Hellstat

A polemic

I have been unfortunate enough to bear witness to the rise of Big Data, millions and billions of rows of numbers, categories, strings and booleans, referenced and cross-referenced, joined, pivoted, filtered and subsampled, all for the purpose of finding problems to fit prewritten solutions. As data collection has increased, and processing power skyrocketed, the siren song of statistical certainty wormed through one field after another, until now you will be hard pressed to find a single area of study or class of decision makers not drawing on data for their conclusions. But in their haste to build closed systems of problem-and-answer, and in their constant pursuit of the dopamine hit that accompanies every “insight” pulled out of a statsheet, these data worshippers have built a cargo cult around numbers, substituted formula for thought and untethered themselves from the gritty, misshapen reality of human existence. Wrapped in a confounding shroud of scientism, acolytes of statistical demons have infiltrated the governments, the schools and even the churches. Having entrenched themselves into every level and aspect of our society, they now toil away at a mathematic Model of Babel with the intent of bringing Hell On Earth in the guise of stochastic charity.

I call these people Neoliberal, because they share much in common with the overly rational libertarian, (or Classical Liberal, as he wishes to be known) but also could not have existed in a time before Data. The neoliberal is a quiet, unassuming man, with a well-groomed beard and a taste for the French press. He is an avid reader of the New Yorker and The Atlantic, and listens to podcasts about national politics. He is very concerned with issues of social inequality and human rights, and will not hesitate to opine on the legitimacy of every government from Bolivia to China, although his opinions on all of these can be surmised from his appearance well before he opens his mouth. There is nothing quite so soothing to the neoliberal as the sound of his own voice, for there is nothing quite so frightening to the neoliberal as not being in control of a situation— tell the neoliberal his bus has been delayed, and see how his face blanches! The neoliberal looks at the world, with its history and traditions and environments and stories and psyches, and sees simply another scenario for him to exert control over. He wishes to dominate everything. He does not wish to be made Supreme Dictator of the Earth only because he does not trust himself to be everywhere at once, but certainly not out of any respect for the autonomy of his fellow man.

Shades of gray are intolerable to the neoliberal, who, in his perverted autism, attaches a numeric value to every social interaction, reducing our lives to data. The neoliberal has watched the first half of season one of The Good Place: he does not care for the drama much, but he thinks the setting is brilliant. Utilitarian is a dirty slur, but utilitarian is too good a word for the neoliberal, as he not only asserts the existence of such numerical reductions but tries his hand at piercing the veil, the result of which is much dismay and suffering. Undeterred, the neoliberal will return again next year, with policy proposals cooked up in a think tank. Surely his ideas will, at least in the aggregate, be good for humanity? The neoliberal wants self driving cars on the road — he does not care by what metrics they value human life. The neoliberal wants economic incentives to push people into urban centers — he does not care what deleterious effects urbanity has on the human psyche, for most of these effects cannot be quantified, and for the ones that can we have SSRIs. The neoliberal scoffs at Bush and the Iraq War — he would do well not to mock an ideology so close a kin to his own! The benevolent tyranny of the Pentagon is the intersection of neoliberalism and warfare, its inefficacy a Cassandric warning of what will come of all this aristocratic punditry.

And this is a cargo cult, indeed, for the neoliberal does not really understand statistics. Oh, he can tell you what a p-value is, he can talk animatedly and for hours on the various benefits and drawbacks of linear regression, nearest neighbor analysis and Bayesian epistemology, and all the while a little projector in his head casts an image of the book he read on the subject onto his arcuate fasciculus, as he quotes its author verbatim. The neoliberal is perfectly capable of doing arithmetic, it is the logical leap from stats to reality where he stumbles. He plays a linguistic sleight of hand on himself, convincing himself that what these numbers really mean and what this correlation really implies and how this prediction really holds — as if numbers mean anything beyond the cognitive, as if correlation is not merely descriptive, as if predictions hold regardless of what happens after they are made. When his prediction comes out incorrect, he may blame the data collection process, or some quirk in the model, but he will never question his method of using empirical data to answer metaphysical questions of justice, happiness and community, for in his mind data is metaphysical, he worships it as a god or djinn. Data is never wrong in his eyes, he has only asked the wrong question, and must beseech it differently to win its revelatory gifts.

The neoliberal is easy to spot, but do not ask him what he is — he defines himself only by what he not. He is certainly not a communist, nor even a socialist, really, although he doesn’t feel comfortable with unfettered big business, and he is socially liberal — very liberal! He may ask you your pronouns; take your time in answering, if so. Invent some convoluted rule to explain and use that minute to catch your breath, for it is the last time he will wait to hear you speak. He is not an anti-natalist, but he is sympathetic to the position, and he has read Benatar (he has not actually read Benatar, except in summary) and is happy to discuss it further. He will intimate that he is not in that camp due to some shade of humanity about him, but this is a lie, it is only because anti-natalism is a position founded on reason and argument, not data, and that discomfits him. This is how pathetic he is, that he will not even admit that he is entranced with death. He is a small man, full of rodentry and cowardice.

The terror unleashed upon the world by neoliberalism and the religion of data has yet to be fully realized, but it is too late to stop it. Data-worship is practically our state religion, a common strand uniting all establishments, Left, Right and apolitical. It infects every area of life, and will destroy anything it cannot quantify: serenity, love, joy and qualia. He is the quintessential Man with a Hammer, all the world his nail. And we, poor sheep, are taken in by his talk of numbers and objectivity, when all this talk amounts to is the flourish of the magician’s hand while his other draws unwarranted and undignified assumptions about the connection between these abstract numbers and our true existence. To make matters worst of all, as a progressive the neoliberal is unable to revert his mistakes, but only compounds them, answering each new dilemma he causes with more statistical despotism. “Imagine,” as the great philosopher said, “a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy, then gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness.” This is the hellish claw of Data. Today it wraps its searing grip round psychiatry, but diabolical seeds germinate even now in every part of society, worming into our brains and enslaving us to the spreadsheet. Beware the neoliberal. Beware Data! Mistrust every study, every analysis, every breakdown. Every time you hear a percentage, your eyes should narrow. Look for the fiendish puppetry of Data in your workplace, your city ordinance, your children’s school. Seek it out, expose it and submit it to mocking laughter. Only through embracing real, true life may we yet be saved from the Model of Babel.