Some in this generation are afraid of BIG. Big pharma. Big oil. Particularly Big Data. How valid is the fear?
Bigness isn’t a new thing. We had things so Big in the 1800’s we regulated them: one man owning all oil. One man owning all rail. Then one man got a board of directors and became that artificial One Man, the corporation—a maneuver to let a group of people acquire Bigness, and theoretically replace their leader at will. But—when they replace him—THEY generally stay. It’s a curious construct, if you think about it. The One Man becomes theoretically immortal.
And fairly prone to swallow the competition. The Bigness, not being physically constrained to one body or one lifetime, can virtually ingest others of its kind.
Or NOT of its kind. It can diversify, immunize itself against the ups and downs of buggywhip technology in one limb of the corporation—
And increasingly divorce itself from the interests of any one of these components. It’s business becomes maintaining itself. Bigness is its primary interest. And morality can only be applied by vote of the majority.
The Big Corporation is also—virtually immortal. Or at least tends to outlive real people.
So, IMHO, the modern age has cured its original problem by creating a problem. But IS it altogether a problem?
Enterprises fail on a number of grounds—mistaken concept, mistaken direction of search—or inability to sustain the search for, say, a cure for cancer, because of the limits of a human lifetime; or the limits of budget; or the sheer scale of the operation; or the inability to share information. One Man can be on the right track. But gets old and dies. Or runs out of money. Or doesn’t talk to the woman in Russia who has a test result and an idea.
Corporations, being in a sense immortal, and having huge finance, and a vast web of connections, can apply these to the problem and make advances much faster than single operations. Corporations can afford to risk a bit. Corporations which have a culture of morality in their boardrooms can take risks with the sweeping authority of ancient kings—a decree saying, we’ll take a chance on that research. We’ll fund that exploration. We can do that.
And lately…there’s a new force in the works. Big Data. It’s a tsunami of information, that in a sense ‘corporatizes’ the world population, so that we know x-number of shoppers bought y’s. X-number returned them. Sally Smith is one of x-number of people with a y-allergy. Sally herself is merged into a tick that may move industry in a way Sally’s phone call can’t. But in another sense, the fact that Sally phoned the manufacturer is itself data: if one person called, there are 10,000 out there that had the same problem but didn’t. We have virtual One Man getting information on ‘virtual Sally’ and Sally becomes significant to a corporate decision to investigate a problem.
We generate data every time we log on, use a credit card, make a phone call, even—thanks to DNA research—every time we touch an object. Sit on a sofa. Nick a finger.
We shed bits and bytes the way a cat sheds fur, constantly. In a sense, Sally sheds pieces that could inform us she is allergic to y, but Sally herself is data along with the motions and actions of all customers. Finding Sally can be amazingly precise—if someone were motivated to find Sally. But Sally’s importance has nothing to do with her holding city office or her knowledge of bookkeeping or her driving record—none of that matters to the corporation that sees her as part of that allergy statistic. We ALL become so statistical that we disappear into numbers and calculations. Sally is world-affecting with no one interested in knowing her name. Sally’s circle of family and friends knows her in a very different way, and that’s Sally in close focus, the ‘real’ Sally, who is not a construct, who is a textured human being with a lot of quirks and differences from average. Sally’s sons and daughters will be wholly different people, generating their own blizzard of data, significant in corporate boardrooms for complete different statistics.
It’s a weird world we live in.
It’s a tumbling cascade of changes wrought by data, new discoveries, massive undertakings, new social institutions.
We don’t cease to be important as individuals because we belong to a data-group. We actually contribute to these changes without knowing we do—we have our particular impact without knowing it, sometimes for good, sometimes neutral, sometimes negative. We’re obsessed with ‘celebrity’ as if that were real, but meanwhile we DO steer decisions in ways we likely will have no awareness of. Everyone of us touches every other one, even when continents separate us and time changes us. The nature of Big Data is information, but the information tends to become chaotic and full of irrelevancies when you sift down to the individual particles. Can Big Data target an individual? An individual stands out in Big Data only by the determined action of someone to find him or someone with his traits. Most of us do not have traits that unique. Our name is generally Legion, in almost all the categories in which our personal data falls. Find us? Maybe. But why?
I do genealogical research. A lot of data on individuals is at my fingertips. I can find out things about people I never met that are just amazing.
Until I run up against a woman in the 1600’s, who I know specifically shares my DNA. I know a lot about her. But because her church wrote her down only as Ellenor Scholes, wife of William Scholes—the line breaks here, forever, unless some family somewhere knows her father’s name. She’s only Ellenor. All other data is lost.
So she disappears. We know something of her influence on subsequent generations, but she, herself, has no face.
I think I’d rather leave records.
Big Data has as one of its’ tenets, the possibility of anonymity or at least the ability to anonymize the results of data searches by deleting personal data fields such as name, address, and SSN. Ancestry including DNA results is actually the antithesis of big data in that it allows specific identification of a person or small group of persons. I was responsible for anonymizing data collected during tests of Army systems so that soldiers could be assured that derogatory comments about their chain of command could not be used in retaliation. Thus, I am particularly sensitive to privacy concerns associated with big data.
Immortal Corporations as opposed to Individual Beings: it’s an interesting opposition that you have put forth that, from an anthropological point of view, may well be revealing your (and my and likely most readers of this blog’s) culture’s kinship construction.
Contemporary American and Western/European kinship system is bilateral – individuals inherit equally from both their mother and their father. Our personal kin relationships are unique to oneself (shared at most with full brothers and sisters). Kin relationships change depending on how a person stands in relationship to you. These specific relationships do not outlive the life of that individual.
Most traditional farming societies, on the other hand, trace descent only through one line – either the father’s (patrilineal) or, more rarely, the mother’s (matrilineal). While individuals are born into the patrilineage or matrilineage “extended family” and die, the patrilineage/matrilineage continues on theoretically forever. Individuals do not own the farmland and other vital resources, the lineage does. Your relationships are replicated in the next generation and land/property is handed down intact for lineage members to use next generation. One man (or woman) is generally head of the lineage at any one time. Although they will die, another person will step into the role and continue on the lineage’s interests.
Anthropologists refer to this as “corporate kinship” and think of the on-going lineage as a corporation. In European history, you can see this going on when you read about the “House of X” (as in the House of Anjou or, in my own Scottish Highland research, the House of Argyll). The head of the House, for example the Earl of Argyll, will be discussed as this single individual who is active in and responsible for historical actions which take place over hundreds of years. It is many different individuals but is viewed as one actor leading the interests of Argyll and Clan Campbell across time.
Full disclosure: my main academic approach is cultural anthropology. I despised its field of “Social Organization” when I took that course as an Anthro undergraduate, but now find it inherent in everything I analyse as I try to tease apart the ways and whys of Early Modern Scottish Highland Society… and our own, modern Western social structure.
I don’t think the issue is so much the existance of “Big Data”, statistics in general, as it is fundamental misuse by people who don’t understand its limitations and believe it has far more predictive value than it actually has. Statistics is fundamentally a summary of the past. Its connection to the future is tenuous. The typical excuse is: “I know past doesn’t predict the future, but I’ve got to do something and that’s the best evidence I’ve got, so I’m going to pretend it does.” From that, all manner of evil arises.
The fiction that a corporation is a person is likewise fundamentally wrong. It is different in so many obvious ways! We need a better paradigm.
My issue with Big Data, is that we become the statistical average and lose the quirks that make us ‘me’. Not for the close focus – but for the company. You can’t have it that way because statistically ‘you’ “people like you” don’t want that. Except of course I, the real me, does want that. Outliers are inconvenient, but when the numbers are large enough, most of us are outliers one way or another. Of course the general ‘we’ doesn’t want to pay for the privilege (Is it really?) of individual attention. But perhaps it would be better if we could have more say where the balance lies between cheap and personal.
If there was more trust in government to regulate and control, listen and respond, perhaps Bigness wouldn’t be such an issue.
Life isn’t easy.
When big data gets big enough the outliers can become a separate body (numerically significant) that can be recognized and accommodated. The corporations that adapt to using big data that way (not just focusing on the average) will be the ones who thrive in the future, IMHO. Besides, there is another, mirror change in our society. A significant splinter of supply and demand has become distributed. The Internet, though it is anchored in big data, allows for small-interaction commerce. If you have something you want that is not offered by large corporations, you can go looking for a small supplier who may be on the other side of the world from you but can still meet your needs. Another thread that will affect all this is the entry of robotics into the mix. Programmed effectively, a robot interface can get you exactly what you want no matter what statistical average big data says you belong in.
And then there are folks like me who love to skew the curve by not being entirely truthful in the things I sign up for. As far as some websites know, I’m a 40-year-old married man, a teacher, with a different name and birth date. Of course, that meant until I started using Mail Washer, I used to get a lot of “male enhancement” spam . . .
I think we are right in the middle of another “revolution” that will cause as much of an upheaval in society as the Industrial Revolution did. Society is changing, and its values are changing and there are those modern-day Luddites who are fighting change so desperately that somebody got elected president on the strength of it. This next “revolution” is going to change the way society works in ways as profound as the industrial revolution. We’re already seeing it happen.
I have always had a dislike of large organizations. Corporations are by their very nature amoral and when given the same rights as people this amorality can and does lead to rather bad consequences.
Of course we have the finest government that money can buy and has bought. We should use kickstarter to raise money to buy our own congressmen.
Spring has not quite sprung up here in New Hampshire.
Jonathan
Public corporations are moral. If they are not, the shareholders can sue the board and the corporate officers. Their morality is limited to, “Make as much money as possible,” but it is there.
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The neo-Luddites aren’t going to win. They never do. But we have to change society a lot and quickly. Many, many jobs are being obsoleted and no principle of Economics states jobs will be created at the rate they’re destroyed. See:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
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The problem with big data is when it puts you in a news bubble, and you’re unaware you’re in a news bubble because you never see anything outside the bubble. Some people do this deliberately by only watching one news source, but it can happen from Facebook, or whoever, filtering to get stories you like, that is, that agree with your prejudices.
The other problem is that Big Data never forgets. Think of the stupidest, most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done. For Millennials, someone has photographed or video’d it, and it will never be forgotten. Think about the Dr. Dao Airport Security officer or the AA “Hit me!” flight attendant; they’re never working in either industry again, as if they didn’t have enough to worry about with structural job elimination.
The way to find Ellenor is to look for the disappearance of Ellenor [someone] at the time and probably near the place she marries William. Whether Ancestry allows that kind of search, I don’t know. Of course, that’s before standardized spelling, so she might be listed as Elanor or any number of other possibilities, especially if she or William were from different cultural areas with different common spellings of Elanor.
The proliferation of cameras (be they cc-tv or smartphones) means that most of us are leaving a visual datatrail, and that misbehaviors that used to pass unproveable stand a chance of being tracked. OTOH, as you say, that can redound on any of us—a moment of overstressed stupidity, like the swimmer who got himself photographed at a party…
Re Ellenor, there is every likelihood that she was known by name for a certain time and maybe to one group of descendants, who could turn up with records they commit to Ancestry. My line comes through a batch of Puritans who became less puritan and headed for Illinois. [Lord, the stories I found: talk about ‘I’m my own grandpa’— those early colony villages were real small, and cousins did marry— It’s also traditional in England that marriage takes place in the bride’s territory, and the marriage seems to have been in Lewknor. So it’s very likely that she was born into that church congregation, and married within it. If I can find the original record of the congregation, it’s possible I can find an Ellenor who was born to some family in the right year. Unfortunately, Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries and overthrew the Catholic churches around the year she was born, so if she was born Church of England, there might be a record, but if she was born Catholic, there might be another place to look. They would have been Church of England to start with, but the Puritans rose up, a radical movement within, and the Scholeses ended up affiliated with the Puritan radicals…not the most extreme of them, but definitely out on the same limb.
Just a thought — with concentrations of interrelated people in small areas — could Ellenor’s family and her husband’s family have the same surname? Unless, of course, there are no other Scholes in the village she was born into. All it would take would be for one man name Scholes to have sons who had sons for three or four generations some of whom had to go to another village. Of course, you’re way more experienced at this than I am.
I’m wrestling with a situation of a daughter who died in infancy who was older than her parent’s marriage at the time she died. Thing is, her daddy was a Lutheran minister, and the situation was such that he wouldn’t have had a child out of wedlock. Either the marriage certificate I have is when his marriage was registered with the state of Texas — as he came to Texas during the transition from Republic to State, or she was married before and this was a posthumous child from that marriage that he adopted — They were living on the bayou near what became Spring Branch at the time and diseases like yellow fever, typhoid fever and cholera were rampant there. The preacher was a very interesting man. Came from a Catholic family (three of his sisters were nuns), and was attending the University of Heidelberg studying for the priesthood. One of his professors converted him to Lutheranism. His family disowned him. He ended up going to a Lutheran Seminary in Switzerland and he along with four other men, were sent to Texas as missionaries to establish congregations in the Adelsverein.
Bad dates or child of previous marriage (I’ve found a lot of previous marriages that way) are what I’d bet on.
It IS possible, but I like to have evidence that that happened. My grandmother’s great-grandmother Maria Maxfield-Maxfield was such an instance. And there is a Boone who ended up in my tree twice. Lots of cousin marriages in those early Massachusetts villages, too. The Dodges and Maxfields and Batchelders or Bachelors, depending on how they spelled it, were an absolute tangle, and married each other with wild abandon. The moment I see another Batchelder in my tree I just bang my head against the desk and ask myself if I want to continue the hunt now—-or solve it later. Maybe next week.
The religious angle sent many of my family hither and yon. The Scholes married into the Dunsters, and at once point I have Dunsters and Jane has Dunsters—brothers, as I recall, all headed to the colonies as Puritans; and worse, Jane has Matherses. But she has the quiet side of that family that produced Cotton Mather, whose sermons are linked to the Salem witch hunts. The rest of the family wasn’t fond of him. Then one of my lot, I think a Maxfield, was charged with witchcraft 3 times, but was acquitted, partially because her son, a judge, was buddies of the trial judge, who threw the last case out of court.
The Boones are an absolute tangle: every generation used the names Daniel, Benjamin, John, Polly, etc. And every family had about 10 kids. My branch rebelled and named the kids Thales and Lafayette…
Seems like “the” Daniel Boone had a brother named Squire, who was a gunsmith, no?
Genealogy is like the best of cold case solving (no actual crime) plus detective work. My mom and I want to go to the Bauer family reunion in Round Top this October — Carl Siegismund Bauer was the grandfather of the preacher’s wife (She came to Texas at the ripe old age of 6 on a sailing ship in the 1840s.) Her name was Emma Rummel Neuthard.
http://jamfamilyhistory.com/stories/rtp.html
Genealogy can be pretty exciting. The lady who was the manager of the apartments I moved from in 2016 was related to one of the men who captured General Santa Ana at the battle of San Jacinto, who was from Winedale a town down the road from Round Top. Small world. Pretty cool, that.