Data analytics and the political economy of the perfect decision

Locked together in an ever decreasing spiral, data and decisions are closely knitted in the workings of contemporary capitalism. The value ascribed to data nearly always equates directly to what it is that those data are seen to add to decision making processes. Underpinning the value attributed to data is the idea that they can be used to perfect decision making — accelerating choices while making them more accurate, informed and anticipatory. It is this relationship between data and decision making that is central to the way that capitalism now operates and to the way value is generated.

New anlytic ideals have been established that lead to this pursuit of data informed choices and that also feed into the very notion and pursuit of ideal or perfect decisions. Without the idea that data can be utilised to perfect decisions, data are essentially worthless. The value of data is in what it is envisioned they will bring to selections, choices and decisions both now and in a projected near future. If capitalism has come to be underpinned by the value of our data, then it is actually underpinned by the idea that those data are fundamental to ever better decision making.

These decisions take many forms, from which film to recomend to us or what advert to target us with, through to what trades to make in the virtual market place or what commercial or human resource decision might give a competitive edge, and so on. The imperative in this context is that all choices can be refined if only more data are used.

We know that companies are valued based on their data and that organisations also attempt to run and order themselves around the data they produce or gather. To understand this we need to look at the work being done by the analytics industry. It is that industry — ranging from embedded organisational analytics through to consultants — that both promotes the ideals of data led decision making, cementing notions of perfectability, whilst also providing the tools, machanisms and insights that enable data to feed into decision making processes.

My recent study of the data analytics industry, to published in the book The Data Gaze, found that it is an industry built around this pursuit of perfect decisions. The promises it projects onto these analytics, aimed at promoting data analytics and embedding them into our lives, are focused on how decision making can be transformed through data — suggesting it can be made more accurate and closer to real time. The technologies of analytics, which themselves are constantly adapting, are premised on the idea of closing ‘the gap’ between data and decisions. These infrastructures are also bound up with the idea that distributed systems provide trustworthy and clean data sources that can be processed on a large scale; which act to give a sense of legitimacy to the decisions made. Finally, the actors involved in analytics are presented as actively translating complex and messy data. They are also embedded in a division of labour within these organisations that affords data informed outcomes. This is a context in which the relations between data and decision making are being reconfigured.

Data capitalism, founded on the value of data, is based as much upon the ideals of perfectable decision making as it is upon the data. It is in the relations, both material and ideological, between data and decisions that contemporary capitalism operates. We don’t just live in an age defined by data, we live in an age defined by ideals about how to think, choose, know and, ultimately, decide. The value of data is tangled into and is founded by some particular perspectives on how knowledge is created and used.

Over recent months we have heard a great deal about the use of our data and how valuable they are to commercial organisations — some of the visible scramble around the implementation of GDPR gave us a further glimpse. What this talk could easily miss is the powerful mediating actors involved in analysis and how data are given value. The value of data is to be found in its relations — both imagined and material — with decision making. Alongside this, it is the pursuit of the perfect decision that creates the impetus to escalate data harvesting and analytics.

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The Data Gaze can now be preordered in paperback from the usual outlets. A piece describing the writing of the book can be found here.