To understand today's global data economy, look to the Middle Ages - The Washington Post - 1 views
www.washingtonpost.com/...-data-economy-look-middle-ages
data corporate accountability god medieval Bentham culture
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With Facebook’s announcement Friday that it has suspended more developer apps for misusing users’ data than previously identified, the company revealed how little we know about the life of our data, even when we already know it’s been breached.
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The global data economy mines human information to predict and influence behavior in ways most of us are incapable of comprehending.
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to better understand what this means for the future of privacy, we need to look back to a much older idea, one from the Middle Ages.
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Christians in the early European Middle Ages, between roughly the 5th and 11th centuries, believed that God knew all human secrets, yet God’s secrets remained fundamentally unknowable to human beings. This widespread and deep-seated belief in an omniscient and mysterious being shaped institutional structures and social behavior in profound ways, as human efforts at concealment were considered futile
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Today, a new form of mysterious omniscience is having a similarly widespread and unpredictable effect on human social behavior. We know that data about us is being compiled at breathtaking speeds, but most of us have little way of knowing what information is being collected, how it is being used and, crucially, how the various algorithms, clouds, networks and devices even work
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The belief in an omniscient God structured almost every part of medieval life, especially around the rapidly developing legal systems of the time. Law codes named God as a constant witness in legal disputes in which human witnesses were considered deficient and God’s judgment functioned as a compelling legal tool.
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By the 18th century, new secular forms of institutional power and surveillance emerged. Jeremy Bentham, for example, theorized the panopticon, a prison structure designed to harness a prisoner’s belief that he was always being watched to shape his behavior in favor of docility. What makes the architecture of the panopticon work is the mysterious omniscience of the prison guards, who can see from their tower into every cell without ever being seen themselves.
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Today’s global data economy is the new form of mysterious omniscience. And as the reach of these technologies expands, their mystery will be one of the greatest barriers to its regulation.
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Indeed, as scholar Shoshana Zuboff has written, firms actively confuse the public about the data they process so that their capabilities “remain inscrutable to all but an exclusive data priesthood.”
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Where people in the early Middle Ages assigned benevolence to and held tremendous fear in their omniscient God, we have been facing — indeed embracing with remarkably little fear — this mysteriously omniscient technology reasoned to be benevolent because it makes life more convenient.
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The way medieval law used God’s omniscience in cases of unreliable testimony foreshadows a future — in some ways, one already here — in which the information collected into that mysteriously omniscient entity (including data recorded by devices and retained by corporations) can be harvested and harnessed as evidence in courts of law, particularly where no other human witnesses are available to testify
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In these cases, corporations have so far resisted sharing the data with the state, with the exception of counterterrorism efforts. But it also contributes to the corporate entity’s growing omniscience and mysteriousness
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the move from the panopticon to this future iteration of mysterious omniscience could potentially entail a more insidious form of discipline stripped of the fear of punishment and, with its godlike status, of the possibility of democratic regulation.