Big Data has big things in store for us. The burgeoning industry devoted to collecting and analysing our every digital emission, no matter how minute or mundane, believes it has discovered the key to reading us, and predicting, if not prompting, our behaviour.
Such ambitions are not new. Political leaders and researchers throughout human history have thought they cracked the human code and could program us at will. So, what is different now? Why should we believe Big Data has figured us out? And even if the data analysts are wrong, what should we make of their hopes and designs? And what should we fear?
Data analysis is an esoteric science whose methods and conclusions are inscrutable to us. To cite a
famous example, data analysts working for the US retailer Target deduced that particular female customers were pregnant by analysing their purchases of specific goods, including vitamins, lotions and cotton balls. Target's analysts were so astute that they could predict the woman's due date to within a week.
Facebook's data analysts, meanwhile, know when we are falling in love or breaking up. Through careful study, they
determined that "couples about to be 'official' will post...1.67 times per day in the 12 days before they publicly change their profile to 'in a relationship'. The number of posts then falls to 1.53 posts per day in the next 85 days... [While] the number of interactions drops as the relationship starts, there's also an uptick in the level of positivity. This includes the use of the words like love, nice, happy, and...[subtracting] negative words like hate, hurt and bad."
Comment: Back in September 2020, 700 church leaders declared that there should be 'no more lockdowns', and yet Christmas gatherings were banned - although that didn't stop 10 Downing Street from holding multiple parties - and we haven't heard much from them since. Even the Archbishop's comments are pretty weak and don't really address the dystopian agenda afoot:
- 200 police descend on church to stop worshipers attending Sunday service in Alberta, Canada
- C of E bishop warns of church closures due to lockdown losses
- Pope Francis compares EU's attempt to discourage use of word 'Christmas' to secular dictatorships like Nazism
Also check out SOTT radio's: MindMatters: Interview with Rod Dreher: How to Survive the Coming Soft Totalitarianism