Tech Hypnosis, Digital Bullshit And The Nature Of Reality - And Of What Really Matters [View all]

[hatrack]

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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.

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