{"id":19218,"date":"2014-10-18T11:42:46","date_gmt":"2014-10-18T15:42:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=19218"},"modified":"2014-10-18T11:43:02","modified_gmt":"2014-10-18T15:43:02","slug":"vibrant-data","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2014\/10\/18\/vibrant-data\/","title":{"rendered":"Vibrant Data"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This is a cross-post from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.its-her-factory.com\/?p=438\">Its Her Factory<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Is data <a href=\"http:\/\/www.its-her-factory.com\/2014\/08\/some-initial-thoughts-on-bennetts-vibrant-matter\/\">\u201cvibrant\u201d in the new materialist sense<\/a>? That is, does it exhibit the \u201cagency\u201d or power that living things have to affect other things? It may not materially vibrate in the way sound waves do, but in its interaction with other phenomena (especially other data), data does exhibit the liveliness new materialists attribute to all things. In fact, some data scientists use concepts of \u201cvibrancy\u201d to describe data\u2019s post- and extra-human capacities to percieve, know, and act.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/68554967?byline=0\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/vimeo.com\/68554967\">Intel Vibrant Data<\/a> from <a href=\"http:\/\/vimeo.com\/incubatedesign\">Incubate Design<\/a> on <a href=\"https:\/\/vimeo.com\">Vimeo<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>For example, in 2013 Intel released a video called \u201cVibrant Data.\u201d The video begins by contrasting linear perception to networked perception, and arguing that data is \u201ca kind of augmented intuition\u201d that can overcome the limitations of linearly focused perception, which phenomenologist Alia Al-Saji calls \u201cobjectifying vision.\u201d Focusing on the persistence of a single signal through time, linear perception overlooks resonances among signals. In other words, by tuning into the primary signal, linear perception tunes out this signal\u2019s overtones. Or, when we treat our lives as linear paths of first-person perspective conscious intentionality, we can only relate to those whose paths directly cross ours. It\u2019s difficult if not impossible to find people whose patterns of behavior are in synch with ours if our paths don\u2019t directly intersect. For example, if I go to the campus coffee shop on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and a researcher with similar interests goes to the campus coffee shop on Mondays and Wednesdays, we won\u2019t know that it might be a good idea to talk about our work over coffee because our behavioral patterns, though strongly resonant, do not directly intersect. Data tunes into these resonances, to behavioral patterns beyond the spectrum of first-person subjective intentionality. As the Intel video suggests, data can connect us to people with \u201csimilar interests\u201d and \u201coverlapping circles of friends\u201d but whom we have not yet \u201ccrossed paths.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Intel\u2019s video illustrates this with a story about \u201cVeronica.\u201d Interestingly, the Intel video uses music as a vehicle for data-augmented sociality: Veronica \u201clistens to music most of the day\u201d and thinks of her life \u201clike a soundtrack.\u201d Vibrant data finds Veronica a new favorite band, gets her to their concert in a town several hundred miles away, and in the process connects her to friends new and old. Data&#8211;or rather, \u201cVeronica\u2019s data\u201d&#8211;knows that she likes this band, that it has an upcoming show in the region, that she won\u2019t want to drive there, that somebody can fly her there, and that at the show she\u2019s likely to run into some high school friends she\u2019s lost touch with. It infers all these things from Veronica\u2019s established patterns of behavior: what music she listens to, her transportation habits, and so on. Veronica\u2019s Data both perceives and acts on information that\u2019s imperceptible to and unknowable from Veronica\u2019s first-person subjective perspective. In this way, as the video\u2019s voice-over tells us, vibrant data gives us access to \u201cexperiences, connections, and possibilities we can\u2019t begin to imagine.\u201d Because data can access and process distributed networks of information that are invisible to the Modern subject\u2019s first-person linear gaze, it can bring us more in tune with ourselves, with our surrounding environment, and with one another. And this in-tune-ness, the warm resonance with which vibrant data enriches our life, is described with reference to the \u201ceffervescence in the air\u201d at a rock show. The affective and aesthetic high we get from listening to music we like with people we like is Intel\u2019s metaphor for vibrancy.<\/p>\n<p>Though Intel describes vibrancy with metaphors of aesthetic pleasure, it seems to function more like a<a href=\"http:\/\/plato.stanford.edu\/entries\/marcuse\/#Rep\"> Marcusean performance principle<\/a> for algorithmic data processing. More precisely, vibrancy is a pleasure principle for us, but a performance principle for our data. Veronica&#8211;and all of us for whom she\u2019s the surrogate&#8211;has access to this \u201ceffervescence\u201d because \u201cvibrant data is hard at work.\u201d In fact, the full narration is: \u201cthere\u2019s an effervescence in the air, our vibrant data hard at work bringing us experiences, connections, and possibilities we can\u2019t begin to imagine.\u201d Mining all our noise for the most resonant signals buried in it, data performs vibrancy in order to nurture and enrich our lives. Sure, vibrant data has agency: Intel\u2019s video makes \u201cdata\u201d (or, \u201cVeronica\u2019s data\u201d) the subject of sentences: it \u201cnotices,\u201d \u201cdecides,\u201d \u201cbuys,\u201d \u201cknows Veronica,\u201d \u201ctakes a leap,\u201d \u201csuggests,\u201d and so on. But is it granted this agency only to indenture it in service to us? Do we grant data vibrancy so we can extract surplus, erm, vibrancy, from its hard work? This is, after all, what happened with white women in the US: they were given access to wage labor so they can be exploited by capitalist patriarchy not just as unwaged domestic workers, but also as feminized wage laborers.<\/p>\n<p>This story of vibrant data completely obscures the fact that \u201cvibrant\u201d data can and is used to make some people\u2019s lives more precarious, to subject them to disempowering and immobilizing surveillance. Credit data and NSA data are just as \u201cvibrant\u201d as Intel\u2019s data. The \u201cVibrant Data Project\u201d is much more aware of data\u2019s ambivalent political potential. That\u2019s why they emphasize vibrancy as a method of \u201cdemocratizing data.\u201d In an interview with \u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/blog.ted.com\/2012\/06\/22\/fellows-friday-the-vibrancy-of-data\/\">TED blog<\/a>, founder Eric Barlow argues that \u201ca more vibrant data system&#8230;encourages more people to participate.\u201d Democracy, here, means participation. This is a nearly textbook example of liberal democratic theory: participation, often in the form of having a \u201cvoice,\u201d is both necessary and sufficient for enfranchisement.<\/p>\n<p>However, as Jacques Ranciere has argued, the very data science that Barlow and his Vibrant Data Project collaborators appeal to has transformed participation and envoicement into post- (which is to say, anti-) democratic practices. That is, <i>data science has made participatory envoicement the very means of de-democratization<\/i>. To explain, here\u2019s a quote from a <a href=\"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2014\/05\/30\/social-media-because-neoliberalism\/\">blog post<\/a> I wrote on the topic. According to Ranciere,<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Data is \u201cthe conjunction of science and the media\u201d which understands itself as \u201cexhaustively presenting the people and its parts and bringing the count of those parts in line with the image of the whole\u201d ([Disagreement] 103). Data isn\u2019t treated as a symbol or signifier of the facts, but as a measurement of the facts themselves\u2026.Ever-advancing technology \u201cis supposed to liberate the new community as a multiplicity of local rationalities and ethnic, sexual, religious, cultural, or aesthetic minorities\u201d (104). Twitter, for example, supposedly gives voice and access to people who are otherwise closed out of corporate [mass] media\u2026.The (supposed) advantage of \u201cdata\u201d is that it allows us to think that we\u2019ve solved all problems of justice, that we live in a post-racial, post-feminist, classless society, in a flat and perfectly meritocratic world. It looks like everyone is included, that everyone has a voice and that their voices count. From this perspective, the only injustices are making false claims about exclusion, marginalization, and oppression (e.g., calling out sexism gets interpreted as itself sexist).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The story we tell ourselves about data, that it is a means to universal envoicement, this story is itself the mechanism of post-democratic disenfranchisement. Following Ranciere\u2019s model, we could say that data cannot make oppression or exclusion as something that is legibly wrong. So, though increasing data\u2019s \u201cvibrancy\u201d might strengthen post-democratic institutions and modes of govenrmentality, it does not ameliorate oppression so much as naturalize it.<\/p>\n<p>When data scientists talk about data\u2019s vibrancy, they\u2019re using vibrancy as a metaphor for agency, either of data itself (as in the Intel video), or of \u201cwe the data\u201d (as in the Vibrant Data Project), that leads to a more dynamic, participatory, interactive, indeed, \u201ceffervescent\u201d life. This effervescence is the affective, aesthetic pleasure that emerges from inclusion and participation in society. It is the feeling of being alive, that is, of having one\u2019s life supported and facilitated by hegemonic institutions. This \u201ceffervescence\u201d might also be understood as what Cristina Beltran identifies as \u201ca kind of beauty that is experienced as a form of visible certitude\u201d or \u201cproof that we have collectively moved beyond prejudice and inequality and now live in a \u2018post-feminist\u2019 and \u2018postracial\u2019 era with institutions that are now fundamentally fair and accessible\u201d(137-8). [1] That is, it\u2019s the euphoria or effervescence of feeling like one lives and participates in a truly inclusive, democratic society. From this perspective, it\u2019s pretty easy to see how vibrant data is quintessentially biopolitical: it\u2019s the use of statistics to manage and optimize the \u201clife\u201d of the population, of the \u201cwe\u201d who are data.<\/p>\n<p>As a technology, biopolitics is politically ambivalent: it can be applied in reactionary and radical ways. The effect of its application depends on a lot of things, including the material-historical situation in which it is applied, and how two key variables are defined. These variables are \u201clife\u201d and the \u201cpopulation\u201d: what kinds of living count as healthy, viable lives, and, given the material-historical situation, whose ways of living most easily fit that definition.<\/p>\n<p>The concept of vibrant data naturalizes those variables&#8211;that is, it turns them into constants. The metaphor of \u201cvibrancy\u201d defines life as something that is flexible, resilient, and agentially interactive. For example, as Barlow puts it, \u201cvibrant\u201d things are \u201cmoving parts\u201d that \u201cinfluence one another.\u201d Data is \u201cvibrant\u201d when and because it affects other things, like data and, eventually, behavior. This definition of \u201clife\u201d takes phenomenological life experience of the most privileged members of society as the universalized, generalized mode of life as such. It overlooks the fact that these very same technologies fix oppressed groups in cycles of, as Stephen Dillon puts it, \u201cimmobility\u201d: \u201cThe neoliberal state requires the management, regulation, and <i>immobilization<\/i> of surplus or expendable populations\u201d (118; emphasis mine). [2] Data profiles characteristic of oppressed populations, like poor credit scores, poor standardized test scores, and prison records, can make it difficult to access things like internet and\/or wireless service, student loans, transportation, housing, and a lot of other things one needs to participate in the economy, the digital public sphere, to have an effect on others, to be a \u201cmoving part\u201d of society that \u201cinfluences\u201d other parts. Again, this is classic biopolitics: the vibrancy and vitality of what appears to be the whole of the population is supported by the immobility and social death of those whose styles of living cannot be brought in phase with normative\/hegemonic vibrations.<\/p>\n<p><strong><strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Data&#8211;or rather, algorithmically processed big data&#8211;does not literally, materially vibrate or resonate. Data\u2019s vibrancy is just a metaphor for its liveliness, for its ability to come alive in support of the lives of those of us who are included in the \u201cwe\u201d of \u201cwe the data.\u201d Vibrant data is one example of how new materialist ontologies support white supremacist, patriarchal political projects.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>[1]\u00a0Beltran, Cristina. \u201cRacial Presence Versus Racial Justice: The Affective Power of an Aesthetic Condition\u201d in Du Bois Review, 11:1 (2014) 137-158<\/p>\n<p>[2]\u00a0Dillon, Stephen. \u201cPossessed by Death: The Neoliberal-Carceral State, Black Feminism, and the Afterlife of Slavery\u201d in Radical History Review Issue 112 (Winter 2012): 113-124.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is a cross-post from Its Her Factory. &nbsp; Is data \u201cvibrant\u201d in the new materialist sense? That is, does it exhibit the \u201cagency\u201d or power that living things have to affect other things? It may not materially vibrate in the way sound waves do, but in its interaction with other phenomena (especially other data), [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1929,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9967],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1929"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19218"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19218\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19220,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19218\/revisions\/19220"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}