We and Our Data Fetish
Dystopia is data without interpretation
We
A few days ago, I finished reading a small, little-known book called We. The book was written by the Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin in 1920/1921 — right in the middle of the Russian Revolution. We was first published in English in 1924. The original Russian text had to wait until 1952 for publication, 15 years after Zamyatin died in poverty at 53 years old.
We depicts a future dystopia and the novel was (supposedly) the inspiration for Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and (certainly) for George Orwell’s 1984 and Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed, among others.
Zamyatin called We simultaneously his most serious and most funny book. The book is a scathing political satire that still rings true today, although for different reasons.
In We, we follow D-503 as he goes through life in the ‘United State’, the self-proclaimed pinnacle of human civilization. People have numbers, not names, they live in glass houses (good citizens have nothing to hide, right?), and every hour of their day is planned for maximum productivity and efficiency — their only personal hour is suggested to be used for a walk (probably the only good idea in the United State). Sex and relationships are arranged through a centralized application process (governmental Tinder, anyone?).
In Zamyatin’s United State, everything is measured and tracked. Creativity is considered a form of epilepsy and religion has been replaced by Taylorism, the scientific management of labor for maximum efficiency and productivity.
Roughly a century later, that sounds eerily familiar. We still have names, but we drool over productivity tools and courses, we don’t mind the privacy breaches of social media’s glass house just so we can share a heavily edited picture of our lives, budding relationships are a matter of swiping and checklists, and some people are deluded enough to think that they can outsource creativity to generative software (efficiency and productivity rule, after all).
Oh, and we love our data.
Data fetish
How many steps have I taken today? How well does the app say I slept? How many people have clicked this newsletter?
I have a (mostly) scientific background, so I like tasty data. But - and it’s a big but - data without nuance and interpretation is meaningless. A lot of people seem to have forgotten that, and so we gladly goosestep toward what Yuval Noah Harari calls ‘dataism’ in Homo Deus. In the context of self-tracking, this is also known as data fetishism1.
Collecting data is always only step one.
This cartoon illustrates the DIKW2 model (data - information - knowledge - wisdom). Which information can we glean from the data? What does that information actually tell us? Do those insights help us take action and make a wise decision?
Focusing only on data neglects all the other steps. AKA it’s meaningless. Also, let’s not forget that every means of data gathering has limitations3. For example, most psychological research on happiness quantifies happiness by asking people how happy they are on a scale of one to ten. Those numbers are the data. I’m sure we all agree a lot is missing in that data. Do you ask people about past events (knowing that our memory almost always embellishes things)? Are different kinds of happiness equivalent? Are two happy eights equal? Within the same person? Between people? We could go on.
The self-tracking data fetish can even have adverse effects. Consider the nocebo effect, or the placebo effect’s evil twin. If you expect something to be harmful, it might as well be. This doesn’t involve any magic, but it’s a corollary of understanding that mind and body are not separate entities. Psychological stress is physiological stress4.
The Expectation Effect by David Robson has plenty of examples of such expectation effects, both beneficial and detrimental. An example that struck me is how the harms of ‘bad sleep’ seem to be (partially) mediated by our subjective experience of that sleep. Let me translate that: people who objectively get plenty of good, deep sleep can suffer from the effects of sleep deprivation if they think they slept poorly. Vice versa, people who objectively have a terrible night’s sleep but are convinced they slept well are spared the consequences of bad sleep. This has been confirmed by several studies.
By assuming and hoping that data, by itself, will provide the answers to the questions that keep us up at night (pun very much intended), we forget a crucial (data?) point:
We are more than data.
If you ask me, there are plenty of more interesting fetishes.
DIKW lumps insight and wisdom together. I haven’t yet decided if that’s wise.
Let me bury a bold claim in the footnotes: no method of data collection is ever as objective as people think. Someone always decides which data (not) to track, how (not) to represent it, which threshold values (not) to use…
This is also why loneliness is so heartbreakingly lethal.
What a great essay - I learned a lot from it. We are indeed in a data fetish period, just like we are in an information overload fetish period. We don't know what to do with and how to process either, I think simply because there's too much of it. Too much data that we collect, and too much information at our fingertips.
Also, that book We sounds so very interesting.
I feel this. I used to track all my health metrics, now I only track what’s necessary. We’ve embraced Apollonianism in the West, to borrow a Nietzschean term, at the expense of our Dionysian; we worship order at the expense of everything from content joy to orgiastic ecstasy.