Analog society vs Digital society
Beware of the data culture pervasiveness
Not a day goes by that we are not reminded that we live in the information era and should embrace the digital transformation. Going digital is everyday mantra for many of us, the construction of the digital society our goal.
The functioning of the information society and the risks associated with it are the topic of The Coup We Are Not Talking About, an interesting article by Shoshana Zuboff, professor at the Harvard Business School, published in the New York Times on January 19th 2021.
The tones of the article are heartfelt and the reader is warned about the growing danger of surveillance capitalism by a few economic actors.
Zuboff’s is just one of the many alarmed cries about a growing risk of manipulation of democratic rules, thanks to the pervasiveness of digital technologies. The scandal created by the British company Cambridge Analytica, accused of having manipulated information disseminated by the media for electoral purposes during the US campaigns and the Brexit referendum, has brought the problem to everyone’s attention. If that were not enough, the uncontrolled spread of fake news that has made this terrible Covid-19 pandemic even more lethal, reminds us that the danger has not been overcome but, on the contrary, is thriving and the idea is spreading that it is necessary to promote and make grow a data culture. Prestigious universities compete to offer data science courses in order to train new data scientists, as normal statistics courses were not enough. Data science courses should certainly be instituted, but not information engineering. Rather they should be promoted for Political Science degrees, so that the consequences of this recent technology on the functioning of our society can be studied in depth.
The risk to our civilization exists because data exists and data exists because digital technology exists. Obviously, information about us and our habits existed even before and the dusty archives of the secret services have been around since long time. However, the extraordinary ability to aggregate, analyze and use data is a clear consequence of the existence of what we call digital culture. Without the huge amounts of data produced every day, especially thanks to the Internet and our use of the software tools that it makes available to us (social networks and communication apps), digital culture would not exist and neither would the looming threat of a surveillance society. In many of the comments circulating about this threat, a common factor is the inevitability of the data. Their omnipresence and their indispensability to ensure the development of knowledge and the quality of life is given for granted. But is not so. Data is not essential, on the contrary, data is a hindrance and, as we have seen, it is the main cause of the growing threat to fair and democratic development.
The first step in understanding why data is not essential, is to comprehend that data are a technological product: they weren’t there just a hundred years ago and, most likely, they won’t be in a hundred years. Like all technological products, it will happen to them what happened to the texts written on the scrolls that used to populate the Great Library of Alexandria: they will be replaced. Medieval libraries were crowded with manuscripts and hosted just few scrolls. Renaissance libraries, on the other hand, were teeming with printed books (another product of technology) and running short of manuscripts and scrolls. Contemporary libraries have fewer and fewer printed books and more and more digital texts. Libraries of the future will have something we haven’t invented yet but will inevitably be in short supply of digital texts.
Data, as a technological product, is created through a process called digitization. Digitization, strange to say, should be a very familiar process because it is done by each of us, many times a day, without us even noticing. As an example, we are digitizing every time we put an electronic thermometer under the armpit. After a few seconds, a number appears (that’s data) which informs us about our temperature. Similarly, when we weigh the flour to make a cake, on our electronic scale, we read the weight value on the display: another data. The production of data, and this is the important part of our reasoning, is our decision because, for example, we could choose to use an analog thermometer and then read the temperature value on a graduated scale, where a colored liquid has grown close to a certain mark. In this way we did not do any digitization, that is, we did not produce any data, but we still got the information we were looking for. Equally simple is to use an analog scale where the metal needle of a steelyard oscillates, more and more slowly, to stop near another mark. Finally, are still among us those who remember the old analog phones that allowed us to talk from one end of the world to the other, perhaps adding a background rustle of increasing intensity with the distance of the call, through which information can be communicated without for this to transfer any data.
It may be objected that these simple examples all refer to devices of the past, with many defects and few advantages, starting with the slowness, the bulk, the poor accuracy.
Again, this is not the case. First of all, because analog instruments are always able to give us more correct information than digital ones. The reason is that in every digitization we do, we insert an inevitable error. In data analysis courses, university students learn that this is called “quantization error” and no matter how hard you try, you can only reduce the extent of the error but never eliminate it completely. Digital instruments are and always will be affected by an error that analogue instruments in principle do not have. The speed of operation, the dimensions, the weight, are all attributes that depend on the technology. Analog electronics existed well before digital electronics and continue to work very well.
But, you might argue, computers are digital and who in their right mind would feel like giving up the enormous benefits that computers bring us today? Answer: no one, because we don’t have to give up computers. Not only there were analog computers well before digital ones (does anyone remember the slide rule?), but the computers of the future, meaning quantum computers, are inherently analog machines and by taking full advantage of their capabilities tomorrow we could obtain computing power unthinkable today. Even the information storage can survive the disappearance of data: information has been archived in an analog way since the time of the first graffiti in the Upper Paleolithic and today we have way more efficient methods.
Having said that, what is there to do? I am not proposing to storm the databases or retreat to the mountains by cutting ties with the rest of society. More simply, I would like to spread the idea that the realization of the digital society, where control over the information is in the hands of a limited number of subjects who are not really disinterested, is not inevitable but rather, it is the consequence of political choices made both nationally and internationally. The risk is that such choices are inspired by forces that have the population control as an objective and the great availability of data as mean.
What can we do to avoid such a terrible risk? To begin with, we need to reduce the amount of data that we produce every day and stop making them easily available to everyone. And this is just the start.
There is more to it and we will talk again soon. Please stay tuned.
