How to think
I want to talk about the topic of my new book-in-progress, ‘The Map and The Territory’, which is an enquiry into the problems of reality in the age of data.
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I’ve advised leadership in many industries profoundly impacted by data over the past quarter century. In all cases, the work has demanded making not just commercial or technological, but cultural, psychological and sociological sense of the accelerating waves of the digital revolution.
Over time, the challenge has evolved, from ‘what to do about this?’, through ‘what to think about it?’ to ‘how to think about it?’. The problem has shifted from the tactical, via the strategic, to become philosophical.
I’ve also published two books - one on digital business, the other on networks. A consistent motif has been the changing nature of meaning and of value, as they’re repeatedly upended by the techno-cultural turbulence of the past quarter century.
The Xerox Parc visionary Mark Weiser observed, ‘The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it’.
He was entirely correct. We’re like goldfish, asked to describe the water and the bowl in which we live. What water? What bowl?
Setting out
What do I mean by this word 'data'? I mean specifically information in digital form that can be manipulated by computer and distributed over networks.
It’s widely believed that ‘the data’ admits us to a comforting future of increasing precision and predictability. But there’s another, darker and far less explored, side to this precious coin.
Considering data today as simply an essential ingredient of information and knowledge is no longer adequate. It throws up genuinely existential challenges, forming an entirely new context.
That said, to ascribe any kind of intrinsic agency or accountability to data is erroneous. The critical questions here are not about ‘what data does’, but what can be done to it and with it, by whom, for whom, and to whom.
Finding our way about
We’ve never had access to more information, nor more tools to mine and manipulate it. And yet making sense of the world has never felt more difficult.
I love this quote from Wittgenstein: ‘A philosophical problem has the form “I don’t know my way about"’.
The cornerstone of this argument is that data’s primary role and value - yesterday, today and tomorrow - lie in supporting human navigation. No longer of just our physical world, but of every dimension of experience, in everyday journeys of understanding, decision and action.
The most challenging of the environments that data has enabled aren’t the satnav, VR/AR, video games, or ‘the metaverse’, all more or less known and navigable visual models of the physical world.
William Gibson’s seminal description of cyberspace, in his novel Neuromancer, helps us to fully appreciate the profound difference between these familiar virtual worlds, and the invisible data-filled abstractions which we now inhabit, and which come to inhabit us.
‘A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators … A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind …’
We should pause on those phrases ‘representation of data abstracted …’ and ‘the nonspace of the mind …’.
There are essential distinctions between data as a representation of the phenomenal world and human experience, which is the way instinctively we tend to think of it, and data as it behaves today, which is far more as an abstraction from the phenomenal world and human experience.
The distinction between those two things, the representation and the abstraction, produces profound implications, which are a large part of my argument as we go forward. They point us to data’s role in all aspects of human navigation, landing abruptly on Alfred Korzybski’s often-quoted remark: ‘The map is not the territory’.
This is my primary hypothesis. The same data, devices and networks that enable our navigation of the phenomenal world, informing and enhancing our moment to moment understanding, decisions and actions, create another radically different, alien environment, for which neither the human mind nor society are prepared.
These abstracted, ethereal ‘maps’ not only create new ‘territories’: they have the power to influence and manipulate our experience, to undermine and even overwhelm it.
Lost in space
If we can accept this hypothesis, data moves beyond describing and enriching reality, to actively threaten and potentially to deconstruct it. To ground these implications, Jakob von Uexküll’s influential Umwelttheory offers an ideal perspective.
It refers to the specific perceptual world unique to each organism, based on its sensory abilities and biological needs. For humans, the umwelt can be understood as a tool for the navigation of meaning.
The effects on human experience, when the umwelt is both pulled into and invaded by a flood of abstraction, are destructive. We already have abundant proof of the impacts of inadequately regulated social media. Meaning, identity, agency, belonging and community are all directly and profoundly compromised.
What is happening here, and what is the precise role played by data?
Two perspectives offer immediate and complementary insights. First, the reflexive nature of modernity has been thoroughly explored, notably by the sociologist Anthony Giddens.
Persistent feedback loops between human experience and ever-shifting information render previously reliable ‘knowledge’ chronically hypothetical and open to doubt. We could say it leaves reality in a state of constant beta.
Today, this effect is continually reinforced and accelerated by the irresistible expansion of digital networks, devices and data. How can we ever plant our feet, when the rug is repeatedly pulled from under us?
Turning to psychological impacts, research by Iain McGilchrist (muh-GILL-krist) and others into the brain hemispheres confirms close similarities between the behaviours of the data-focused left hemisphere when separated from the right, and common symptoms of schizophrenia.
In particular, loss of context, hyperfocus on abstraction, and alienation from lived experience. The correlations with the individual and societal impacts of unfettered data are clear.
In Neal Stephenson’s cyberpunk classic Snow Crash, a computer virus jumps from the screen into the body to cause brain damage.
In Wim Wenders’ film, Until The End of The World, a handheld machine enabling humans to watch their own dreams leads to obsession and breakdown. Note that it’s not their dreams that drive the characters mad, it’s recycling and consuming them in abstracted form.
Humans are neither intended nor equipped to inhabit and navigate - let alone to contain - such worlds. Our efforts tip us towards individual and societal breakdown.
Back to earth
The unique attributes and dynamics of data are central to its role in creating both clear and remarkable benefits and hidden, bewildering dangers. Its neutrality and fluidity enable it to move freely throughout the entire global system of networks and devices.
Its infinite plasticity and modularity enable it, like Lego bricks, to be manipulated - not only to assemble information, knowledge, narratives and content of all kinds, but to disassemble and reassemble them in forms that best suit actors with the necessary resources.
An inescapable conclusion is that the integrity and reliability of much - by now, likely most - of the information available to us can no longer depend solely upon digital abstracted data.
Instead, they come to rely on the degree to which our own values, intentions and purposes align or conflict with those of immensely powerful corporations and in increasing cases, governments. If we trust these, all is well. Reasons not to do so are plentiful.
I began this introduction with two premises. First, that data needs to be raised to the level of a significant existential challenge. Second, that it’s not ‘what it does’ that should concern us, but what can be done to and with it, by whom, for whom, and to whom.
Both democracy and capitalism are fraying at their edges, exacerbated by a toxic conflation of political and commercial interests.
The digitisation, abstraction and proliferation of data have played significant parts, advanced by the dominion of the algorithm across all financial markets, and the commonplace manipulation of national elections and both military and cultural wars.
We can see several distinct fronts converging, setting the scene for a very large, very perfect, storm. While it lies towards the edge of this project, such broader existential threats have been described as ‘the metacrisis’. Data is deeply and problematically embedded within and across all of these scenarios.
I’ve encountered some of the most passionate advocates of ‘the digital’ and’ the data’, increasingly uncomfortable with their rigid adherence to a kind of secular theology.
What I’ve discovered so far is that the challenge that data presents today is far more complex than whether it is, or is not, helping us to ‘find our way about’.
The map has itself become part of the territory, coming to undermine the solidity and consistency of reality itself. The question that follows, demanding our most urgent consideration, is this. What can realistically be done to retrieve and defend meaning, sanity and a shared sense of truth - the essentials of human agency and freedom - from all this data?
While I believe it’s profoundly important and long overdue, I fully appreciate that this work is not only unfamiliar, but also uncomfortable. So thanks - as always - for reading.