Big data - a revolution in our understanding of our society or just another buzzword?
For my money - neither. Big data represents the end of the world as we know it - and I do not feel fine.
For there to be big data there have to be big databases. Googolplexes of data, tabulating our lives in minute detail. True, they have some benefits. They keep my medical records - obviating the need to repeat my medical history to every doctor I pick up, facilitate my online banking - further minimising the number of interactions I have to have with real people and remember my passwords - because they're the only entities that can.
And there, in that last example, is the problem. They always remember!
As has been discussed in previous posts in this excellent publication, lies and deception are central to our lives. Anyone who has successfully navigated the minefield of finding a mate will know that. As an early teenage amateur you go out there, full of confidence that your real self, if boldly presented, will be your ticket to eventual reproduction. And you realise, head-on at about 120 kph, that you're driving on the wrong side of the road. There's a game to be played here. You have to lie. Perhaps not exactly lie, but you have to present a version of yourself that is compatible with the delusions that your prospective mate has about his/her ideal companion. He or she also has to play this game for you. It's only after you're comfortable with each other's PR departments that you can get the heads of state together for a real meeting. The advice to "just be yourself" is the kind of thing you get from people that don't like you very much.
There's usually some trial and error in all this and the only way it works is for other people to forget, or at least choose to ignore, the person they thought you were before. And it does work. Pop stars reinvent themselves and make comebacks. Tom Hanks got over BIG and Turner and Hooch to become a heavy hitting serious actor. CEOs keep getting plum jobs even though they drove their last two companies into the ground so hard that civil aviation authorities are still trying to piece together the wreckage and all the victims are yet to be identified. The world works because people forget.
But databases don't forget. They know and will always know. And when they talk to other databases they share what they know and there you are, a grown adult, naked as the day you were born with all the things you hoped would be forgotten out in the open, clearly documented and backed up in three separate off-site locations - and probably an undeclared fourth just in case you and the Semtex find the first three.
Australia doesn't have a bill of rights and, on the whole, I think we shouldn't. Most of our rights are "understood" and are a central part of our national character . And one of those rights, inalienable in my view, is the right to gently defraud the tax office. It is my duty to fill in a tax return and my right to have them believe what I tell them. And, as Kerry Francis Bullmore Packer said, "as a government you're not spending it that well that we should be donating extra".
The Australian Taxation Office has become scary. It's a waste of time filling in my tax return because they know everything already. They know my income, my tax, my bank interest (all 55c of it), how much I've spent at the doctor - the lot! Why ask me to fill it in? Is it some kind of twisted honesty test? Some way of checking my loyalty to Big Data and the Party?
I tell you a story, you believe my story. That's the social contract Australians used to have with the tax office.
Employment has gone the same way. The art of CV writing, as I have previously mentioned, is a form of creative art not unlike portrait painting. It's understood by both audience and artist that the laugh lines will be touched up, the eyes made less close set and the weird mole just off to one side of the cleft in your chin will be conveniently removed. The result is still you, just a version that you're happy for people to see. That's what a CV is - you as an oil painting.
And, as Neddie Seagoon said, I'm no oil painting.
Enter iProfile - Big Data's invasion of the recruitment sector. It's a database on which the claims you make to one recruiter are stored and then accessed by other recruiters - not just in the same firm but any recruitment company that subscribes to the system. So much for artistry. When I give you my CV, it's carefully crafted for that job and de-emphasises, air brushes or just straight omits certain facts that I think are not in my best interests for you to know at this stage. Except that you can know them - all those things I foolishly disclosed - because they're all there - stored in perpetuity. That was not the deal.
Apart from the need to stay warm, clothing will no longer be necessary in the near future. Clothing, like our CVs and our mating persona, is designed to project an image we imagine others are happy with - to disguise the lumps, bumps and weird little bendy bits that make up our real selves. Big Data is stripping us naked and revealing us for who we really are and, worse still, who we really were. Every time we try to set the record wrong on important parts of our history, a Party apparatchik will jump out with a data-derived report and say "No, that's not how it was!" and, thereby, ruin our futures. Every date we ever botched, every bra latch we ever fumbled, every Tweet we ever hung our head in shame over when we sobered up and every career decision we ever lived to regret will be there, projected on a billboard, for the world to see.
We're either all going to have to become Gattaca perfect or get used to each other's unvarnished selves. Big Data destroys forgetfulness, the basis of human relationships. Only loyalty to and love for Big Data can be tolerated. If you want a vision of the future, Winston, imagine a human face without makeup - forever.
Notes:
For the ATO - this is a satirical blog.
Kerry Packer - Australian media mogul - famously delivered the quoted line to a Senate inquiry into print media in 1991. The quote comes right at the end of this video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnwYoOeWZGA
Neddie Seagoon was a character in the Goon Show. The reference is to the episode called "The Mystery of the Fake Neddie Seagoon"
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