TALK of revolution is not only to be found in Mayer-Schönberger’s and Cukier’s book Big Data. The authors of the collection of essays The Human Face of Big Data also use the term liberally and go so far as to write, with no concern for possible objections, about the grandest upheaval in human history since the agrarian revolution ten thousand years ago.1 For Eric Schmidt (formerly Google’s CEO) and Jared Cohen (at present the director of the Google think tank Ideas) the Internet is “driving one of the most exciting social, cultural, and political transformations in history,” a revolution that will influence “how we interact with others and how we view ourselves.”2 It should not seem surprising that the dystopian prospect of unavoidable and all-encompassing control of individuals hardly perturbs the authors. Their recipe for dealing with this is self-censorship and identity management. Avoid doing anything that could not be published before the court or on the front page of a newspaper. For everything else there will be identity managers with monthly reports and suggestions on how to optimize one’s online persona. In addition—the book was written before the NSA debate—these authors were conjuring up a prestabilized harmony between citizens, state, and the economy: “People will share more than they’re aware of. For governments and companies, this thriving data set is a gift, enabling them to better respond to citizen and customer concerns, to precisely target specific demographics of the population, and, with the emergent field of predictive analytics, to predict what the future will hold.”3
It is evident that this perspective represents a different picture of society than that addressed by Adorno’s critical theory, Foucault’s surveillance society, or Deleuze’s control society. Any perspective reflecting on power structures should be skeptical and suspicious when asking in what way the knowledge that is generated from users’ data produces power that may be drawn on, against the interests of individuals and the majority. For Schmidt and Cohen the conflict of interest between citizens and state only exists in authoritarian states; thus they appeal to the citizens of those states to democratize their political system and to create the necessary social norms and legal regulations that will empower technological developments. According to Schmidt’s and Cohen’s prognosis for a kind of feel-good world, the new technologies will clearly prove useful since they allow, for example, shopkeepers in Addis Ababa or San Salvador to publicize and document state corruption and irregularities: “In fact, technology will empower people to police the police in a plethora of creative ways never before possible.”4
This sounds very much like “digital orientalism,” to borrow Evgeny Morozov’s term for the self-serving Western notion that in politically “backward” countries advances in democratization are only possible with the help of Western technologies.5 However, Schmidt and Cohen are careful not to overstate their technocentrism since it would not be in the interest of a technology corporation to concede too much power to its own products. In order to be freed from responsibility, the corporation has to delegate this power to the user. Schmidt and Cohen know better than the “do-gooder” Mark Zuckerberg that such modesty is a part of the business, and thus they dismiss proactively any possible complaints about the undesirable consequences of existing technologies with a vague appeal to civil society: “The central truth of the technology industry—that technology is neutral but people are not—will periodically be lost amid all the noise. But our collective progress as citizens in the digital age will hinge on our not forgetting it.”6
Schmidt and Cohen are not the only ones to underline the belief that the revolution described here has only just begun and is barely understood. This is not a disquieting statement; the results of historical upheavals are rarely clear at their beginnings, as the French Revolution has shown. It is also not disturbing that the present revolution is a global one since this is the characteristic of technical revolutions as compared to political ones. It is, however, potentially explosive, in that we are hardly conscious of the fact that we are witnessing a revolution. The revolution they announce is silent, as Mercedes Bunz entitled her book in 2012, The Silent Revolution, inspired by Michael Angelo Garvey’s The Silent Revolution: Or, the Future Effects of Steam and Electricity Upon the Condition of Mankind (1852). It is a revolution whose “street riots”—Klout score, Summly, Hapifork, and, of course, the stock-market algorithms—attract hardly any attention beyond that of their own individual eyewitnesses but that nonetheless change the human condition step by step and day by day—in the same way that electricity and steam once silently changed the world in the nineteenth century. Bunz proclaims the true heroes of the revolution in the subtitle of her book: How Algorithms Are Changing Knowledge, Work, Public Life, and Politics Without Making a Lot of Noise.
The history of this noiseless revolution is documented in another German book: Miriam Meckel’s Next. Erinnerungen an eine Zukunft ohne uns (Next: memories of a future without us, 2011), in which an algorithm reports from the perspective of the future how once upon a time it made the uncertainties of human behavior calculable and then gradually overcame human beings altogether. The book is a sort of fictionalized science supporting the narrative of the algorithm by references to media reports on certain technical innovations: the silent “street riots” of the revolution. The end of the story is reminiscent of that of the supercomputer HAL in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey from 1968, which eventually turns against the astronauts. Meckel’s text also recalls Hans Jonas’s 1979 book The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age, which counters the implicit utopianism of technological advancement with an “imaginative casuistics” of the worst-case scenario: “we need the threat to the image of man—and rather specific kinds of threat—to assure ourselves of his true image….We know the thing at stake only when we know that it is at stake.”7
The description of the current situation by representatives of digital-media studies reveals an alarming parallel with Meckel’s prophecy of doom. After the excessive promises of salvation in the 1990s, now the arguments come from a culturally pessimistic point of view: Popular Internet theorists lament the impoverishment of relationships in a society that only communicates via media, warning that the Internet does not forget, and also that a culture of multitasking no longer trains deep reading and deep thinking.8 Criticism is no longer limited to the jargon of digital-media studies. In its anecdotal form it also appeals to the general public, with alarmist simplifications even finding their way onto TV talk shows. A case in point is the book Digitale Demenz—Wie wir uns und unsere Kinder um den Verstand bringen (Digital dementia—How we drive our children out of their minds, 2012) by the neuropsychologist Manfred Spitzer. Finally, newspaper reports make sure that we are informed about the “‘secret” revolution taking place.
The fact that all of this nonetheless fails to inspire a broad social debate leaves very little hope for the “imperative of responsibility.” As has become very clear in the context of Snowden’s disclosures in the summer of 2013, there exists a double unwillingness to expose the problems: While the general public tends to lack a sense of dissatisfaction, politicians have reduced the action of government to mere reaction, and they demonstrate political will only as isolated responses to the pressure of specific incidents. Reasons for the willingness of people to cooperate with the system of surveillance and control by digital media have already been mentioned in the first chapter. The reluctance of politicians can of course be seen as helplessness, especially when faced with global technologies that do not conform to national law. But this is only half the answer.
A more penetrating reason is to be found in Morozov’s answer to a survey by the weekly Die Zeit from August 2013, which asked: Can the Internet still be saved? Recontextualizing the question within the discourse on modernity, Morozov notes that consumerism and surveillance dominate the net because modernity itself is dominated by consumerism and surveillance, thereby proclaiming the fate of the net to be dependent on the fate of society. The perspective that the social realm determines media might initially appear more optimistic than its counterpart, which we could term technological determinism. However, what alternatives can be offered to the free-market economy after the end of the social utopias and their discrediting in Eastern Europe, Cuba, and China? What new prospect can follow the “end of history” declared by Francis Fukuyama in 1989 after the liberal market economy and consumer society appeared as the goal of social and cultural evolution?
If Morozov’s equation and Fukuyama’s maxim are true, then mining big data in support of better marketing and better customer service becomes an indispensable aspect of our society. The imperative of efficiency—as the chief principle of capitalist development—has shifted from the productivity of work to the productivity of consumption. This manifests itself in the customization of offers and the classification of consumers in order to address them selectively and to exclude unprofitable transactions more effectively. To expect a sustained intervention into such practices by politicians would mean—and this is what Morozov fails to understand—committing the state to a social-utopian role in terms of educational policy. Instead of paving the way for economic growth, the state would have to begin criticizing market-inspired consumer culture as being on the wrong track, replacing it with “higher aims”—exactly the opposite of what can be expected under the conditions of neoliberalism, after the end of the social utopias. And, as we shall see, perhaps this political engagement should not be wished for at all.
Taking Morozov’s statement one step further, big data is neither a sociopolitical nor a simple technological problem but a historical and philosophical one. This does not make the situation more hopeful, however. It seems that the silent technological revolution can only be halted by a loud social revolution; whether this is possible or desirable has to be discussed elsewhere. For now it must suffice to point out and note the social context of the technological revolution. The relative indifference of both politicians and the general public regarding the excesses of big-data mining can only be explained superficially by the tendency to ignore potential negative consequences in the face of instant gratification. At the same time, this indifference follows a fatalist logic stating that what can be done will be done. What is technically possible leaves no social alternative: We scan because we can. Even though in the time of the surveillance state a new ethics and a “new deal on data” for laws regarding individual ownership and control of one’s own data are indispensable,9 these only address one part of the problem. We will have to look at the cultural and political implications of the technological revolution by turning to its invisible heroes.