Your data diminishes your freedom

It's no secret - though it has yet to be clearly or widely articulated - that our lives and our data are increasingly intertwined, almost indistinguishable. Being able to function in modern society means submitting to demands for ID numbers, financial information, filling in number fields and drop-down lists with our demographics. Such submission, in every sense of the word, can push our lives in very particular and often unsettling directions. It wasn't until recently, however, that I saw someone trying to understand the deeper implications of what happens when our data - and the formats it has to adapt to - becomes an inextricable part of our existence. , as a new member or organ to which we must adapt. "I don't want to pretend we're just data and nothing but data," says Colin Koopman, chair of the University of Oregon's philosophy department and author of "How We Became Our Data. ". I claim you are your data too.” Which means at the very least that we should be thinking about this transformation beyond the most obvious data security concerns. “We're surprisingly apathetic,” says Koopman, who is working on a follow-up book, tentatively titled “Data Equals,” “about the attention we give: what does this data show? What assumptions are built into the data configuration in a given way? What inequalities are built into these data systems? We need to do more work on that.”

Can you explain further what it means to say that we have become our data? Because a natural reaction to that might be, well, no, I'm my mind, I'm my body, I'm not numbers in a database - although I understand that those numbers in that database have a real impact on my life. The claim that we are data can also be seen as a claim that we live our lives through our data in addition to living our lives through our bodies, through our minds, through anything other. I like to take a historical perspective on this. If you go back in time a few hundred years or go to certain communities, the repression would not be, "I am my body", the repression would be, "I am my soul". We have these evolving perceptions of ourselves. I don't want to deny anyone that, yeah, you're your soul. My contention is that your data has become something increasingly unavoidable and certainly unavoidable in the sense of being obligatory for your average person living their life. There are so many of our lives that are woven or made possible by various data points that we accumulate around us – and that's interesting and concerning. It now becomes possible to say, “These data points are essential to who I am. I need to take care of them and I feel overwhelmed by them. I feel like he is being manipulated beyond my control. Many people have this relationship with their credit score, for example. It is both very important to them and very mysterious.

When it comes to something like our credit scores, I think most of us can relate on a basic level that, yeah, it's weird and disturbing that we don't have clear ideas about how whose personal data is used to generate these ratings, and this discomfort is compounded by the fact that these scores then limit what we can and cannot do. But what does the use of our data in this way suggest in the first place, in the broadest possible sense, about our place in society? The informational sides of ourselves make it clear that we are vulnerable. Vulnerable in the sense of being exposed to large impersonal systems or systemic fluctuations. To draw a parallel: maybe I feel like if I jog, take my vitamins, and eat healthy, my body will be fine. But then there's this pandemic, and we realize that we're actually supervulnerable. The control I have over my body? It's actually not my control. It was a set of social structures. So on the data side, we see this structure put in place so that people have a clearer view of this vulnerability. We are in this position, I do my best to optimize my credit score or, if I own a small business, how to optimize my search engine rankings. We simultaneously load more and more of our lives into these systems and feel we have little or no control or understanding over how these systems work. This creates a great democratic deficit. It undermines our sense of our own ability to engage democratically with some of the basic conditions through which we live with others in society. Much of this is not an effect of the technologies themselves. A lot of it has to do with the way our culture tends to want to think of technology, especially information technology, as this scintillating, exciting thing, and its importance lies in the fact that it's beyond your comprehension. But I think that...