Andrew Culp (with Anirban Baishya) Data, Media, Ethics: A Conversation with Andrew Culp “Networks are not just for the counter-culture anymore, they are how the military plans war, companies do business, and governments cast their influence.” Andrew Culp teaches Media History and Theory in the MA Program in Aesthetics and Politics and the School of Critical Studies at CalArts. He is the author of Dark Deleuze (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) which has been translated into Spanish, Japanese and German. His research theorizes the ambivalent effects of network culture from the anti-globalization movements to the monetization of social relations of the Web 2.0 sharing economy. In this piece, Culp shares his thoughts on datafication, tech culture, and the emerging horizons of technocratic governmentality. Anirban Baishya (AB): The term “big-data” gets a moral philosophy to a science of government as thrown around almost as if it were a magical thing. the Physiocrats argue for the connection between But, as Craig Dalton and Jim Thatcher put it: “‘Big value and price. The consequence is more than a data’ has big precursors, earlier knowledges that set data-driven approach to commerce, it constitutes the stage and helped define the nature and needs a science in which the market speaks a truth that that present-day ‘big data’ realizes.” So, what exactly verifies governmental practice. Perhaps even more is different about big data (or what’s the BIG in big importantly, this is also the time of Adolphe data)? Quetelet, father of “social physics” and the birth of l’homme moyen (“the average man”). The point I Andrew Culp (AC): Big Data is an intensification of am making is that when looking at the history of our “information society,” as it has been called since data, of course one will find devices for producing the 1960s. But as you say, it has many precursors. knowledge, but upon close inspection, there will One way to locate its antecedents is to follow also be a whole theory of truth. Foucault’s inquiry into “what has counted as truth?”. Flash forward to today, and I would like to And more specifically, the practices of knowledge ask the same type of questions. Drilling down production that he called verediction. But whereas into the information society would lead one to the in Foucault’s time, marketing firms previously contemporary “truth-telling” power of Big Data: the employed psychoanalysts to divine the unconscious formalization of the positivist social sciences (at the desires of the masses, today, information analysts expense of other forms of expertise), the triumph now coax out patterns that can only be seen from of behavioralism with its accompanying theory of inside a dataset. Putting it in another way: isn’t the the subject, and computation along with its mode of promise of Big Data just a new speaking subject problem-solving. The post-war Keynesian fantasy after the Death of the Human? was automation, with the machines doing all the In his lectures on neoliberalism, Foucault finds work. Our post-crash Neoliberal fantasy can no a curious moment in the middle of the eighteenth longer imagine a world without work—or to repeat century when economics transforms from being that slogan from the ‘70s that has become even Small Media and Everday Life: Digital Media Beyond Big Data 31 Anirban Baishya, editor, Spectator 39:2 (Fall 2019): 31-38. DATA, MEDIA, ETHICS more popular today: it is easier to imagine the end everyday thinking. Not only will it act as a virtual of the world than the end of capitalism. Perhaps we subject, with “the algorithm” suggesting to them are already in that very apocalypse, a world of Big people to date, books to read, or jobs to work, Data where the machines do all the thinking. There, but a means to discuss the truth about healthcare, human interpretation is no longer necessary because manufacturing, policing, transportation, education, copious amounts of data are readily available and and science. self-transparently true—a veritable libertarian technocratic fantasy. AB: What media objects would we not have But before I oversell the idea, it is equally without Big Data? Over the past years, Variety important to note that there are already quite a few has held Big-Data Summits and platforms such as chinks in its armor. The social sciences are currently YouTube, Google, Facebook and Netflix routinely going through a reproducibility crisis, aided in part collect user data to predict user preferences through by Big Data. The trick of machine learning is found algorithms, or to target ads. Is “big-data” a vehicle in its ability to locate interesting patterns. But as for other media, or are we at a point, historically, recent scandals have revealed, those patterns often when we can think of data itself as a media-form? express a quality of the dataset and not the reality on which they are meant to be modeling. The problem AC: A lot of true Big Data is never seen as so much that arises here is not one of true believers but of of it is proprietary information internal to the dependency. To specify, it is not just the information corporate world, sensitive information protected processing problem of “garbage-in, garbage-out,” it by government privilege, or research data never is the result of privileging forms of knowledge that used by more than a fewer researchers. When can be only be produced through certain technical translated from the database into something more means—here, I’m thinking of systems where the appropriate for humans, it is most often represented “truth” of a process begins to overwhelm any single through graphs, charts, or maps—still one of the actor’s ability to override it, as with Terry Gilliam’s areas driving Big Data is climate change research. Brazil. This is perhaps the greatest social risk of Though many of their datasets are not big enough Big Data: even in instances where it is completely to technically be Big Data, there is a media whose unreliable, it continues to be used because of history is intimately tied up with it: Geographic dependence on the kind of truth it speaks. Information Systems and geo-spatial research more broadly. Exemplary projects include Million Dollar AB: So, what changes when the rhetoric of big-data Blocks. slips into our everyday, habitual use of networked But in terms of the entertainment industry, technologies and what consequences does big data which seems more central to your question, Web have for our larger understanding of media culture 2.0 has given us even weirder Big Data-adjacent in the present? media, such as Instagram star Lil Miquela, the chatlogs of racist Microsoft chatbot Tay, 23andMe AC: Here’s one idea that continues the Foucauldian genetic analysis, interactive surveillance maps, line of thought that every society has analogies it psychedelic DeepMind images, Deepfake and takes as the foundation of truth. Genetics has long other AI-generated faces, and more. If one expands served this role, with everyday people arguing that the category to include all media that exists only something must be true “because it’s in my DNA”— through the network-massification effect of the which they mean both literally and metaphorically, web, it would include meme aesthetics, social sometimes at the same time. It becomes perfected media-specific discourses & subjectivities, video in the television show CSI, whose forensic science game narrative logic, streamer video conventions, became so convincing to general audience that it crowd-funded retro reboots, and much more. And led to a measurable “CSI-effect” in real trial juries finally, there is a whole category of media that who expected all detective work to be as equally preexists Big Data and the web but is marketed as persuasive. As Big Data becomes similarly self- new. Journalists have very recently talked about how miraculating, people will commonly lean on it in self-styled visionaries have appropriated gendered 32 FALL 2019 CULP media like the Slimfast diet shake through products prefigured by lefty development as part of the anti- like Soylent as essential components for efficient globalization movement, such as Indymedia or “biohacking,” with its accompanying analytics of how the underlying model for Twitter came from counting, measuring, representing, and modifying the SMS-based protest app, TXTMob). As this behavior. Most remarkable is how close the early generation of Web 2.0 companies evolved convergence is for a doctor’s diagnosis for disordered and responded to venture capitalist demands for eating and the data analytics of the quantified self. coherent business models, their roles clarified: What is new about Big Data’s role in all of this? they were landlords of a new sort. But instead of As you say: prediction. But also, extrapolation. This demanding rent, they monetize user-generated is something Artificial Intelligence and Machine content in return for use of their site as a “platform.” Learning gets from its forefather, cybernetics. As this monetization started driving the priorities Cybernetics was itself born from the mind of MIT of more users (formal and informal), so changed mathematician Norbert Wiener, who was working the type of content that they produced. Fortunately, on automatic anti-aircraft guns during World War the web is still a chaotic enough place that the 2. Media makers are using data-driven techniques profit motive does not drive everything, but it is to similarly target audiences. It works on a few influencing more and more the type of content different levels. Identifying trend lines is the core of that is being produced. For example, because of Web 2.0 business model for companies looking to the massive amount of money being poured into monetize collecting data, which sell to information the “alt-light” (Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson) right brokers like Acxiom.