Being Like Data; the Central Intelligence

Anything we would need the state for, anything the state would do, can ultimately be reduced to intelligence. The state needs to defend the country and the borders, and in doing so needs to mobilize and deploy vast resources, which must themselves first of all have been produced, by industries that themselves must have been state supported—all of this planning comes down to intelligence, and these state functions will be done well or poorly depending on the quality of intelligence: what is known about present and potential future capabilities, both your own and others. The state needs to protect individuals and property against violence—this is best done by pre-empting violence and designing social sites so as to minimize its likely effects in advance—again, a question of intelligence. We will be able to say the same thing about education, bio-politics, the preservation of natural resources, economic policies, and so on. The crucial point that needs to be added to this is that quality intelligence depends upon the quality of the agencies gathering and eventually using the intelligence. But this, then, means, that the most essential function of the state can be continually abstracted from all of these agencies precisely to the extent that these agencies only want to perfect their practices, which entails giving off intelligence beyond their own gathering capabilities and intentions—in the knowledge that central intelligence is focused on nothing more than ensuring the provenance, integrity, coherence and actionability of all the intelligence given off by all the agencies it in turn supplies. So, in repairing the center, we approximate such a central intelligence.

These reflections draw upon the increasing recognition that the US, and no doubt other Western states, are increasingly becoming states run out of their national security apparatuses—security and intelligence—as they govern through media, academic, NGO and corporate proxies (which in turn convey intelligence back to the center). No doubt this was always the case more than just about anyone was willing to acknowledge, but that it’s nevertheless becoming more obvious, with fewer people having the energy to try and deny it, is significant. The behind the scenes is becoming the scene. The most common initial response to these revelations is to resist this transformation (one that brings the US into conformity with less discreet security apparatus run states like the USSR and Nazi Germany—suggesting that this transformation might simply be the logic of centralization in the post-sacrificial world order) in the name of restoring the nation or republic traduced by it. I’m suggesting something very different—accepting that the repair of the center involves the further reduction of all governance to the curation of intelligence. This would in fact build upon the most important things for the government to do right now, and what it might be best suited to do: ensuring the integrity of information systems. This is also where things today are most messed up, which is to say, where struggles to control a center whose occupancy can only be seen as usurpation have their most devastating effects. Is it not likely that a great deal of “woke” culture is really nothing but the activities of agent provocateurs more or less directly plugged into intelligence agencies, aimed at generating responses that those agencies are now capable of registering as intelligence?

Nobody really loses anything by giving up fantasies of restoring what are in fact imagined modes of defying some evil center—your opinions are meaningless, as are mine. There is no discernable effect on the broader ecology of power on any of us having however well thought out a view on abortion, immigration, crime, the fed, or anything else. But we can become better consumers of the intelligence that the central intelligence disseminates in whatever disguised or distorted form, better generators of intelligence that might work its way into corridors of power through some avenue that might be made clearer through repeated effort, and better infiltrators into institutions where more impactful data intake and processing takes place. This is a different way of configuring ourselves that we would all (and here I do mean “all,” under the assumption that this reconfiguration will cure a lot of partisan diseases) do well to learn: to see ourselves as data within larger data sets and work on producing the kind of data that would be useful to the kind of center that constrain itself in accord with the demands of rigorous data curation.

This would also provide for a better distribution of power and responsibility across the social order and, while relying on systematic recording, measuring and monitoring devices, does not raise the kind of issues we are used to invoking when demanding some identity, as citizen or member of some other group, be recognized and protected by the state. Peirce’s declaration that we are each and every one of us an insurance company undergoes the not so great translation into we are each and every one of us a site of data exchange overlapping with myriad other such sites. There are plenty of things going on in your body regarding which intelligence can be gathered without any input from you, while there are also plenty of things that do require your descriptions and self-observation; this is even far more the case with your mind and brain where we can set aside attempts to define the contours of “respect,” “autonomy” and so on and set our sights on making each of us of the best carrier, recorder and reporter of data inseparable from our historical location in the world. Someone wishing to try unapproved treatments or wishing to abstain from approved treatments can approach the matter in the manner of one willing to operate as a needed control group or source of data that couldn’t be acquired otherwise. There could still be disagreements, but rather than intractable disagreements grounded in ultimately arbitrary notions of “rights” and “obligations” they can be addressed as positions within an emergent field of inquiry, with the “subject” of inquiry always a participant in it as well.

“All data are local” is the title of a recent book by researcher Yanni Loukanis, whose work joins a growing body of inquiry into the problems posed of collecting, identifying, preserving, analyzing, interfering with, etc., the surplus of data now available to us. Data marks one’s place and studying and building one’s place allows for the kind of data production that will secure that place in the world. And the richest, most important and universally accessible data is still language, the study and cultivation of which is the best way to improve one’s data curation in the broadest, which is to say, qualitative, sense. Data collection and analysis is future oriented insofar as one approaches data with research questions aimed at identifying the most likely occurrences or readily achievable accomplishments, in as short or long a term perspective as your mode of data curation provides for. But this always brings us back to the places from which data has been collected and the places where it will eventually be brought to bear. To use language, to put forward a sample, is to create a bridge between yourself and a certain range of people who will with varying degrees of likelihood be located in specific places, which they will environ around themselves in specific ways. The linguist Ghil’ad Zuckermann has initiated, as recorded in a book I admit I haven’t yet read, the project of “revivalistics,” that is, the restoration of lost languages (focusing mostly on Australian aborigines). Even without knowing anything about this, I can safely guess that collection and algorithmically aided analysis of linguistic data will be central to such projects. And if you can do this with language, you can do it with other institutions.

Any social action must be predicated upon a continual relation of feedback with the environment—you do things to accomplish things (get certain ideas to certain audiences, compete for power in institutions, etc.) but always, also, and even more so, to generate data to be carefully gathered, studied, and recirculated back into the planning stage. The canons of “proof” will vary wildly—when you interact briefly with a single individual and probe and provoke him so as to see what he might be capable of, you’re not gathering data that will withstand the scrutiny of a double blind peer review process but you’re certainly improving considerably your own decision making prowess in that and similar situations. You’re “training” your own inner algorithms. Forms of friendship, collegiality, solidarity and cooperation are predicated upon certain, usually more tacit than implicit, norms of data assessment—not just what counts as true or likely, but in what sense and to what extent are we talking about the same thing? What is this a sample of, and what is the relation between sample and population, for the purposes we’re discussing here? If you want to change the world you have to learn to think, speak and act along these lines—otherwise, how would you say you know what you are doing?

Data exchange with the central intelligence provides a way of strategizing on all scales of action. The sample, as I’ve proposed previously, is in direct opposition to the asset: this is the incommensurability to be foregrounded at all points. Both samples and assets take on their meaning from possible futures: the sample as a result of an ongoing inquiry that continually sets time limits for determining the truth or meaning of certain statements; the asset as a form of property that takes on its value by being discounted against expected future earnings (to cite Bichler and Nitzan’s Capital as Power). A house is a sample and an asset; so, perhaps is a kidney. The more things we treat as samples the more “objects” we render liable to be turned into assets, e.g., to be patented. Samples and assets progress side by side, advancing and interfering with each other within the “techno-capitalist” order. Preserving the sample-like character of things precisely when their subjection to asset reduction—for example, keeping a newly discovered genetic sequence open to further scientific and therapeutic inquiries as against the patent that would reserve it for specified uses, or even no use at all—requires the reworking of all the legal, political, cultural and intellectual infrastructures. And that means all of the elements of that infrastructure need to be treated as data, which one enters and, in fact, becomes, as one creates more of it. To take just one example, which I have had in mind for a while: how would some political party of the hopefully not too distant future address the problem of libel and slander laws in terms of data exchange with the central intelligence? For a statement to be deemed “true” (and therefore not libelous) or “false” (and therefore potentially so), it needs to meet certain linguistic and evidentiary standards that themselves must be tested, measured and testified to by specific people, located in specific places, with degrees of credibility determined in various ways, and so on. It’s pretty well known by now that crucial to the development of the civil rights regime was a court case decided on the basis of judges not wanting a Southern sheriff to win a libel lawsuit against the NY Times, and as a result making it almost impossible to sue the media for libel, especially if one is a public person (for some odd reason it has come to be considered more acceptable to lie shamelessly about people everyone knows about, as if anything could more thoroughly pollute public discourse). Organizing power so as to bring about reversals in these and other areas can not only have far greater affects that frontal assaults on, say, “Critical Race Theory,” but might enable one to take enemies by surprise. For this kind of approach, you’d need to be able to treat power as a source of data, and to point out the implications for our shared intelligence for certain discursive filtering devices. Work on shoring up all of the creaky bulwarks of civilization can proceed in this matter, in an extremely aggressive way that will nevertheless never be overtly polarizing—as long as there’s a critical mass of people participating in data exchange with the central intelligence. All we ever need want is to provide data as impeccable as possible to a central location with nothing more in mind than protecting everything making it approximately impeccable.

In addition to libel law, then, patent, copyright and corporate law more generally must be approached from the standpoint of improving data curation—enhancing the uses of a particular sample, which might simultaneously serve inquiries in biology, medicine, pedagogy, science studies, institutional ethical culture, and so on. Whatever interferes with this enhanced world of data exchange in the name of making it easier to discount a particular asset against future earnings is to be targeted. At each point along the way, built into legal strategies and public campaigns, an alternative model of use is to be tied to alternative terms of chartering corporations that bind corporations not to vague social responsibilities but to the highest standards of data curation beyond the specific uses made of the samples by the corporation. In which case we’re modeling different hypothetical futures, represented by specific, imaged articulations of power and responsibility, needs and abilities. Targeting circulation and utility of data so to create a new set of incentives serves to encroach upon financialization. Property law can be skewed toward the stakes of engineers as against those of investors; investors themselves, as opposed to controlling funds making research and invention possible, are themselves to be converted into curators of intelligence in intense collaboration with the central intelligence. This will require a weaning away of significant groups from the habits of demanding that addressing interests and grievances be the foremost priority of government: demands to be supplied with the kind of data and the resources needed to create more data (including the data of the effects of inventions and their spread across the social order) would come to displace conventional grasping for a piece of the pie. Even if a minority, such a “faction” would have considerable advantage over consumerists in strategizing incremental inroads into power bases within institutions.

A word on the occupant of the center. Here, I am assuming that the occupant of the center at whose transformation opposing samples to assets one might aim is roughly equivalent to today’s existing states. I make this assumption as a matter of convenience, in order to hold everything constant except insofar as the variable I’m focusing on would necessarily affect it. But if the central intelligence is the secure curation of data so as to make all users and interfaces interoperable in their own curation and emission of data, then it’s an open question what kind of agency capable of doing that might emerge. The present occupant of the center, with all of its formal appurtenances and informal infiltrations is necessarily the starting point of any deliberation about social change but it may be that the kinds of practices I’ve hypothesized here would themselves assist in the bringing into being of some new kind occupant, both more minimal and more potent, constraining in enabling ways, localizing through ordered gradations. Practices of converting assets into samples can be designed so as to increase the likelihood of such an outcome.