Where’s the Grand Theory of Big Data?

Everyone is talking about what we can and cannot do with Big Data. The real question is what Big Data does to us. A note to self.

Big Data is a force that by the looks of it is set to impact individuals and whole societies, and nearly every aspect of human life like nothing before. So, really, it’s something we should have a debate about. But even before it has properly started, it’s been given over to businesses, technologists, lobbyists, economists, activists and, less so, sociologists and legal experts.

The debate is heavily skewed towards particular interests, dominated by terminology awash with technical metaphors, and generally shaped by a technocratic, (probabilistically) deterministic world view that deifies data (“correlation finally absolves us from having to make sense of the world, the data speak for themselves”) and privileges the type of social structures and interactions (and discourses about it) that create them most readily.
While a number of vital questions are being asked, they are dangerously limited in scope: They address e.g. privacy issues, big data governance, the legal and ethical dilemmas of behavioral prediction, the status of theory, reconfiguration of power hierarchies etc. What is missing is a debate about the larger context. There’s as yet no “big theory” of big data itself just commercial, economic, legal, sociological vignettes. We have no real clue yet about the impact of big data on human identity and agency, cultural production, knowledge production.

Just what happens to individual human as well as collective social identity when its constituent parts — memory and social interactions are not only increasingly outsourced to and inscribed in big data but when, even more worrisome, control over it is handed over to commercial entities? What about the subjectivities inherent in the big data paradigm (its principal Silicon Valley architects are “white, male, neoliberal”, its primary users members of capitalist consumer societies)? What is the the role of individual doubt, the human capacity to err in a world where statistical certainty aims to smooth out every bump in the road?