Archaeology for cyborgs
Where does the person stop and the personal data begin?
One of the most important lessons I learned as an archaeologist was this: if you are in possession of a human skull, do not put a cigarette in its mouth and a hat on its head and definitely don’t take pictures. You might be holding it in your hand, but it’s not your skull — you already have a skull.
This was part of a section of my archaeology MA on the ethical treatment of human remains. Our lecturer was giving us a series of real-life examples of archaeology lab gags, but what made this one stick is the reminder that while we call them ‘human remains’, these are actual humans. There is never a time to suspend our respect for their dignity, even if they’re thousands of years old, and even when no one else is around. After all, we study humans, and there’s never a more important time to be respectful than when you have physical power over their bodies, living or dead.
Human remains are personal data
It normally feels ethically ‘safe’ to study, for example, a piece of pottery — to describe its fabric, shape, evidence of use, and make an interpretation that helps you build a narrative about the people who left it behind, usually as an anonymous group. If the pottery is in a burial context, especially if the remaining fragments of the human are found inside or next to the pottery, you will be extra careful, which means that here, too, you should avoid putting cigarettes in it.
But in general, there’s a fairly straightforward distinction, for the past, between a person and a thing.
There’s still an assumption that because something comes from another place or time, the main ethical standards we need to meet have to do with appropriate techniques, and rigorous standards of recording and preservation. If the past is as recent as yesterday, or, more realistically, a few years ago, and we’re no longer dealing with the dead, do the living have a say?
What happens to the fundamental assumption that we have a right to study other humans when we accept that:
- The past is anytime that’s already happened
- Personal data is increasingly tied to our physical bodies.
There’s plenty of discussion about our transformation into literal, rather than metaphorical cyborgs. We’re seeing it from a legal perspective, and there’s the anthropologist’s view of the lived experience and societal context. But what about how research ethics will change — and are changing as our personal data becomes even more personal?
Are personal data also human remains?
My watch logs my steps and takes my pulse, and sends that to my phone, which is never far from my body, and which tells me that I ran 44.1 kilometers last week. About two days before my period starts, a custom “Bitch horizon approaching! Warn the community!” notification pops up on my lock screen. Thanks to the data I’ve fed my Clue app, I know that there’s no reason to be concerned that I’m crying more than usual at puppy videos, I just have PMS.
We recognize that our reliance on digital technology means our identities are ever-more-tightly intertwined with the devices that are always with us, that we wear on our bodies, that instrumentalize us, measure our activities, hold our thoughts, feelings, conflicts, correspondences, to-do lists, and vital health statistics. Where does my body stop and my technology begin?
This isn’t a new question. It becomes a lot more interesting (to me, anyway) when we recognize that ‘digital’ is just a new shorthand: technology has always been part of us. It’s always reflected a whole range of human bodily actions, and we wouldn’t have general purpose technologies like pottery or smartphones if humans didn’t see them as both functionally useful and also important to personal and collective identity — even if the function came first.
Things we found on the floor
In 2004, my friend Jim Dixon and I, then scrappy PhD students, were approximately four million drinks in at the Theoretical Archaeology Group conference party in Glasgow. We’d been asking these questions a lot: if we agree that archaeology doesn’t have to be ‘old’ for it to be considered our concern (and not everyone does agree), how do we draw the line between legitimate research and an invasion of privacy?
The patina of age is normally given as a legitimizing reason to gather knowledge about other people’s lives, but contemporary research created a gap where “because it’s old” used to be. If the material isn’t old enough for the people to be dead, or their status isn’t known, then the vague sense of material being from another time normally seemed to suffice.
We’d become involved with CHAT, Contemporary and Historical Archaeology in Theory, and we were inspired by some of the work done by people like William Rathje in Arizona, along with more local peers like Laura McAtackney and John Schofield and Colleen Beck, who did address some of these questions, and worked directly with the populations they studied, altering their methods to respect the needs of their subjects.
We thought it would be a good idea to show archaeologists what it’s like to be studied, to try to force these questions a little further by taking their seemingly ephemeral information and turning it into an archive without asking them first.
At the end of the TAG party, we waited until most everyone had left and went around picking up trash. We tried to collect relatively indiscriminately, allowing our gag reflexes to be our limit, and we deliberately had no research question: we just wanted to be able to create a ‘site’ out of the party, in some form. We agreed to return to it in a decade and see what could be done, or if archaeologists were really as boring as we seemed.
I’m not sure I expected it to actually happen.
A decade (minus one) later
In 2013, Jim and I met for a drink in a London pub during the CHAT conference.
“It’s been nine years,” he said, and put a plastic bag on the table. Between that day and this one, the archive has been lost, but we remember some of what was in it.
Cigarette packs and a couple of butts. the smoking ban only reached Scotland in 2006, which meant that party smelled in a way that official parties don’t smell anymore. Cute, but not much to it.
Some napkins and beer mats. People drank and wiped things up. Great.
The answer sheets to the legendary TAG party table quiz. Every year, the academic journal Antiquity sponsors and runs a notoriously difficult table quiz at the conference. The key to winning has always been to get some archaeological legend on your team (I think we managed to coax Prof Colin Renfrew onto ours) because some of the questions are so hopelessly obscure you need a good four decades in the field to stand a chance of winning (we didn’t).
I remember saving these because I thought it would be fun to go back see if we could determine who was on which team, or what wiseass answers people had given for questions that stumped them. I found our own team’s answer sheet, with the (not that funny) wiseass answers in my handwriting. Okay — now what? Maybe this was a drunken idea to save a bag of trash for nine years, and there was no point.
On the backs of some of the answer sheets were emails and journal proofs belonging to Professor Martin Carver, editor of Antiquity. Proofs of articles, professional niceties and polite back-and-forths, and the occasional “Please consider the environment before printing this email” in the footer — back when that really meant something.
We made the assumption that these probably came from the scrap paper box that would have been beside the departmental printer in any academic department. In 2004, because it was ‘scrap paper’, we would have thought of these as pages with only one side available for reuse, and we sort of ignored whatever was on the other side — or at least that’s how I always thought of them. It was, at the time, not abnormal to print your emails for reading later, and then to dump those pages into a box so they didn’t go to waste. That was how it looked when you ‘considered the environment’, I guess.
These sheets had been handed to us — possibly collected for this use by Martin Carver himself. And yet they felt so personal. It feels strange even writing this without telling him first.**
Please consider the awkwardness before you save a guy’s garbage
Somehow in the intervening years, we’d gone from a kind of mental deletion of the material on one side of what used to be called ‘scrap paper’ to a time when:
- Almost nobody prints out their emails
- “Please consider the environment” is a cute anachronism
- Having possession of another individual’s personal digital information without their permission is a very bad thing
- Keeping something for nine years that had been given to us for a temporary use felt like an invasion of privacy
- The scrap paper box seems like a pretty dodgy security risk.
What we picked up as a bunch of table quiz answer sheets written on scrap paper had, in the years since, become more significant as personal data — the context had changed. We had unknowingly crossed into a new digital era, and yet what we had done felt more invasive, not less.
We’d been talking about some of these issues of the ethics of our discipline for a long time, but now, amid jokes about submitting our ‘research’ to Antiquity, the question really crystallized for us:
Does deposition imply consent to be studied?
People had consented to the reuse of this scrap paper for the pub quiz, or some other ephemeral purpose, by virtue of placing the sheets in the box next to the printer. They had no reason to assume that nine years later, we’d be reading this stuff in a London pub. Would the implied consent be any different if the assumption of ephemerality wasn’t a reasonable one at the time?
When we think about the physical stuff we own, most of us would say no, that’s invasive. When we think about our personal data, especially if it’s really personal, we also would say no, unless we’ve consented otherwise. And even in 2013, the question about whether Twitter is ‘public’ enough to count as a legitimate tool for researching individuals and groups still felt new and strange. There is now a proposed ethical framework that addresses some of these questions about our assumption of privacy, at least when it comes to Twitter.
But whether it’s the imagined patina of age or the patina of a ‘business case’ that makes someone’s personal data seem like (or be) fair game for analysis and action, we’re still not fully addressing the question: if someone deposits an object, whether it’s data or a more visible physical thing, how do we make people care about, not just whether something seems ethical in our methods, but the underlying question of consent?
Why did it feel so invasive to have these relatively impersonal personal emails that we had acquired through perfectly reasonable means?
Our future past in the present
Anthropology and sociology have worked a little harder than archaeology has to decolonize their disciplines, which is why the way we handle data in the industry looks a lot more like the under-addressed fundamental questions in the ethical landscape of the discipline I was trained in. There have always been questions about who owns the past, who has a right to interpret it, hold it, display it — and how But there has always been a fundamental assumption that deposition implies consent to be studied by someone; it’s mainly been a matter of determining who that someone is.
What will happen, then, when these two thought systems collide, when the data itself becomes a piece of social history, when the patina of age meets the things that were collected with a business case in mind? I think a lot about how our social media data will be used, along with all of the third-party permissions we’ve granted it, sitting on Facebook’s servers up in the Arctic Circle (in my case, at least, given that I live in Stockholm), and how our consent in the present will be translated in the future, when there are data centers of ambiguous or disputed jurisdiction, acting as digital burial grounds for who we used to be, employed in constructing a narrative of who we might have become by then.
In the tech industry, all we need to justify our right to study and act on other humans is access to ‘good’ data and a business case for doing it. We want to pretend there’s more than this, but we’re pretty indiscriminate. There are questions of governance and privacy, but those are too often treated as an unwelcome burden. Increasingly, being good at governance and privacy-friendly are good business decisions in their own right, but that change is slow. In research, we need to meet ethical standards, but the question of digital consent to be a study subject, which seemed like it was clear until the technically public Twitter was defined as private (and I agree), muddles this.
I’ve joked a bit that the coming of the GDPR means a whole bunch of reckless, entitled techbros will be forced to learn the meaning of ‘consent’, and that maybe failing to understand it in any context should always cost them at least €20 million, but there’s also something more serious about this new consent horizon.
Our personal data is increasingly tied to us, physically attached to us. Even though for me, my PMS push notification is an ephemeral piece of information that reminds me not to overthink my tears over that puppy video, that’s potentially useful to build up a long-term picture of who I am, what I am, how I am. In the present, I know that, for example, Clue is careful to outline what they do with our data, that they collaborate with university researchers, who are expected to comply with ethics committees, to do large-scale, anonymized research into women’s health.
What about all of those startups where I’ve submitted my details for a free trial, and then I abandoned the service, the company failed — or both? What happens in the long-term, especially considering that anonymized data really isn’t? I did consent for my Garmin watch to collect data, and to connect to my Strava app, and I did put those apps on my phone. But they aren’t about my phone, my apps, or just abstract representations of my activities — these things are about my physical body, and connecting the two datasets, you could learn a lot about it. By consenting to the use of my data, am I consenting to knowledge of my body — and for whom?
The closest analogy I can think of is NAGPRA, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (the Wikipedia entry for it is really good), and in an archival sense, the work of Sweden’s Kungliga Biblioteket to create archives with access levels, some of which are completely off-limits, due to their sensitive nature. But we need to think about how our research, our unquestioned right to study other people, even if we think of it as studying our collective selves. Will there be something like ‘digital repatriation’, or have we already signed that opportunity away in the form of unread and agreed-to terms and conditions?
As we become more comfortable with the idea of ourselves as cyborgs, of the digital self being tied to our physical selves in truly meaningful ways, then we need to have a good discussion about what it means once all human remains are cyborgs, too.
**Dear Professor Martin Carver, we’re really sorry about your emails. We promise if we find them again, we’ll send them back.
And thank you to Dr Jim Dixon for being such an awesome collaborator, and for including me in the wider discussion, even since I’ve left the field.
