Who Ru(i)ns the World? Data.
From social media to the climate crisis, Big Data is helping to ruin everything. It’s a problem.
“Data” isn’t “things”.
We too often make false assumptions about data. We like to think that data represents faithfully whatever it is data of.
A cube has sides of length 1 inch. It has a certain mass and therefore a certain density. We can take these measurements and plug them into an Excel table. We can even measure the spectral properties and elasticity of the cube, or chemically manipulate it to figure out what it’s made from. These can be data that go into our Excel table, too.
But data doesn’t give us everything. None of this data, nor any combinations of said data points, can be said to be the cube. The cube just is, and is separate from the data that describes it. This is an obvious fact, but an overlooked one: data can never exhaust what it is to be the object of study.
This separation between “thing” and “data” leads naturally to the conclusion that at least a few micrometers — likely more — of wiggle room exist between how a thing actually is vs. what the data says about that thing.
Data is currently ruining the world in a number of ways. Just as data doesn’t exhaust things, nor does the statement “Data is currently ruining the world” exhaust the…
