In the beginning

A long long time ago, a single cell decided to take its data and make a copy of it. A few billion years later, we’ve evolved a bunch and now have a thing called ‘data privacy week’ because the whole thing has gotten so out of hand. This years’ theme for data privacy week (January 27-31st) was ‘Take Control of your Data’ which we should all interpret as ‘Nobody is Coming to Save You.’

In the interest of empowering ourselves in the Wild West of information tech, I feel it’s important to have a degree of literacy about what data is and how it works. I’m not an expert, but I’ve been paying close attention and have some half-baked thoughts on how our relationship to data is evolving.

The way we interact with data is new, but data itself is old as time…when you tie your shoes, you access data; a pattern of movement stored as memory. When you share a story from your childhood, you synthesize and translate data from one module to another. When you burp, your body is giving you data about what you ate for lunch. What’s new about data are its’ modern artifacts (digital packages of personal information) and how we use them (data capitalism). The relationship between the experience of living, the artifacts these experiences generate, and how we respond to it all, is changing faster than we can keep up. And in the wake of this, data is changing us.

How much of you is your true self, and how much is your curated online identity? How much has your ideology been impacted by your feed? Are you creating your digital presence or is it creating you? Do you feel connected to your digital self? Do you trust that person?

It’s a hall of mirrors in the digisphere. Naomi Klein writes powerfully about this in her 2023 book, Doppelganger, connecting the dots between information technology, ideology and identity. If you’re a person in the world and you don’t live in a cave, you should read it.

The Data Cycle: how we generate and perceive data

Like a game of telephone, data degrades the further it gets from its source. To better understand, let’s break it down into order of operations:

1. The Experience: Imagine that everything’s just animals, plants, cells, planets, maybe some people, just going about their lives without anyone really needing to take notes on every little thing that happens. It used to be like that. A thing would happen, a creature would experience it, and the whole thing would be lost to time forever. From the perspective of a human being in the 21st century, that’s no longer a thing. Both actively and passively, our every move - from social media posts to NLP interactions - is captured in data.
2. The Artifact: This is what most people think of when they hear the word data. The artifact is the recording of an experience. A cave drawing is a data artifact. The grooves in a record are a data artifact. The words I’m typing on this screen, documenting my thinking as it passes from my mind, to my fingers, through the machine and back to my eyes again, are a data artifact. The DNA in a cell is a data artifact.
3. The Decay: To varying degrees, data artifacts are highly susceptible to decay and abstraction. As DNA data copies itself from one cell to another, it mutates from time to time, which is why we have so many different kinds of plants and animals and colours and a million different species of bugs. Before cloud storage, data would often get corrupted as it was being copied from one place to another. The Guardian published an excellent audio article last year about data decay, questioning if we’ve entrusted our memories to a system that might destroy them. Data, subject to the nature of decay, becomes an abstraction of original experience.
4. Synthesis: It’s the part of the ‘telephone’ game where the message is processed, rendering your original message (or experience) into something far less palatable. I like to think of this output as the hot dog wiener of data. It’s a complicated process because, by nature, there’s interference. In the game, the message gets more and more corrupted the further it travels from its origin - mixed up with giggles, whispers, and tomfoolery, there’s always that one jackass who messes it up on purpose. If we were smart, we’d be watching to see who that person is and what’s in it for them. Data, aggregated using systems that are designed to optimize the needs of capitalism over people, does the same thing.
5. Translation: When your original message comes back to you, does it even make sense anymore? If you’ve ever posted something online that’s been misinterpreted, you’ve experienced this. If you’ve searched in earnest for positive content online, and had your ideas kicked back to you as ideologies you never signed up for, you’ve experienced this. If you had only your Spotify wrapped to go on, would people get to know the real you?

By the time it’s come full circle, it’s easy to believe the degraded versions of ourselves rather than trusting the origin, our own experience of being. Think of it as gas-lighting at scale. This is how we end up with teenage girls not recognizing the version of themselves they see in the mirror. And ethical people becoming radicalized, turning against friends, neighbours and family. Having outsourced our intuition, we’re allowing our corrupted data to become the story we tell ourselves.

How does this relate to data privacy?

Given that opting out of the game isn’t really an option, the initiatives offered by data privacy advocates fall into the category of harm reduction. The term ‘data privacy’ feels like an oxymoron. Privacy is no longer a reasonable expectation. Instead, I think the conversation should be about trust. If we accept the message that nobody is coming to save us, we’d better learn how to do it ourselves. An important first step is understanding the psychology behind personal data breaches.

Privacy breaches happen to individuals when outside agents prey on the disconnect between real and digital selves. They take advantage of the confusion we face as our perception gets muddied with the onslaught of information. In this soup, we are vulnerable. Hardwired for belonging, we are sitting ducks.

We want to trust. We want to believe that job recruiter who likes our work, or that hot stranger online who finds us desirable. As social creatures, we’re easily manipulated. My recommendation is this: imagine your online interactions as a game of telephone and consider how many people are playing. If you can’t reduce it down to you and a couple of friends playing, then you can’t expect it to be safe or private.

Is that email from your bank legit? Call your local branch - not the number in the email. Look it up yourself, and talk to a human who works there. That stranger DMing you, are they who they say they are? Invite them out for a coffee and find out.

We’re all right to be concerned about bad agents and criminals. But in the big picture, I’m less interested in how criminals and corporations use data against us than how this impacts our culture, politics, and mental health. The disconnect between our IRL and digital selves conditions us to distrust, and is a driving force behind everything from the loneliness crisis to the global rise of fascism.

I’ll be elaborating on these ideas in upcoming articles.

In the meantime, stay safe out there, friends - xo

Coming soon:

The Hunted: thoughts on data and surveillance.

Xerox: Analyzing the story of Jodi Stutz (the first documented report of a person photocopying their butt) through the lens of data processes.

THANKS FOR READING. My name is Sarah and I’m passionate about data humanism. I write about how we experience data because I believe that knowledge is the first step in personal and collective data sovereignty. Professionally, I work as a data designer specializing in synthesis and translation. Reach out if you’d like to chat!

Mentions:

https://naomiklein.org/doppelganger/

https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2024/mar/29/power-grab-the-hidden-costs-of-irelands-datacentre-boom-podcast

Writing and Artwork: Sarah Clark

type: essay

stage: budding

last tended: February 12, 2025

length: 5 minute read

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