers was what happened in the industrial age. That was yesterday’s story.
The phrase yesterday’s story is enough to tip us off to Baker’s teleological impulses, while his elision of management’s point of view with that destiny, with the end of the story, with the point of view that shapes the story, is characteristic of the book as a whole. It is our fate to become numbers in the eyes of the powers that be, because it suits those powers that we be organized in that much-more-manageable fashion. But Baker would have us believe that history itself is responsible, not the institutions and those who profit by them.
A more fundamental problem lies with Baker’s account of the nature of the data about us. “When it comes to producing data,” he declares, “we are prolific.” This seems an innocuous enough statement, but it’s totally backward. Our behavior is simply our behavior; to us it is lived experience, memory, sense stimuli. It need not compute. So we don’t “produce” the data used to pigeonhole us so much as the technology used by us (or on us) collects our lived experience and transforms it into that data that institutions (corporations, the state) crave.
Technology works to have us reconceive ourselves as numbers, as the sum of datapoints, and then presents its manipulations of that data as the means for our personal extension, even though we are now limited to the field it has defined. “Once they have a bead on our data, they can decode our desires,” Baker notes, but it seems more appropriate to say that they encode it, trapping it in the mediated digital world. Amazon, for example, usefully tells us what we might want based on our behavior, and then buying the books it has suggested begins to seem a way of completing ourselves. The data — the preexisting categories, the defaults, the automated processes incumbent in the systems that capture information — has started to produce us.
The most obvious example of this is social networks, or the even more totalizing Second Life. These data-harvesting applications hope to encourage us to conduct our social lives in their petri dishes and behave in preconditioned ways that service providers can measure and exploit, attaching ads and recommendations to social exchanges that in the real world would transpire with unencumbered spontaneity, with no commercial subtext.
Online, though, our behavior — now transformed into marketing data — suddenly works, to those we “network” with, like a sales pitch — a means to some other end rather than being autonomous. Our actions seems less real until they are posted and shared and processed to our maximum advantage with regard to the impression we would like to create or the number of page views we would like to garner. We can automate our social life or refashion our identities thanks to the tools the social networks provide, but the thrill of lived experience vanishes to a degree, becoming more and more a matter of adjustments on the spreadsheet of self.
Once we have accepted the notion that we are inevitably no more than our data, it’s just a short leap to claim that “the only folks who can make sense of the data we create are crack mathematicians.” In other words, don’t try to understand yourself; you need a math genius to tell you who you are and what you’re meant to do. Statisticians are better managers of our datasets than we are, and they are better able to manipulate our data to see what it will yield — to see what our true possibilities are. Apparently, our own account of our hopes and dreams and intentions is irrelevant to the degree that it is not conditioned by what the math geniuses have calculated and made permissible. Once we are data, we are inscrutable to ourselves.
Not only does our reduction to data make us strangers to ourselves, but Baker goes so far as to opine that in the future, we will be “happy to pay for the privilege of remaining, to some degree or other, in the dark” about the selves that can be constructed from our data. He has in mind the idea that we won’t want to know disconcerting probabilities that we will contract diseases, but plausibly we might wish to opt out of the whole range of knowledge that can be produced about us. When we begin to be overtargeted, we will need filters to discover our authentic reflection in the efforts to persuade us. We will want liberation from the self left behind by the trail we’ve blazed through commercial culture, as that identity is merely the one that shopping permits us to have. Our more integral self will fight that commercially derived one for the social space in which to manifest itself. But the hegemony of consumerism will require us to “pay for that privilege” of being able to conceive an authentic self independent of our data stream.
What can we do to thwart our being converted to data? Baker suggests a can’t-beat-em-join-em approach, urging us to make spreadsheets of our achievements to demonstrate our worth. As digital data hounds become more thoroughly intrusive, we can probably count on the advent of services that would throw out false scents in our name, creating fake data trails to muddy the image of ourselves therein, to obscure our health concerns from insurance companies who would like to have that information in order to exclude us, and to mask our shopping proclivities to ensure that we don’t suffer price discrimination. Just as credit-score doctors learned how to game FICO, a counter-Numerati is sure to emerge to try and thwart their efforts to define us. Short of that, it will increasingly be to our benefit to conduct ourselves anonymously if we want to preserve any sense of self at all.
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