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{{a|devil|}}A prelude to the [[great delamination]]. | {{a|devil|}}A prelude to the [[great delamination]]. | ||
There is a strand of [[High modernism|modernist]] thinking that flows from Robert Moses, Le Corbusier, that there is an optimisable configuration for human interaction and it can be derived from a rigorously scientific, or at least mathematical, method: that the only obstacle to implementing it has been the lack of a sufficiently powerful machine to run the calculation. | There is a strand of [[High modernism|modernist]] thinking that flows from [[The Death and Life of Great American Cities|Robert Moses]], Le Corbusier, that there is an optimisable configuration for human interaction and it can be derived from a rigorously scientific, or at least mathematical, method: that the only obstacle to implementing it has been the lack of a sufficiently powerful machine to run the calculation. | ||
===Data ''modernism''? Or ''post''-modernism?=== | |||
An initial objection: in Moses’ classical high-modernist view there is a central, top-down, beneficent dictator who has, in good faith, derived a theory from deterministic first principles; a sort of [[cogito ergo sum]] begets [[income tax and rice pudding]] begets a mechanised [[High modernist|modernist]] way of life. Data modernism dispenses with the need for the beneficent dictator, or at any rate yields that position to a more or less ineffable ''[[algorithm]]''. We don’t know how it works, how it gets to its conclusions, but we are fixed with the conviction that, being the massed output of the wise crowd, it has greater intelligence than any one of us. | |||
That time has now arrived, or is close at hand, whereby the means is at our disposal. We now have the processing power to take massive amounts of [[unstructured data]] — “[[noise]]” in the vernacular — and from it extrapolate a [[Signal-to-noise ratio|signal]]. We don’t necessarily understand ''how'' the [[algorithm]]<nowiki/>s extrapolate a signal; they just do — this inscrutability is part of the appeal of it: there is no “all-too-human” bias<ref>At least, until the algo goes rogue and becomes a Nazi.</ref> — but there is a belief which stretches from paid-up Randian anarcho-capitalists through to certified latter-day socialists, that ''we can solve our problems with data''. | That time has now arrived, or is close at hand, whereby the means is at our disposal. We now have the processing power to take massive amounts of [[unstructured data]] — “[[noise]]” in the vernacular — and from it extrapolate a [[Signal-to-noise ratio|signal]]. We don’t necessarily understand ''how'' the [[algorithm]]<nowiki/>s extrapolate a signal; they just do — this inscrutability is part of the appeal of it: there is no “all-too-human” bias<ref>At least, until the algo goes rogue and becomes a Nazi.</ref> — but there is a belief which stretches from paid-up Randian anarcho-capitalists through to certified latter-day socialists, that ''we can solve our problems with data''. | ||