“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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“He laughed, “Mum, you did it the wrong way round, I see your search history – but you can’t see mine.”…..mum why do you like the Ladyboys so much!
“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”
Nah, the main parties are the UNI-Party following in a Globalist agenda. That’s why they agree on all the big stuff and put up a Punch & Judy show for us plebs.
People easily confuse numbers with data. Not the same.
““Yeah, all your Googles come up on my search history.”
THE HORROR. My data soul flashed before me, like some black thriller”
I remember the feeling when an ex randomly clicked through my history, I hadn’t been on the Net long at the time and, lets just say I learned super fast after that LOL. Ah the trials of being a perv!
You missed out justice. Love without justice is just soppy sentimentality.
Speaking of absolute truths, this here will be the most hideous thing I will see all week. Fact;
https://x.com/OliLondonTV/status/1873768909444354110
Data is a layperson’s term for information and information isn’t necessarily true. For instance, the statement My first name is Paul is information, despite it’s false (Rainer, actually).
True. The Met Office maintains a temperature database that we now know includes lots of made up temperatures and readings from sites that give inaccurate readings so is quite detached from the truth.
The problem we have is that it’s difficult to confirm that your name is Rainer, or is it Rayner?
And, if it is, are you the ‘cake making expert’ in East London? They beat Mr Kipling with ease.
I’m a programmer (“senior software engineer”) living in central Reading and I’ve certainly never ‘made’ a cake in my entirely life. I tried making pancakes twice but the result was rather not a success.
All that happened in July was that one WEF puppetician handed the baton over to the other WEF puppetician.
“Good governance and good living” had nothing whatsoever to do with it: let alone truth, beauty, freedom and love.
Imposition of “the Great Reset,” Stakeholder Capitalism (aka Fascism) and a One World Government is what it is about.
Er … did the author never attempt to check her son’s search history then?
Data is mostly subjective, unless it can be verified.
It sort of depends what the data is. If its raw empirical data, collected lets say for temperature measurements and trends, it could be used to totally disprove the entire Climate BS. Why we never see or have access to, the raw data!
Yes we need principles, we also need morals and ethics, we need honesty and integrity, transparency and accountability, and above all Objective truth.
True….just watched the early firework display in Australia, but thought to myself, nice display but they are not a free country. Like most Western countries they’ve been captured by big business. Their Covid fascism was a horror show.
Datum: any fact assumed to be a matter of direct observation. (Plural, data.)
It has nothing to do with “tech” guys – it pre-dates them by some time.
Confidence mentor? I’ve heard of a confidence trickster.
Many years ago I had to go through my thesis changing every ‘data is’ to ‘data are’