Is Big Data racist? (duh.)

My toxic trait is that my gut instinct is that “Big” anything is always suspect. Big Pharma, Big Oil - you name it. They're amorphous, shadow-y, blurry, suit-wearing blobs seeping through the cracks and crevices of some big-time ( there it is again - BIG) politician’s wallet.

Screen grab from Ted-Ed's "History Vs. Vladmir Lenin" (no political statement is being made here, it's just a spooky pic)

But obviously, as a gen-z-digital-native-all-the-other-dumb-words-boomers-came-up-with-to-describe-us-internet-girlie, there’s one big that is coming into focus as the biggest and baddest big of them all:

BIG DATA.

In 2017, filmmaker Hiro Steyerl wrote Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War which I can honestly say is the first book I’ve read that is written the way my brain works - jarringly (but in a good way) scatterbrained, jumpy, skeptical, slightly abstract & so very interesting.

Her chapter “A Sea of Data: Apophenia and Pattern (Mis)-Recognition” externalized all the suspicions I had about Big Data as one of many resident social-sci-arts-tech-skeptics. It also sort of enlightened me to the fact that we desperately need social-sci-arts-tech-skeptics engaging with the tech and data industries critically because (and I mean this so disrespectfully) what the actual fuck is going on?

Hiro’s work and source list offers so many avenues to go down, from the perhaps-if-you-see-no-colour-you-can-play-it-off-as-innocuous wealthy, brown teenage foreigners being excluded from luxury hotel demographic data to “is this refugee a terrorist?” data scoring, but what grabbed my attention and hasn’t let go is the idea of apophenia and dirty data.

Steyerl calls dirty data “messed up and worthless sets of information.” It’s the stuff that you sanity check out when you interpret data; the kind that doesn’t fit in your line of best fit. I interpret it as the stuff that gets thrown out (baby with the bathwater style) after apophenia occurs - “ the perception of patterns within random data”.

Good old patterns. Let’s get real and call it what it really is. Bias.

You know, the same bias that gets Black men stopped in the road for “fitting a description” but still here better than ever with its own digital glow-up. From image-cropping AI being racist to islamophobia, ageism, and every other -ism your mind can fathom, human bias woven into the fabric of “neutral” tech is skyrocketing to new heights and is presented as automation (ex. it’ll do the thinking so you don’t have to!)

It's pervasive throughout the whole system in a way that makes you want to burn it all down anarchy-style.

The way we sift through data deciding what “makes sense” and what doesn’t - who has the audacity to even BE an anomaly (marginalized populations). Big Data loves a monolith, and it's a “you” problem if you don’t fit the bill(cue Anti-Hero by Taylor Swift).

What’s scary is that tech’s big (THERE IT IS AGAIN) brand is neutrality; the facts are facts so no critical engagement is necessary. But interpretation runs rampant in the industry - there’s a reason they call it a “sea of data”, a reason why data filtration exists. Someone, somewhere decides what’s important and what’s not, who is important and who is not, and that someone being a network of nameless, faceless tech characters making $500K+ is maybe the scariest thought of all.

So where do we go from here? That, dear reader, is an excellent question. With programs like ChatGPT gaining rapid popularity, automated filters deciding which content is appropriate and which content goes viral - who is valid, and who isn’t, what do we do except say this shit is...

Is it bad that the only answer I have is to be skeptical at all costs? My brain is a skipping record stuck on that tik tok, “remember kids, when someone says “the government wouldn’t do that”, oh yes they would”. This rule applies to Big everything, no less deservingly so than to Big Tech.

I don’t really have a succinct way to wrap this up positively, but in closing: Think. Go a little conspiracy nut-core. Think, and don’t let anyone else or anything do the thinking for you.