Tech Hypnosis, Digital Bullshit And The Nature Of Reality - And Of What Really Matters

[hatrack]

EDIT

Big Data have also enchanted the Quantified Self (QS) movement. Adorned with wearable devices, QS enthusiasts track data on the tiniest details of their physical and psychological status – from sleep patterns and blood pressure, to heart rate and mood. In extreme cases, so-called “body-hackers” have surgically implanted sensors in their bodies. Some of this data is useful, of course - but the development of high-end me-meters for otherwise healthy 30-somethings is unlikely to impact the pandemic of chronic illnesses in the rest of the population. If quantity counts, the Big Data craze is understandable. According to Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, “the amount of data in the world has doubled in last two years” – and we apparently create “as much information in two days, now, as we did from the dawn of man through 2003”. It’s a fair argument, I suppose, that with so much data about, it would be wasteful not to use it. But how, and to what end?

For the Financial Times, Big Data signifies nothing less than the arrival of a ‘postmodern economy’. Under the headline ‘Welcome To The Desert of the Real’, the paper stated last year that ‘today’s market is the most infinitely complex and impossible object ever imagined”. In order to prosper, the FT opined, the modern investor must be ‘adaptable to changing modes of acuity’; be able ‘to imagine different realistic states of the world’; and be able to think as ‘both the mathematician and the artist’.

If frothy prose like this appeared in an undergraduate’s cultural studies paper, one would not blink an eye. But these words adorned the house journal of global finance. It is surely alarming that the world’s economy is being shaped by people who are mesmerised by all things digital – but who are blind to a much larger reality: the analogue knowledge accumulated in nature during 3.5 billion years of evolution.

In his book Collapse, Jarred Diamond argues that one reason societies fail is that their elites are insulated from the negative impact of their own actions. Diamond focuses on Easter Island, where the overuse of wood products eventually destroyed its inhabitants’ survival prospects. That lesson applies equally to us, today. We lust for speed, perfection, control but, because we inhabit an abstract, digitially diminished world, we’re blind to their true cost.

EDIT

http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-11-25/desert-of-the-real

[Demeter]

1. Because it's so much more self-serving than actually doing something

with the mounds of data that shows where effort and resources MUST be applied...for other people's sake.

[hatrack]

3. It also allows you to do the "Perfect Data Heisman"

Known under ChimpCo, Inc. as "further study" - since nothing can be judged or done until all the information is in (and all the information will never, ever be in) . . .

[GliderGuider]

2. Pointing once again to the differences between data, information, knowledge and wisdom.

It's the "trickle-down" theory of wisdom: if you pile up the data higher and deeper, some of it will eventually trickle down and ferment into wisdom.

Right?

[Nihil]

4. "elites are insulated from the negative impact of their own actions"

Diamond was spot on with that observation and the accuracy of it is being underlined
every day in every country.

They are the ones who interpret "The last shall be first, and the first last" as
meaning that "The last ones to get over a million shall be first to die and the first
families of the world shall be the last to die."

That's a fascinating article Hatrack - thanks for posting it!

[CRH]

5. The unreality of it all, ...

data is just that data. How it is put together and what conclusions are drawn, is much more subjective and controlled by the input parameters.

And to think our new economy and even our manifestation of self is to be synthesized by the phenomenon. It reminds me of an old saying from the seventies. I've done so much with so little for so long, I can do anything with nothing.

And accomplish about the same thing, I might add.

[NNadir]

6. Diamond's book is without a doubt the best environmental book I have ever read.

It should be required reading in either high schools or colleges and universities, but it won't be.

I think about that book all the time.

There is a modern day Easter Island taking place right now, the island nation-state of Nauru, which was strip mined for its phosphate reserves, but now has no industry or means of support other than functioning as a prison for illegal refugees trying to make their way to Australia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nauru

[Nihil]

7. One cannot help but note a certain irony in that comment ...

> ... other than functioning as a prison for illegal refugees trying to make their way to Australia.

The wheel turns full circle ...


(But yes, I totally agree with you about Diamond.)