So, I haven't posted in about a year and a half, a hiatus in which a lot has happened lifewise. My life has been a little too unstructured and unpredictable to put a big marathon on the calendar, a kink in the normal rhythm of training. I run a lot, but lately more as devotion to the fitness I've gained over the years. It's a way to tend something precious through a period of dormition, like covering roses in the winter.
Neither is running an inexhaustiable topic, and after I read Murakami's book on running, I felt like he had had the last word. Murakami taught me something valuable about the limits of writing about running, that running is best written about as running--not as metaphor for anything else. After all, running itself is hugely interesting topic, at least for a while.
But running is a social and economic activity in addition to being a sport, so it inevitably intersects with and provides relays into other precincts of concern. I've been thinking about what relation we have to the data we generate in our daily activities, and feeling exploited by those who make money from it. For reasons unrelated to my suspicion, I've stopped running with a Garmin, mostly because I don't care all that much about the exact mileage I've traversed, I know my own body well enough to know how far I've gone in a given duration, and I know the lengths of my routes.
But the Garmin, and various other fitness tracking tools are test cases that raise an important question about the nature of our relationship to facts recorded about our daily activities. If I run 10 miles in 67 minutes over a given course in a given zipcode, what kind of relationship do I have with that information? Its ostensible purpose is to gauge fitness, and provide a record to help me get better at a hobby: running. But what other kinds of relationships do I have with that data? Do I own it? Is property even a useful concept for thinking of the data we generate? Do we make data or "generate" it? Do we have a "right" to it? Can I keep others from profiting from it?
Google and the others have found ways to exploit a resource that wasn't possible a generation ago: the data we create, make, or generate in daily living. Obviously, this data wouldn't exist without the technologies to capture it, and some would argue, perhaps not entirely cynically, that mining data from humans is like mining minerals from the earth, that harvesting the patterns of our behavior is no different than harvesting wheat or corn, and that in each activity labor consists in the act of extraction, and to the extractor go the rights of property. But to carry that analogy further, harvesting a human product instrumentalizes our bodies and our behaviors (of which a human self could be said to be the sum), and is therefore qualitatively different.
The recent NSA/Google/Facebook collusions have embarrassed the techno-utopianism that drives the rhetoric of "sharing" and "connecting" and have again raised the question of privacy, something now less a value than simply a technical problem, the degree of difficulty of connecting a SSN-linked name with a set of data points. But privacy is only part of the issue, and as a number of people have pointed out in recent days, no one is naive anymore about the implicit contract we make when we go online, that we trade the risk of exposure (of connecting the data we generate to our names) for the various forms of convenience that the Internet provides.
The other problem, though, is the way the data that emerges from our actions and our bodies is used and monetized. It's a new problem seldom discussed, and unlike privacy, lacks clear precedent. The fact that data arising from our activities is used to someone else's gain angers me, and to better articulate the injustice of this, we need to figure out what exactly our relationship to the metrics/data we generate (?) might be, and if it is a proprietary one, come to a better understanding of how to articulate a defense of that relationship.
More, hopefully, next time, about ways to defend the proprietary nature of our data--data that to exist requires a novel combination of bodies, wills, and activities with technological tools. For now, I think that if data needs both these ingredients to come into being, then no one party should be sole beneficiary.
Neither is running an inexhaustiable topic, and after I read Murakami's book on running, I felt like he had had the last word. Murakami taught me something valuable about the limits of writing about running, that running is best written about as running--not as metaphor for anything else. After all, running itself is hugely interesting topic, at least for a while.
But running is a social and economic activity in addition to being a sport, so it inevitably intersects with and provides relays into other precincts of concern. I've been thinking about what relation we have to the data we generate in our daily activities, and feeling exploited by those who make money from it. For reasons unrelated to my suspicion, I've stopped running with a Garmin, mostly because I don't care all that much about the exact mileage I've traversed, I know my own body well enough to know how far I've gone in a given duration, and I know the lengths of my routes.
But the Garmin, and various other fitness tracking tools are test cases that raise an important question about the nature of our relationship to facts recorded about our daily activities. If I run 10 miles in 67 minutes over a given course in a given zipcode, what kind of relationship do I have with that information? Its ostensible purpose is to gauge fitness, and provide a record to help me get better at a hobby: running. But what other kinds of relationships do I have with that data? Do I own it? Is property even a useful concept for thinking of the data we generate? Do we make data or "generate" it? Do we have a "right" to it? Can I keep others from profiting from it?
Google and the others have found ways to exploit a resource that wasn't possible a generation ago: the data we create, make, or generate in daily living. Obviously, this data wouldn't exist without the technologies to capture it, and some would argue, perhaps not entirely cynically, that mining data from humans is like mining minerals from the earth, that harvesting the patterns of our behavior is no different than harvesting wheat or corn, and that in each activity labor consists in the act of extraction, and to the extractor go the rights of property. But to carry that analogy further, harvesting a human product instrumentalizes our bodies and our behaviors (of which a human self could be said to be the sum), and is therefore qualitatively different.
The recent NSA/Google/Facebook collusions have embarrassed the techno-utopianism that drives the rhetoric of "sharing" and "connecting" and have again raised the question of privacy, something now less a value than simply a technical problem, the degree of difficulty of connecting a SSN-linked name with a set of data points. But privacy is only part of the issue, and as a number of people have pointed out in recent days, no one is naive anymore about the implicit contract we make when we go online, that we trade the risk of exposure (of connecting the data we generate to our names) for the various forms of convenience that the Internet provides.
The other problem, though, is the way the data that emerges from our actions and our bodies is used and monetized. It's a new problem seldom discussed, and unlike privacy, lacks clear precedent. The fact that data arising from our activities is used to someone else's gain angers me, and to better articulate the injustice of this, we need to figure out what exactly our relationship to the metrics/data we generate (?) might be, and if it is a proprietary one, come to a better understanding of how to articulate a defense of that relationship.
More, hopefully, next time, about ways to defend the proprietary nature of our data--data that to exist requires a novel combination of bodies, wills, and activities with technological tools. For now, I think that if data needs both these ingredients to come into being, then no one party should be sole beneficiary.
