The mythical world of data. By Philipp Theisohn

By Philipp Theisohn

As the global mountains of data continue to grow in volume and complexity, we need to endow data with its own myth in order to take away our fear of it. This is accomplished with the help of cyberpunk.

There can be no doubt about it: what Big Data lacks is gifted visionaries. The idea has all the trappings needed to create a great, fascinating narrative: the search for ultimate under standing of the world in which we live, the moment in which the objects begin to speak to us in new ways, the uto pia of the individual’s realisation of complete global, eco nomic and ecological autonomy. All that is left of this utopia, however, is a murmur, a rumour. While we dream of a better world, someone – companies, tax authorities, secret servic es – has “got hold of our data”, to paraphrase German elec tronic music band Kraftwerk. There is only one thing wrong with this all too familiar scenario: no one has “got hold of” our data – it’s everywhere, it passes through our hands and is used by us, but it is rarely understood. What Big Data needs is not ever more powerful computers but a reasonable plot. The story of data could help take away our fear of it.

The ideal source to consult here is a literary genre with its roots in the 1980s and which presents to us worlds that made Big Data possible: cyberpunk. This is an iteration of science fiction in which the harsh reality of a near-future, fully technology-dependent world fights tooth and nail against any attempt at logical explanation. The scalpel of the alienation technique wielded with such precision in hard core science fiction is nowhere to be found in this type of literature. It is noisy, vulgar and at times easy to confuse with refurbished trash. If it could, it would be the antithesis of literature. Precisely for this reason it has the potential to expand our understanding of a reality that ultimately no longer has room for literary structures, contemplation, a classical storyline or tragedy – a reality in which writing is nothing more than the graphic representation of algo rithms. When literature has completely morphed into data, cyberpunk will be what is left of this culture: kludge in the form of a novel, the destruction of codes, the misuse of computers that were not built to tell stories but to do calcu lations. The strategic value of cyberpunk lies in the fact that it speaks to us from a world in which the cultural technique of storytelling is found only as a memory buried beneath the data, and this memory has to be salvaged from the detri tus of digital reality, the data garbage, before it can be used.

THE DARK SIDE OF DATA

What once made cyberpunk – as shown, for instance, in William Gibson’s “Neuromancer” (1984) or Rudy Ruck er’s “Ware” tetralogy (1982–2000) – the catalyst for deal ing with the repressed, technology-based problems of the late 20th century was its analyses of dystopic future data scapes. Nowadays cyberpunk’s prophetic treatment of so cial issues is an integral part of the discussions about the future of data: the proliferation and ubiquity of data and the fact that it has taken on a life of its own. Cyberpunk’s vi sions are infused with fear. The cross-linking of private and public data, of medical information and government-held economic data, of virtual friendships, of counter-terrorism databases and passenger lists, inevitably leads to a world in which corporations have direct access to the life of their employees (as in Lewis Shiner’s “Frontera”). It is a world in which healthcare has been taken over completely by secondhand heart dealers and shady biochip merchants (as in Rucker’s “Software”) and in which wars are above all cyber wars (as in Gibson’s “Count Zero”). When data has been given a value in its own right, where money, time and en ergy are devoted to the storage, proliferation and cross linking of data, it is only a matter of time before resources become scarce and life gets tough. At the end of the day this inevitably produces masses of precarised high-tech experts who are forced to earn their daily bread as hired killers or prostitutes in the desolate inner city landscapes.

That no thought is given to the human being in an empire dominated by data, that even the human conscious ness can be simulated by algorithms – scanned, “barcoded” and analysed – and can no longer find its way back from be hind the data, that even the belief that one is a human being might be nothing more than a digital illusion: all of this could indeed be gleaned from the apocalyptic cityscapes of the cyberpunk world.

DIGITAL NATURE

If we follow the cyberpunk narrative, this is what we arrive at. Since Big Data will determine the paths our future lives will take, at the end of the story we will all be androids, interchangeable and reusable storage modules in a fragile protective casing. And what makes it worse is that we will not even be aware of this. There can be no doubt that the imaginary worlds of cyberpunk take seriously the philo sophical doctrine of technology as “humankind’s second nature” – as recently illustrated by internet philosopher Mercedes Bunz with reference to algorithms. So seriously that in these cyberpunk worlds second nature gradually displaces nature itself, the human body is reduced to mere “Wetware” and robots mutate into organisms. Which ac tually makes perfect sense, as data has no need for the hu man being, this unstable data carrier. And who knows, per haps we would be quite grateful for this change in command. In the great debate about Big Data, this post-human narra tive is the ever-present vanishing point in cyberpunk. However, this is a misinterpretation, a misunderstanding of the information society of the future.

The problem with the world of data that surrounds us is a different one. This data is becoming nature, has already become nature, for there is simply too much data around for it to be decoded and processed into intelligible information. This is why it is no longer “our” data; it has long taken on a life of its own and created its own living space. Just as the first humans were confronted with nature, we are faced with a mass of data to which we have no relationship. It frightens us because it is all around us, it is alive but it cannot commu nicate with us. There has only ever been one way for human beings to escape the paralysis that such fear brings with it: by telling stories. It is the myth that can explain what mean ing this reality has for the human being, where is comes from and what place humankind has in it.

THE INSTIGATOR OF THE INFOCALYPSE

The naïve view of Big Data is the assumption that data is not a god, that there is no need for stories of its genesis and

divine promises: a refusal to allow it to have its own my thology. It is precisely the creation of such a mythology that is the true task of cyberpunk. Cyberpunk asks the question of how the present feels in a world in which evolutionary developments such as Big Data have long since become re ality. In a world where, for example, every pizza delivery guy can be digitally tracked and liquidated at the press of a button if he is late in delivering the goods. A world in which people might transform themselves into avatars and ar range to meet on virtual boulevards in order to put a digital end to one another with the help of traditional Japanese swords. Or one like that described in Neal Stephenson’s novel “Snow Crash”, published in 1992, which is run by data as the result of a neurolinguistic virus that a Sumerian programmer named Enki set loose on the world, the insti gator of the infocalypse. One programming language was transformed into many, and the universal system of com munication on which human cultural interaction was based, collapsed and was replaced by the “Software” em pire. It was called Babel.

Those who make it all the way to the depths of the sea of data will encounter such stories. It is only down there among the myths that they will be able to find out for them selves why the unification of all available information could be a desirable objective: because only what was once one should be made one again. Before the catastrophe of the Babylonian confusion it was humanity’s fate to be one mainframe computer. After Big Data it will be able to return to this state. However, who is the driving force behind this unification – who wants to bring it about? It must be an en tity which knows what to do with this volume of data, a being for which the unification of disparate snippets of in formation is of vital importance. An artificial intelligence like Maddox’s “Memex” or Gibson’s “Wintermute”, for in stance. For if the universe is alive, the machine that wishes to calculate the universal must also be given life. This is the basic axiom of any metaphysics of data. So when we argue the pros and cons of data collection and data storage, it is not only the raw materialisation of our souls through the computer, but the imbuement of matter with spirit that is at stake. The spirit moves into the machine. It is resurrec tion myths that we are talking about here, and that is what they remain even when we change their names to “algo rithm of the world” and such like.

There is nothing bad about these myths. First they transform technical potential into digital culture, or at least they could if we were to accept their validity. That we are blind to them is nevertheless understandable, for they in jure our pride. If you take cyberpunk seriously, you are aware of the fact that Big Data is not the culmination of the evolutionary process of humankind’s search for autonomy but may be no more than a phenomenon, an episode in a monumental novel. Perhaps it is a badly written novel; it may even be ripe for the literary scrap heap. But anyone who wants us to put our faith in data should at least be able to tell the story of that data.

Philipp Theisohn is Professor of Contemporary German Liter ature at the University of Zurich. His current research focuses, among other topics, on futurological fiction and literary crea tion in the digital age. He is currently head of the research pro ject “Conditio extraterrestris. The Inhabited Galaxy as the Space of Literary Imagination and Communication (1600- 2000)” at the Institute for German Studies at the University of Zurich.