At the end of a long week last week, I needed a spark of humor to get me over the Friday afternoon finish line. And here it is:
It was reported that Mark Zuckerberg has taken President Obama to task over governmental spying and subversion of privacy on the internet. Either the lad’s brain is hermetically sealed in his own fantasy world of ‘specialness’, or he has single-handedly recalibrated the dimensions of chutzpah. Frankly, I think that he is such an exceptional personage that he is fully capable of both. As are so many of his peers in the Enchanted Valley.
Honestly, would you buy a used car from Mark, or Eric Schmidt over at the other Data Death Star? Or a new car, for that matter? Think about Google’s track record of ‘experimenting’ with new services only to drop them in an instant once some child genius gets bored. Imagine yourself tooling down the boulevard in your auto-piloted Google-mobile, having an otherwise delightful conversation with Siri (or not, from what I’m told), when all of a sudden the Google mother-ship decides to do an app tweak on the autopilot. Ooooops.
But I digress. The real focus of this rant is the issue of data and personal privacy in the age of Mad Max and the self-styled buccaneers of free enterprise.
Am I worried, as a citizen, about the NSA? Yeah.
Do I fear institution of a totalitarian regime by my government? Not tomorrow morning, and probably not next week; but its excesses could conceivably lead to such, if not for its own apparent incompetence. An organization with such loose internal security is a diminished threat in its capacity to effectively project AND sustain tyranny.
Does the NSA require greater transparency? No, stupid! It’s a spy agency!
Does the NSA require greater oversight and checks and balances? Absolutely!
And how about Facebook and Google? Yeah, them too. And let’s throw in Amazon and Apple and Yahoo while we’re at it. Because these various data pimps and the galaxy of private sector John’s they service (insurance, finance, employment and recruiting, retail) can and do support a subtle tyranny of manipulation and exclusion that is perhaps more immediate and pervasive and subversively disruptive to the greater society than anything that is likely to emanate from Fort Meade any time in the foreseeable future.
But what oversight do we have on them? What oversight SHOULD we have on them? If Google and Facebook are the data-mart of choice for our esteemed NSA for ‘shoplifting’, what does it offer its paying customers, whose profit driven endorphins seek the same data for more predatory purposes? Let’s have that conversation too, Mr. Mark.
Big Data and its twin, Analytics, most definitely have a place in our evolving society. We have a lot to learn about ourselves and our world for positive outcome. But the Googles and Facebooks are not being driven by the search of insight and wisdom. They are being driven by the search for profits, which is not, in itself, a bad thing. But at what expense and whose expense do they derive their profits and to what end?
If Facebook and Google, et al, are data pimps, and the various buyers are Johns, who are the prostitutes in this analogy? You guessed it. You and me. We aren’t even selling anything. We’re givin’ it away for free. For free information, free music, free video, free books, free porn, soft and hard, and not thinking twice about who’s looking back at us from behind the screen, and with what intent.
The truly amusing part of this is that we have no concept of the potential consequences of data tyranny, although we should by now. We simplistically think ‘I know everything there is to know about me. I’ve got nothing to hide’. But that’s not how it will work.
Big data may store and regurgitate the bits and bytes of your digital life on demand for the select few (who are willing to pay) to see. But then the fun begins with the ANALytics.
Analytics are tools that theoretically enable us to compile big data into big insights. They can assemble huge amounts of data never before possible, and present it in various dimensions and perspectives. They can slice and dice the mountain in ways we might not achieve in a couple of lifetimes.
But Analytics are not simply about compiling data. Analysis is ultimately about perspective (how you choose to approach it) and judgment (what you deem relevant and important). Perspective and importance are ultimately the system designer’s choice; not the machine’s. Therein lies the potential for good and evil. It’s not merely the factoids of our lives; its the perspective and value judgements applied to them by people or institutions in positions of power.
Analytics become ANALytics when we use these tools to substitute for critical thinking, to ‘cut to the chase’ as we love to say in business, to bang through the ‘clutter’ and get to the market’s ‘sweet spot’, and ya-di-ya-di-ya. ANALytics are when lazy people in positions of influence let the machine do the thinking for them. There are an incredible number of highly paid, lazy people in positions of influence.
I’ve watched ANALytics at work on a modest scale in the medical field as a casual observer. In three family situations over three decades, I’ve watched medical science throw barrages of tests at patients, only to come up empty of useful insights. In many cases, it took an exceptional doctor to look beyond what the test data was telling her/him for what it was NOT telling hem, and then make an informed judgment (guess) as to what course of action might be productive. In the most troubling of instances, a doctor, operating on the ‘big data’ of his time, made a judgment that the life in question was probably not worth the surgery that was necessary. Fortunately, other doctors who stuck their necks and their careers out as a matter of principle and humanity, chose not to write off that life based on ‘the odds’. There were too many other unknowns to be so glib and callous.
Thirty years later, the same profession contemplates investing in a simple surgery with potentially devastating consequences and costs to prolong a life that by all reasonable measures was nearing its inevitable conclusion. What was lacking was not data, but perspective. Ultimately, judgment was exercised which required more perspective than data, and the patient was spared one week of agony to pass in relative peace to a place that was destined; a place that too may medical folks fear to accept. Data does not always = Reality.
But these are matters of life and death. What relevance to the everyday mundane world of marketing, employment, credit, access to services, access to get back in the country?
If the NSA and Homeland Security can access the Facebook and Google factoid factories and draw erroneous conclusions from data viewed under a distorted lens of dubious values, why can’t all other more anonymous, but no less consequential, johns in the information data-mart do the same with similar consequences? What prevents the trolls in the political arena from cherry picking a wealth of factoids and mis-representing them into another swift-boating assault on an otherwise worthy candidate for public office. The original Swift-boaters were a bunch of unsophisticated hacks. Imagine what you could do with the benefit of DATA and a dossier built on factoids carefully cherry-picked and cooked to perfection.
And what might stop a high-powered executive from digitally knee-capping a competitor for the corner suite with the same dis-information campaign? Or an academic for that prized Chair. (As Kissinger correctly noted, few can fight so hard for so little as academics.)
Whereas Eric Schmidt and Mark Zuckenberg and Princess Marissa would like you to believe that their messianic quest to order the world in their vision will be a force for good, it is in fact far more dangerous than the NSA. In their universes, there is no presumption of democratic rule and oversight. Just their whim of the moment, and the opportunities of their market place, in which you and I ARE NOT the buyers or sellers.
The age of information tyranny, institutional and freelance, has arrived. And its implementation will be so subtle, the redneck devotees of the NRA won’t know who to shoot.
Onward
20140321
Integrated Man 