“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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