The concept of data is extremely generative. Any time you focus on something with a question that brings some things into view and suspends attention to others, you generate data. When you generate data, you generate more data, for others, regarding your means of generating data. When we construct machinery, devices, or new modes of social organization to detect, record and sort data, we generate all kinds of incidental data that will be interesting in ways we can’t anticipate. Johanna Drucker rightly points out that a better word for “data” would be “capta,” which is to say, we’re “taking” rather than being “given,” the information we want from our surroundings. But data is a gift as well—we open ourselves up to it without knowing what we’re going to be “taking” from it. The origin of data is in inscription, that is, materialized commemoration. According to the Online Etymological Dictionary, “data” was first used in the sense of a “fact given or granted,” during, unsurprisingly, the 1640s, at the very beginnings of British empiricism and the organization of scientific activity; while not being used in its contemporary sense of "transmittable and storable information by which computer operations are performed" until 1946. I’m still fairly comfortable backdating “data,” because data derives from the ostensive, from members of a group being able to point to something and say it’s the “same.” There cannot be a human order that doesn’t need to place things at the center and say what it is in such a way that can be iterated. Our current data driven order is a direct descendant of the priest ensuring the ritual has been carried out precisely according to specifications, as well as the seers and prophets that studied the consequences of laxity and transgression in carrying out those rituals. In every case, some ascertainable relation between what is done, seen and said is enforced, and some path from ostensive, to imperative, to interrogative, to declarative and back to ostensive established. There’s nothing more important, ethically, morally and politically, than participating in these efforts, precisely because “spillage” from these orders is becoming increasingly obvious and consequential. It’s getting harder to fake, lie and conceal, and if you tell me, with very good reason, that there seems to more, and especially egregious examples of all these activities than ever, I would simply respond with “yes, and how do you know that, and how much of that despicable activity results from the difficulty of covering up previous instances of it?” You can try and re-install honor, virtue, sacrifice and other values effaced by modernity back at the center, but since modernity has enabled us to see how easily all of that can be simulated and fabricated, we would still be insisting on and learning to assess (including the use of algorithms to do so) the data emitted by actions meant to display those qualities. The optimal human-machine relation is that increasingly well-trained humans program machines to collect and automatically analyze data so as to present it back to those humans as reciprocal, anthropomorphic data collectors and interpreters of each other’s latest efforts at machine-aided design. Each element in this process can be continually improved upon without making any of them less indispensable.
Inscripto-punctualism
Inscripto-punctualism
Inscripto-punctualism
The concept of data is extremely generative. Any time you focus on something with a question that brings some things into view and suspends attention to others, you generate data. When you generate data, you generate more data, for others, regarding your means of generating data. When we construct machinery, devices, or new modes of social organization to detect, record and sort data, we generate all kinds of incidental data that will be interesting in ways we can’t anticipate. Johanna Drucker rightly points out that a better word for “data” would be “capta,” which is to say, we’re “taking” rather than being “given,” the information we want from our surroundings. But data is a gift as well—we open ourselves up to it without knowing what we’re going to be “taking” from it. The origin of data is in inscription, that is, materialized commemoration. According to the Online Etymological Dictionary, “data” was first used in the sense of a “fact given or granted,” during, unsurprisingly, the 1640s, at the very beginnings of British empiricism and the organization of scientific activity; while not being used in its contemporary sense of "transmittable and storable information by which computer operations are performed" until 1946. I’m still fairly comfortable backdating “data,” because data derives from the ostensive, from members of a group being able to point to something and say it’s the “same.” There cannot be a human order that doesn’t need to place things at the center and say what it is in such a way that can be iterated. Our current data driven order is a direct descendant of the priest ensuring the ritual has been carried out precisely according to specifications, as well as the seers and prophets that studied the consequences of laxity and transgression in carrying out those rituals. In every case, some ascertainable relation between what is done, seen and said is enforced, and some path from ostensive, to imperative, to interrogative, to declarative and back to ostensive established. There’s nothing more important, ethically, morally and politically, than participating in these efforts, precisely because “spillage” from these orders is becoming increasingly obvious and consequential. It’s getting harder to fake, lie and conceal, and if you tell me, with very good reason, that there seems to more, and especially egregious examples of all these activities than ever, I would simply respond with “yes, and how do you know that, and how much of that despicable activity results from the difficulty of covering up previous instances of it?” You can try and re-install honor, virtue, sacrifice and other values effaced by modernity back at the center, but since modernity has enabled us to see how easily all of that can be simulated and fabricated, we would still be insisting on and learning to assess (including the use of algorithms to do so) the data emitted by actions meant to display those qualities. The optimal human-machine relation is that increasingly well-trained humans program machines to collect and automatically analyze data so as to present it back to those humans as reciprocal, anthropomorphic data collectors and interpreters of each other’s latest efforts at machine-aided design. Each element in this process can be continually improved upon without making any of them less indispensable.