WHEN the net critic Evgeny Morozov calls the American spies “dataholics” in a commentary on the NSA affair, demanding that they be committed to a “big data rehab” clinic, this represents a merely rhetorical gambit that he himself relativizes in the course of his article.1 Morozov knows all too well that Russia, Snowden’s sanctuary, loves, in this instance, the traitor more than the betrayal. After all, the criticism leveled against the NSA applies equally to the Russian intelligence agency, a fact that Morozov himself has addressed in the chapter “Why the KGB Wants You to Join Facebook,” from his 2011 book The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. Yet it is not only the intelligence agencies that are addicted to limitless data love. Their coveting of “complete capture” finds its parallel—and here precisely lies the paradox of a possible reconciliation between society and its intelligence agencies—within society itself not only in the form of the widespread endorsement of smart things but also in what has come to be known as the self-tracking movement.
Commonly also referred to as the “quantified self,” the culture of self-tracking has been developing for years, generating products like Fitbit, Digfit, Jawbone’s Wristband, and Nike+, which monitor—and thereby control—the frequency of steps and pulse and thus also how we move, sleep, and eat. The imperative of absolute transparency is changing its character, promising that control will lead to self-awareness. Initially, it is striking to what extent the discourse of self-tracking is self-deluding in its populist form. The slogan connecting self-observation and self-optimization is “If you can measure it, you can learn to improve it.”2 Another slogan admits to the connection between technology and control (“If you can measure it, someone will…”) but suggests that being proactive (“…and that someone should be you”) offers reassurance and benefit.3 Of course one does not keep one’s sovereignty over personal data by measuring oneself and by feeding the results into the system on the server of the provider. Instead, the statement underlines what Zygmunt Bauman has described as a “second managerial revolution” in claiming that the observation of man is taken over by the individual him- or herself, discipline replaced by self-discipline.4 It is equally misleading when self-trackers cast themselves as in the “Know Thyself” tradition of the Oracle of Delphi,5 which regarded self-knowledge as the recognition of one’s own imperfections and limitations and which categorically did not mean an optimized “living by numbers.”
Beyond the immediate goals of self-optimizing, self-tracking could be described as unconditional data love. Like any true love it promises no financial gain, nor does it have a reasonable goal. What a young self-tracker “who tracks everything from his mercury levels to his vitamin D consumption” announced in 2008 also holds true for others today, and even more so: “There’s so much info that it’d be a shame not to track it.”6 To stay with the metaphor, true love surmounts the conventions of rationality and burns for the answers to far-fetched questions, like whether one falls asleep more quickly when standing on both legs for several minutes beforehand or how often one is typing each letter of the alphabet on one’s keyboard.7
Nevertheless, the notion that self-trackers love data more than they love themselves would be presumptuous. The “unconditional” love for data of any kind is characterized by aspiration for a subsequent rationalization when new scientific methods create important insights from seemingly useless data about the producers of this data and thus society itself. This “unconditional” love, this aspiration for scientific insights, indicates that the undeniable obsession of self-trackers is not pure narcissism. Their data fetishism contains a social component that is initially expressed by making their personal data public and in helping others—fellow citizens, sociologists, physicians, traffic planners, and so on—understand people and society better.8 From this perspective self-trackers are the avant-garde of an extraacademic self-study. They produce contextual, problem-oriented knowledge beyond the existing hierarchies of knowledge creation, thereby modifying the relationship between the sciences and society and echoing the statements of sociologists of knowledge since the beginning of the century. While in the course of modernity it has always been science that has spoken to society, now society “responds” to science in the guise of “lay experts.”9
Smart things and the Internet of things provide another way of reconciling intelligence agencies with their citizens. This mantra was also cited by Morozov and others during the debate on data protection and privacy in the wake of the NSA scandal, but it hardly had the chance to gain ground against new disclosures, personal tragedy, and smashed hard disks. Yet the scenario of software-enabled everyday objects communicating with one another in order to reach programmatic decisions would have the potential for generating fascinating media spectacles: the swimming pool that heats up because a barbecue has been entered into the calendar, the fridge placing an order with the supermarket when the milk has reached its expiration date, the GPS that is aware of traffic jams and construction and automatically alters the car’s itinerary. The Internet of smart things frees human intelligence from the menial tasks of analyzing situations with procedural consequences because the computer can do this work much faster and much more reliably. This is our liberation, freeing us to pursue higher goals, as the enthusiastic promise reads, but with, today, no clues as to where we might look for these goals.
At the same time, we are paralyzed by this very liberation. Marshall McLuhan, one of the founders of media studies, once upon a time called media “extensions of man”: the elongation of arms (hammer, pistol), of legs (bicycle, car), of eyes (binoculars, microscope), and of memory (writing, photography). With the Internet of things, the computer now not only takes over calculation but also the observation and analysis of our environment (reasoning). For McLuhan, the dark side of the extension of organs was also an amputation because the advent of script does not train our memory any more than our legs develop muscles while we are driving. With the Internet of things a new amputation takes place, namely that of privacy. Not only do smart things cause our reasoning to atrophy, but they do so in the process of assimilating all possible personal data about us. If we don’t feed them, they cannot serve us. The pool will remain cold when we don’t allow it to see our calendar; GPS hardly helps when we don’t tell it our destination. Smart things can only communicate to one another what they know about us, and if their service is based on intimate knowledge, then the breach of privacy happens for the sake of efficiency rather than control.
On this basis we will give these services—global players on the Internet—the very data that we don’t want our intelligence agencies to have. As things stand, most of us find it a promise rather than a threat that Google is always attempting to improve the categorization of our situation, interests, and whereabouts so that at any time it can feed us recommendations about restaurants, shops, places of interest, and potential spouses in our vicinity. With the prospect of more efficient information management even a blatant technology of surveillance such as Google Glass may finally become socially acceptable. The problem of surveillance is not a political or economical one, although it is that as well; it is first a technological, philosophical, and anthropological one. Morozov calls it the “ideology of ‘information consumerism.’”10 This ideology—and this is the real scandal—surpassed the reach of the intelligence agencies by embracing everyone.