Big data

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Turkey: “I have transformed myself into a data-driven business. All my data — and I've got reams of the stuff — tells me that every morning I shall be fed at 9 am precisely.

Aha! Here comes the farmer, right on time! I wonder if I'll get a special treat because it is Christmas!”

The obsession with big data has two implications:

Firstly it expresses a preference for the aggregate and the mean over the outlier, the individual, the unique or extraordinary. It is to cater for the average. It is to prefer the mediocre for its weight of numbers over the genius and its isolated vision. As surely as the ugliest man killed God, so did data kill the superman. The will to power is defeated by the million-strong dull blades of the will to entropy.

Second in its reductionism, in its funnelling of a dispersed population into an essential homogeneity, it speaks to the underlying belief in a grand unifying theory:a transcendent truth. Its non-accommodation of pluralism is a denial of pluralism.

See also

• In God we trust, all others must bring data