Merriam-Webster defines data as “factual information (such as measurements or statistics) used as a basis for reasoning, discussion, or calculation.” Indeed, due to the virtual nature of data, it is often thought of as a convoluted technical term with no bearings in our physical space. Data, however, is nothing more than a modern renaming of what has always been intrinsic to and driven human societies, namely, information and knowledge. In 1597, Sir Francis Bacon proclaimed that “knowledge itself is power,” a truism that has resonated through human societies since their conception. What is different now is not the role and manipulation of data in society, it is the rate at which, and by whom, it is being collected, stored, and used. Our modern digital world is characterized by the automatic and instantaneous transfer of information. Every day, 3.3 billion searches are performed by Google, 350 million photos and 4.5 billion “likes” are distributed on Facebook, and 144 billion emails are exchanged. Knowledge is still power and at no point in history has knowledge been more unequally distributed than it is today.
With advances in Big Data, machine learning, and cloud computing, data has become more pervasive than ever before. Data has become a medium of exchange, a currency that has value in and of itself. The “Big Five” - Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft - are represented in nearly every aspect of the modern digital economy. This concentration of data has become worrisome. After the Cambridge Analytica affair, democracy was placed next to privacy, security, and intellectual property on the shelf of modern liberal norms threatened by this data concentration. Moreover, tech companies, like Facebook and Google, are using our virtual personalities to show us the content we want to see: advertising has only become more effective in shaping our views and commanding our actions.
Despite recent government efforts to regulate data protection, legal frameworks are outdated and limited in scope. We need new ways of distributing, protecting, and managing the people’s data. John Locke argued that an individual’s right to privacy can be derived from their right to private property. Data, however, is only useful as a sum of its parts; in practice, individuals have limited control over their own data and cannot hold the “Big Five” to account. Perhaps we need a new conception of our right to privacy that is derived from collective property instead. With a novel appreciation of data as collective property, new technologies, including blockchain, can offer innovative ways of protecting individual or collective data sources.
This week, Graphite focuses on our modern, data-driven world. Institutional reform is a necessity, but also presents an insufficiency. We need people to know, think, and talk about how data is being collected, stored, and used. The first step to correcting the inequalities in knowledge and power are to become familiar with them. Join Graphite as we address the modern debates around data protection and ownership. Join us as we explore the 1s and 0s of our data-driven world.
-Lucovic
