Why data is a puzzle, not ‘the new oil’

Why data is a puzzle, not ‘the new oil’

It is an oft repeated phrase that ‘data is the new oil’. This seems logical, we’ve always known of capitalism and its endless striving for monopolies and the accumulation of wealth. So, the data collection of the tech giants, must be of the same order.

Consider oil, always known as finite, and increasingly so. What happens when one person or group controls all of the oil available on our planet? That person or group has a lot of oil, which is very valuable. The difference between none, a little and a lot of oil is different only by number.

It is also widely understood that wealth brings power and influence. But economists, and economic thinking more broadly, is clinically awful at predicting outcomes of human behavior beyond simple, closed loop, experiments (mostly of the thought variety).

Whilst psychometricians can look at a person’s response to a test or quiz in a fundamentally different fashion than mere future prognostication or guesswork. Indeed, by looking not at which answers were answered ‘correctly’, but rather by looking at patterns or combinations of answers, are able to glean behavioural traits. These traits, alongside modelling, can produce outcomes to tests that the subject never even completed.   

So, an economist, and a bound form of logic, notes that a monopoly will gain you power and influence, but these two things will be gated by the implicit value in your stockpile of wealth, whether in the form of oil or woodchips. These ‘classic’ monopolies proved relatively stable and immune to ‘disruption’. Ignoring the obvious and catastrophic impact on the environment of these practices for the moment, they have remained relatively ‘stable’ and predictable. Psychometrics and Big Data however propose a novel modifier to this tired capital-centric equation.

A monopoly based around data (read personal information) is fundamentally different. It is additive. It is cumulative. And it is exponential. Couple this with the remnant instinct of industrial era capitalism, the myth of unrelenting growth, new markets and economic growth without collapse, and you have a dangerous concoction. You have a puzzle.

Monopolising and controlling more pieces of the data puzzle, does not merely increase their value, it increases the comprehensibility of the subject. Us.

What can stop this unrelenting growth and slow the piecing together of the puzzle? And what will the puzzle reveal, if, and when, it is completed?

Perhaps, as with oil, storage and disposal might become an issue? But with storage space cheap and becoming moreso, this seems unlikely. Digital storage is best treated like Long Term Memory, theoretically infinite.

Perhaps, we the subjects will put a stop to the collection of these missing pieces? Human discomfort might be growing, but not at the same rate as the proliferation of data collecting devices and their expansion into new areas. The concept of privacy in public is increasingly becoming antiquated with surveillance by a range of means becoming the norm. In our own homes, the ‘Internet of things’, 'Smart Homes', Google Home and Ring cameras see us increasingly surveilling ourselves. But when the pushback against the resultant data collection is halted or slowed, through laws or human discomfort, the final pieces of the puzzle may never be required.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning informed by psychometricians modelling will be able to provide the missing pieces of the puzzle and fill in the missing spaces. These processes will make errors, many of which will have catastrophic effects (especially for those groups in society already most disadvantaged). But despite these faltering and catastrophic faults, progress and improvement will be visible and human agents will support these processes in their growth.

So, when the puzzle is completed, what will the picture reveal?

Initially, and perhaps this aspect is already solved, it will merely reveal the buying interests and habits of the people it has this data on. But this is old capitalism thinking within a new paradigm, warning of what is possible, but not delivering on it.

Next this continual striving will move from asking and suggesting to openly influencing. The Cambridge Analytica scandal being but one visible example of this process already underway. 

The goal is a new Skinner Box (a system that trained rats through randomly positive and negative rewards) that can, will and does nudge peoples habits. But when this different kind of monopoly is able to shape and mould people’s actions and habits, the question becomes not ‘can Big Tech be trusted’ but rather: Can this power be trusted to anyone?

As Shoshana Zuboff suggests in ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’, the data puzzle is a significantly different paradigm than the ‘classic’, Industrial Revolution era capitalism that preceded it.

So, the question remains:

What can we do about it?

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