“Data is the absolute truth,” said Nigel Farage recently in the Telegraph interview with Tim Stanley. Oh Nige, I thought, don’t be so gullible. Data is just another commodity, sold by slick tech bros who convince the untechy that they have the data-led secret to unlocking human desires and therefore elections. It is this mindset, I suspect, that helped the Tories lose the election: during their time in Government, they were convinced by junk data from pollsters and focus groups that people wanted one thing, when in actual fact they wanted nothing of the sort.
This understanding of junk data came to me in the most uncomfortable of ways: I discovered that for the past six years my internet search history has been connected to my eldest son’s phone. We were faffing around with his mortally smashed phone screen when I said I might be able to remember the provider because I’d connected our phones so I could monitor his search history. He laughed, “Mum, you did it the wrong way round, I see your search history – but you can’t see mine.”
Black sweats and thudding heart followed.
“WHAT?!?”
“Yeah, all your Googles come up on my search history.”
THE HORROR. My data soul flashed before me, like some black thriller:
- Meningiomas
- Best rat poison
- Ideal fat content of 46 year-old woman
- Rehoming cocker spaniel
- Ralph Fiennes in Onegin
- Fostering children Hampshire
- Honey cheesecake recipe
- Nick Dixon
Did my poor son track my grief-stricken searches when my Dad was diagnosed with a, thankfully, benign brain tumour, my rage when our dog ate my jacket, my alarming interest in fostering Nick Dixon?
“Oh no!” I wailed, “What on earth must you think of me?”
My eldest looked perplexed.
“My thoughts, you’ve seen my thoughts.”
He frowned and considered this.
“It’s not you Mum. There’s more to you than Asda deliveries and recipes for the slow cooker.” My heart slowed down a bit.
“What is me then?”
He thought for no more than a moment: “Shouting when I don’t unload the dishwasher. Liking Middlemarch. Laughing. I dunno, that sort of thing.”
Phew. And yet, many companies will have bundled up all my Google searches, and sold this data to all sorts of other companies as swish sounding data analytics. How would I be packaged: ABC1 middle-aged country woman? A ‘needs based’ or ‘wandering consumer?’ How would my political affiliation be deduced? All I do know is that whoever buys this rubbish has been sold a pup. While parts of ourselves, parts of our souls, parts of our thoughts, parts of our dreams, parts of our worries, may be found in historic Google search data – it is only part, certainly nowhere near the whole. And this is the point that gets lost in all the excitement about data. Data is by no means the absolute truth – for either individuals, political parties, society or country. We’ve all seen The Prisoner: “I am not a number, I am a free man!”
“Oh Christ,” sighs my husband, “You can’t possibly be saying that data is rubbish. It’s worth billions, it’s one of the only things the U.K. is good at.”
“Remember the Stasi files,” I shoot back at him. With 270,000 people and 180,000 informers working for it, the Stasi – the Ministry of State Security for the German Democratic Republic – kept files on over five million people in stores that would measure over 11 kilometres. What was revealed to those who uncovered the mass of files in 1991 was less Teutonically-efficient data storage and management, more the out-of-control mess of a demonic hoarder. There was simply too much information for even the most ruthless Stasi operatives to process in any coherent way, thriving instead on a devilish combination of paranoia and fear. And computers wouldn’t have helped analyse it all, because human thought, human impulses, human responses, cannot be classified into neat data analytics, no matter how much the bureaucrats want to categorise and rationalise us. Man doth not live on Amazon orders alone.
“Where’s the tape measure?” interrupts my son.
“In the kitchen drawer,” I reply doubtfully, fearing the jumble of Blu Tack, Halloween fangs, letters from primary school, nail clippers, pack of cards, gorilla tape, batteries that clutter up the drawer. And that, I realise, is what most human digital data is: amassed junk from the mess of life. A computer can no more make coherent the contents of the drawer than the digital footprint of individual souls. Soon the countryside will be littered with huge data storage centres as pointless as the kitchen drawer.
So where then can Nige turn for guidance when he realises that data is not the absolute truth? To principles of course. The principles that underpin all forms of good government and good living: truth, beauty, freedom and love. Principles that cannot be quantified or computerised and packaged up into neat gobbets of data, but the only principles that the wise need to seek, to follow, to embody and to act upon: truth, beauty, freedom and love. Difficult to get right but more reliable than data.
Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence mentor.
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“Governments don’t stay in power if they make people cold and poor”. They do if there is no coherent opposition to vote for.
And even if they don’t stay in power and get replaced, the next lot just carry on in the same way, so it makes no difference.
And they are rewarded with gongs for failure.
Which confirms what I keep repeating on here – our governments are NOT running the country.
Pitchforks.
Petrol bombs while we still have access to it.
All the petrol pumps have been damaged by climate zealots.
Pointing out the costs and suffering won’t put an end to insane climate policies.
The policies stem from the idea that burning fossil fuels leads to climate catastrophe and destruction.
In most peoples’ minds, a bit of suffering is better than catastrophe and destruction.
Years and years of brainwashing need to be undone.
But that isn’t going to happen without telling everyone that the whole CO2 climate catastrophe story is a giant hoax.
Too many people who try to argue against climate policy on the basis of the unacceptable costs don’t dare to challenge the broader narrative and that’s a big problem.
I think this is true for the Guardian readers I know, but I also talk to quite a few people much more grounded in reality and I am sure they would be more than happy to forget about the climate crisis if their bills went down.
People are saying that “the whole CO2 climate catastrophe story is a giant hoax” but they do not try to prove it. Probably they do not know enough to be able to.
The UN and WEF will be delighted that their planned destruction of the UK …. at the hands of the British Establishment and puppeticians is going so well.
Only a small percentage of the Earth’s surface has direct temperature reading instruments of varying accuracy and from which these averages of averages are calculated.
The result is numbers, not data.
Net-zero common sense for decades. And all because the earth has supposedly warmed 0.8 deg C since 1860 when records began at the low point after a little ice age.
To physicists, that’s an increase of 0.3% from 288 to 288.8 degrees Kelvin. Meanwhile the difference in average temperature between London and Manchester is 1.2 deg C. Go figure.
A simpleton’s yarn debunked over a decade ago by a Nobel Physics Laureate…
https://mediatheque.lindau-nobel.org/recordings/31259/the-strange-case-of-global-warming-2012
“…In this talk I will explain why I became concerned about the climate, and terrified by the one-sided propaganda in the media, In particular I am worried about all the money wasted on alternate energies, when so many children in the world go hungry to bed.”
Twelve years on, the Climate Theatre of the Absurd just runs and runs.
Thanks for the link.
Climate activists are average people
No, I think most of us would consider them below average retards if there answer to a lack of wind generation is just to build more of it. 1 + 1 still only equals 1 when it is the percentage of output from your windmills.
Energy, supply and demand.
The article covers comprehensively the supply end, or lack of it, but leaves out the zooming demand. According to the (fake) statistics, the population of Greater London in 2024 was 9,748,000, 1% more than 2023. Nevertheless, going by measurements of water consumption and sewage production, the real figure is close to 12m. And this is the curious thing. The NetZeroist fanatics also support enthusiastically open borders, ignoring the fact that increasing population levels lead to huge greenhouse gas emissions.
Friends of the Earth’s Tony Bosworth said, “We have an abundance of natural resources like wind and solar,” he says. “They’ll go on forever, and we won’t be reliant on expensive gas and oil.”
Bosworth ought to be sent, along with the Just Stop Oil filth who have just desecrated the grave of Charles Darwin, to Texas, to be instructed by the Texans about what happened to their wind & solar during the terrible “Polar Vortex” Blizzards in 2021. The wind turbines froze solid, the solar panels were covered with snow, and the people froze to death.
“The Texas Winter Storm And Power Outages Killed Hundreds More People Than The State Says”
“A BuzzFeed News analysis shows the catastrophic failure of Texas’s power grid in February killed hundreds of medically vulnerable people.”
“The true number of people killed by the disastrous winter storm and power outages that devastated Texas in February is likely four or five times what the state has acknowledged so far. A BuzzFeed News data analysis reveals the hidden scale of a catastrophe that trapped millions of people in freezing darkness, cut off access to running water, and overwhelmed emergency services for days.”
“The state’s tally currently stands at 151 deaths. But by looking at how many more people died during and immediately after the storm than would have been expected — an established method that has been used to count the full toll of other disasters — we estimate that 700 people were killed by the storm during the week with the worst power outages.”
“This astonishing toll exposes the full consequence of officials’ neglect in preventing the power grid’s collapse despite repeated warnings of its vulnerability to cold weather, as well as the state’s failure to reckon with the magnitude of the crisis that followed.”
Texas’s Winter Storm Killed Hundreds More Than Reported
Until the mainstream media stop repeating the net zero lies, it will remain difficult to get the honest message such as this article, through.