Are We Demonising Data Collection, or Data Exploitation?
— Towards the end of The Gutenberg Parenthesis—in which Jeff Jarvis argues that the internet is too new a medium for us to understand its long-term social impact—he writes:
I worry that we demonize data and regulate its collection more that its exploitation, we might cut ourselves off from the knowledge that can result.
People don’t oppose data collection per se. They oppose data collection as a means to further the agenda of tech-oligarch owned businesses. As such we need to differentiate what data is being collected and more importantly why it is collected.
Is the data collected to build comprehensive psychograms of every user, what they read and for how long, what links they click, and what they share; with goal of extending their stay within walled-garden websites and to sell more advertising and thus to make more money for stake holders? Is the data collected to train AI models to eventually replace salaried humans in creative vocations with to make more money for stake holders? Or is this data collected to study human behaviour, to archive the current cultural, political or technological discourse, so humanity can learn from it now and in future generations.
When we’re discussing intrusive data collection and how to reign it in, we’re not talking about a bunch of scientists trying to understand current and historic events mediated through social media similar to how climatologists drill ice cores into the antarctic shelf to understand the composition the atmosphere throughout history. We’re talking about greedy and morally bankrupt business owners who collect data to manipulate, to deceive, and frankly steal, just to make a buck.
Herein lies the difference.
We don’t live in medieval Florence where the arrival of a new medium led to an explosion of new ideas that few people with power rightly perceive as a threat to their power, and where the better idea eventually prevails. No, we live in a world where greedy billionaires actively curate algorithms so they push engaging but false divisive content on millions of people to sell ads, and more recently to advance their midlife-crisis driven political agendas.
The data is currently collected by the wrong people, those that can afford extensive hardware to store everything that is being said and done online for eternity. But open APIs that allows access to the data are a thing of the past so the data ends up on closed silos, where it’s useful to few but useless to the majority of society now and in the future.