We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves

We Are Roadkill

We all know that web services sell data from our use of the internet. But how do they make that data useful to anyone? That is the purpose of We Are Data. It laboriously elucidates the often arcane machinations of the Googles and Facebooks of the world. At bottom, there is an algorithm, a mathematical construct, ever tweaked to reflect new realities, so you can’t pin it down from one day to the next. Algorithms spit out decisions based on your individual clicks, searches, e-mail, contact lists and chats. They decide who you are in order to appeal to data purchasers. According to your activity and location, it might classify you as a man even though you are a woman, old though you are young, black though you are white, show more and so on. You could be gay one day and straight the next. Doesn’t matter. Your activity and location is just a commodity for sale in bulk.

Web services structure the raw data into algorithmically constructed data objects, according what is useful to clients. It could be ‘terrorist’ for the NSA for example. (There are two kinds of beings in the world – those without quotation marks, and those with, the latter being cyber constructs). Facebook’s ‘terrorist’ could be completely different from Google’s. It’s purely a convenience for the sake of the buyer, be it TSA or Starbucks.

Everything is monetized (but you receive none of it). The dictum is that if it is not in principle measurable, or if it is not being measured, it doesn’t exist. Individuals cease to matter. They become dividuals, the cyber distillation of the data they generate.

We Are Data is a missing link in the chain of how the world operates. it is also quite dense and dry. There are precious few examples of how real people are affected. It is however, festooned with empty when not totally meaningless references to Michel Foucault. Just name dropping, while adding zero insight. I would say he is mentioned about 40 times. In places, We Are Data reads like it was written by an algorithm. But just when you want to give up, Cheney-Lippold sends a missile across the bow: ”Almost everything that is algorithmic is a lie.” I wish he would have led with that instead of his 40 page intro. It would have been a much more dynamic book.

So the bad news is privacy is non-existent. Irretrievable. Gone forever. The good news is nobody wants to know who you really are anyway. Just keep clicking.

David Wineberg show less

I gave up about 100 pages in and I never give up. But I did. I was excited about this book. Some scholars I follow praised it on social media. This is a topic I am profoundly interested in. And yet, I found it unreadable. It may be that I'm getting older and less tolerant of academic gibberish that papers over relatively simple ideas. So, unless all the insightful stuff is the other 200 pages that I did not read, there was really nothing there that I hadn't read somewhere else, except clearer and much better written.