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Why? ''Because they wouldn’t do it otherwise and no-one would miss it''. | Why? ''Because they wouldn’t do it otherwise and no-one would miss it''. | ||
{{data | |||
Now here is the thing. There is, the JC freely narratises, an epochal battle raging between [[expert|experts]] and technocrats which the technocrats have, for thirty years, been winning. As we move into the era of artificial intelligence the wear feels like it is in an end-game: no ''Götterdammerung'', no great final conflict but rather a whimpering out of human expertise, finally beaten down by the irrepressible logic of data. We acquire tools to help the experts, ''digital'' tools, and the tools create ''metadata''. A typed letter contains no machine-readable metadata; a facsimile contains a limited amount; an ASCII document is ''only'' data. | |||
And as the talent loses, we succumb to data, increasingly giving it off, great clods of it, which the technocrats then harvest and weaponise back at us in some self-fulfilling apocalyptic prophecy. No matter that the data are a historical, formalistic digital sketch of a model; that they bear no resemblance to the great ineffable, analog whole: there is no historical measure of the forward value of actions not taken, crises headed off; capital investments avoided through quick thinking and untraced application of human common sense. | |||
The technocrats build tools to make lives easier which happen as a by-product to generate data, and then the data is all the residue that remains, not the ''lives made easier''. | |||
And the more data we give off, the more it emboldens the technocrats: the more it seems to be universal, and all-telling to immerse themselves in an alternative universe described by the data. | |||
Communications up and down the chain of command do not advance the [[commercial imperative]], but ''react'' to it. They are validations of things the report already knows; reluctant, strained, for-the-sake-of-it FYIs; updates and postings serving only to spare the manager’s blushes should she be blind-sided by someone else. Vertical communications fulfil formal, not substantive, requirements for order. | Communications up and down the chain of command do not advance the [[commercial imperative]], but ''react'' to it. They are validations of things the report already knows; reluctant, strained, for-the-sake-of-it FYIs; updates and postings serving only to spare the manager’s blushes should she be blind-sided by someone else. Vertical communications fulfil formal, not substantive, requirements for order. |