Data Love

Intelligence services, government administrations, businesses, and a growing majority of the population are hooked on the idea that big data can reveal patterns and correlations in everyday life. Initiated by software engineers and carried out through algorithms, the mining of big data has sparked a silent revolution. But algorithmic analysis and data mining are not simply byproducts of media development or the logical consequences of computation. They are the radicalization of the Enlightenment's quest for knowledge and progress. Data Love argues that the "cold civil war" of big data is taking place not among citizens or between the citizen and government but within each of us.Roberto Simanowski elaborates on the changes data love has brought to the human condition while exploring the entanglements of those who-out of stinginess, convenience, ignorance, narcissism, or passion-contribute to the amassing of ever more data about their lives, leading to the statistical evaluation and individual profiling of their selves. Writing from a philosophical standpoint, Simanowski illustrates the social implications of technological development and retrieves the concepts, events, and cultural artifacts of past centuries to help decode the programming of our present.

PrefacePart I. Beyond the NSA Debate1. Intelligence Agency Logic2. Double Indifference3. Self-Tracking and Smart Things4. Ecological Data Disaster5. Cold Civil WarPart II. Paradigm Change6. Data-Mining Business7. Social Engineers Without a Cause8. Silent Revolution9. Algorithms10. Absence of TheoryPart III. The Joy of Numbers11. Compulsive Measuring12. The Phenomenology of the Numerable13. Digital Humanities14. Lessing's RejoinderPart IV. Resistances15. God's Eye16. Data Hacks17. On the Right Life in the Wrong OneEpiloguePostfaceNotesIndex