Big Data – Big Worries

The current penetration of our society with new media is a profound cultural upheaval.

A statement that can hardly denied. Often experts in some field – as medicine, finance, engineering and of course data processing/information technology – welcome this, making out the great instrumentality, seeing that ‘machines’ are better able to perform some tasks than human beings (even if this is sometimes an illusion: typing a small equation into the calculator may be more tedious than just calculating … – though having only learned to calculate with the calculator may make it impossible to do any calculation that cannot be performed by using the fingers [don’t make divisions, please]). Often the person from the street, ordinary people appreciate it as these ‘cultural tools’ make things possible that had not been even thinkable before – or at least some things are becoming easier. And then there is a third group, also reflected by within the two groups mentioned: sceptics, who, in extreme cases, lament the decline of culture and Western values.

There are surely good arguments in favour of each attitude. However, isn’t there also a good argument for suggesting that we are looking at the wrong question?

The current penetration of our society with new media is a profound cultural upheaval.

This formulation suggests that the new media are the decisive point in question. While looking at the current penetration, it refers to ‘our society’ and this ‘our society’ seems not to be at stake – or to be more precise: our society changes as consequence of (a) the new media and (b) the penetration. Such perspective has major implications for nearly everything: the way we approach democracy, elections, consumption, education, learning, travelling … . – Spoiler: the following does not claim to know the correct answer; and the outline of the present answer is moving on slippery, i.e. contradictory ground.

***

The English businessman Thomas Cook (22 November 1808 – 18 July 1892) is not least known as forerunner of package holidays. However, it had not been until the 1950s that the concept came to a breakthrough: combined flight, transfers, and accommodation, and later the ‘leisure-time activities’ by animateurs characterised new ways of mass tourism. Without doubt a progressive concept, opening explorations to people who could not afford it before.

However, we also see a connotation that is often lost: the amateur had been replaced by the follower of an animateur; the immediate experience of touring by the explorer, entering unknown territories had been replaced by tourism, that offered a framework, an arena, a predefined track for tours. Of course, very few people even in the olden times could afford to travel like Marco Polo (c. 1254 – 8 January 1324), merchant, adventurer and author who travelled years along the Silk Road. One underlying fundamental change is that the multi-skilled, multi-interested and not very rich Marco Polo had been what we may call entrepreneur, undertaker – not in today’s Schumpeterian understanding – who had been replaced by today’s user. There is a paradox implied: whereas for Polo’s generation of undertakers the exchange value emerged from the use value, for today’s user (the entrepreneur as the consumer alike) the use value depends on the exchange value – so far its highest stage and ultimate expression is the financialisation of the economy, techno feudalism (Varoufakis) only being a variation.

Marco Polo, James Cook and the Horizon Holiday Group are only one of many developments that characterise the shallowing and draining of life – the seedbed for

[t]he current penetration of our society with new media

A simple answer can be given by unscrewing the wheel, returning to elitist concepts … – as said: Marco Polo had been one of the few privileged at a time where mass migration existed only as answer on some kind of exodus.

And

In the 2^nd century AD, around the same time in the Western world that the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius was recording his philosophical thoughts on papyrus scrolls and relying on scribes to reproduce them, the main works of classical Chinese literature were cut into stone slabs in China over a period of eight years from the year 175 AD. Thousands of copies were made in the form of copies: Moistened paper was pressed onto the inscription stones in such a way that when the paper was brushed with ink, the incised characters stood out white against the otherwise blackened paper. (Team “Mainz. Gutenberg 2000: Vor Gutenberg; https://www.gutenberg.de/erfindung/vor_gutenberg.php; 17/11/2024; own translation)

The various steps of massification from earlier developments until today seem to be inextricably linked to a flattening.

But, so far, the simple answer ignores one aspect: what appears to be massification, had been dominated by the idea of rationalisation and making control more effective – that the ability to read could also be used to read other info that those supported by the modern entrepreneurs had to be accepted as unintended side-effect. The liberating effects, however, had not been transposed into the real liberation of the user, or even more: the transformation of the user into the role of the owner. Instead, it had been the orientation on gain as sole guideline also for social processes (see Polanyi) – the alternative is becoming clear in the following lines, taken from the first volume of Willi Bredel’s Ein neues Kapital – A New Chapter: (Berlin: Aufbau, 1974: 412)

….Deshalb wollen wir lernen, fleißig lernen, nicht um klüger zu werden als andere und daraus Vorteile zu gewinnen, sondern um die noch nicht Kluggewordenen klug zu machen. Deshalb wollen wir schaffen, rastlos schaffen, nicht um reicher zu werden als andere und daraus Macht zu gewinnen, sondern um das Leben aller reich zu machen.

….Therefore we want to learn, to study hard, not to become wiser than others and to gain advantages from it, but to make those who are not yet wise wise. Therefore we want to create, to work tirelessly, not to become richer than others and to gain power from it, but to make life rich for everyone.

A simple example: The daughters of a famer had been ‘travelling the world’, the father ‘travels with them’, using the internet, National Geographic etc. and of course digital means of communication even if he rarely moved physically to the next lager city. Both could afford it, not least because they had been ‘time-rich’.

Keynes, writing in 1930 about the Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, suggested

Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us! (https://www.aspeninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/files/content/upload/Intro_and_Section_I.pdf; 17/11/2024)

Wouldn’t that allow all of us to travel more substantial than instagramable, to exchange honestly instead of sending only short messages and sending pictures, to study deeply rather to depend on ‘deep AI’ .

And not least, would that not also open a door to informed political decisions, ‘deep democracy’, going beyond elections – in the US for instance, the campaign of the recent elections had been the most expensive ever (see e.g. https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2024/10/total-2024-election-spending-projected-to-exceed-previous-record/; https://www.zeit.de/politik/2024-11/usa-wahlkampf-teuerster-donald-trump-kamala-harris; 17/11/2024), resulting in a criminal being president (see e.g. https://www.lto.de/recht/hintergruende/h/usa-donald-trump-us-stormy-daniels-manhattan-new-york?utm_source=Eloqua&utm_content=WKDE_LEG_NSL_LTO_Daily_EM&utm_campaign=wkde_leg_mp_lto_daily_ab13.05.2019&utm_econtactid=CWOLT000034312644&utm_medium=email_newsletter&utm_crmid=).Interestingly enough, taking from an entry on the US elections on Robert’s blog, we learn:

The biggest caveat to Trump’s voting victory is that contrary to the usual hype of a ‘massive voter turnout’, fewer Americans eligible to vote bothered to do so compared to 2020. Then over 158m voted, this time the vote was down to 143m. The voter turnout of those eligible fell to 58.2% from the high of 65.9% in 2020.

Around 40% of Americans registered to vote did not do so. And the number of Americans who failed to register rose to 19m from 12m in 2020. So, although Trump got 51% of those who voted, he actually got only 28% support of Americans of voting age.

If it is said that

how we learn, work, discuss, position ourselves socially and politically and make decisions – all of this is changing so quickly that we can hardly keep up

we should go a step further, asking for what we are leaning, discussing and position ourselves, what kind of decisions are we making. If the polity changes along the line of gaining and maintaining power – individually and/or in the sense of MAGA (or any other country). If political decisions are replaced by financial investments and juridification ala “seek(.)[ing] jail and public office ban (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/14/marine-le-pen-embezzlement-trial-national-rally-prosecutor-ban?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other; 17/11/2024) for disagreeable politicians we are confronted with the problem of depleting public spaces, leaving it to individuals to decide ‘what is right and what is wrong’. Such ban directed against Le Pen may be in the short run to be welcomed as it may be welcomed to ban a right-wing populist party like the German AFD. At the end, however such depletion of public spaces is a kind of re-feudalisation, reestablishing the absolute ruler. Of course it is a paradox: in the extreme case, and only then, the absolute ruler may be necessary to avoid the absolute dictator.

Indeed, it is interesting that

[t]he German legal system does not provide any legal protection against disinformation and fake news beyond defamation offences. In order to activate the protective effects of the law, a personal reference is always needed first. In the broad area of assertions without personal reference, in particular the right-wing camp has adopted the peculiar narrative that Google, X and Bytedance (the company behind TikTok) should decide on lies and truth rather than the state. (Chan-jo Jun, Flint, Jessica, 2024: Warum nicht Tiktok und Co über Demokratie entscheiden sollten. Regulierung nach dem DSA; in: Legal Tribune Online, 30.05.2024 , https://www.lto.de/persistent/a_id/54659; abgerufen am: 16.11.2024)

This fundamental problem must be highlighted: the trinity of privatisation, individualisation and the dismissal of the state from responsibility. The aforementioned juridification only appears as contradiction, insofar law is fundamentally concerned with rights of individuals. This basically opens the door to digitisation, and what’s more, digitisation becomes a logical consequence if not necessity as both are based on the principle of binarity.

With all of this, contexts are systematically destroyed – TV programmes, that people are talking about are victim of TV media libraries, commercial channels that offer whatever we like at whichever time we want [and of course, they tell us as well what we want] …. The “Monday morning question at work”: Did you watch …? The subsequent discussion cannot really happen anymore, is at least not encouraged; the debate of the latest news is difficult as the news are sooner old than they can be digested – and in addition they drown in ‘multimedia-news shows’: presenting a central message, accompanied by the stock exchange info on the bottom, the weather forecast on the right and/or some sport info on the left and not least the very latest news in a short superimposition … and of course, somewhere the next film is announced — already now available in the TV library, even if only broadcasted the next day … . This can be continued without end, applied for different areas – and perhaps the only exception is sports: bringing people together and although they get lost in the crowd, everyone feels an important part of it – not digitally, but in analogue. – And yes, sometimes the smell of horses on the field or in the arena of a circus is much better, a counterweight against Pokémon.

And it is in this sense always necessary to discuss the meaning of rights, not leaving justice as in the hands of algorithm-driven machines.