Presentation at the Quantified Self Europe Conference 2014 in Amsterdam: How does the practice of tracking, sharing, and using data for personal meaning challenge our ideas about human connection, ideas traditionally framed as oppositions between between "individuals" and "society."

1. QS and Philosophy
Quantified Self Europe Conference 2014
Amsterdam, May 11th 2014
@jbenno
Jörg Blumtritt

2. Pythagorean World or Metaphors?
• Do we regard the world as comprehensible through
numbers (as is the claim of QS)? Is this in the sense
of St. Augustine, that we think of the world that way?
Is it Kant's schemata resp. the Platonists' ideals that
we think of, or is it even further, reality being in
principle numeric?
• Many talks and sessions at #qseu14 touch this
question: how to quantize or track emotions, scents,
memories, even grief? And in many sessions we
experienced a rather postmodernist way of dealing
with it:
• Do we want to find facts, empirical evidence?
• Or do we use tracking to tell a story about ourselves
(to us in private or to others that we share our data
with)?
• The first makes sense in the context of science
(->next slide); the latter makes QS into a meaningful
extension of social media.
I took the allegory from the title engraving of "Vollständiges Mathematisches Lexicon
Darinnen alle Kunst=Wörter und Sachen Welche In der erwegenden und
ausübenden Mathesi vorzukommen pflegen", Leipzig 1747
2 #qseu14, Joerg Blumtritt

3. 3
Sozialdynamik bewegter Körper
• Or modernist social paradigm is aggregating
people to sets, represented by an average value or
one representative member (like we see with
sampling, panel research, or with the concept of a
constituency, where one member of parliaments
speaks for the total population of his electorate).
• End of the 19th century, experiments and
measurements in physics became so precise, that
the paradigm of Newtonian science had to be
overthrown. Einstein and Planck changed the
perspective from the aggregates of moving
particles that where used in thermodynamics, to
looking after the single particle, and thus
formulating quantum physics.
• With the possibility of tracking each single person
in a large set of people without the need to
aggregate (which for me is essentially what "Big
Data" is about), do we get into a quantum-physics-
like paradigm shift in social science, or even in
humanities?
• Certainly, most of the topics covered with QS are
far more qualitative than quantitative social
science, however at the same time dealt with in a
numerical way.
(Particle or Person? This could be someone walking down a street, seeing her cat
on the other side, and then just walking on. Of course it could also be my
drawing a Feinman diagram of a neutron beta-decaying to a proton.)
#qseu14, Joerg Blumtritt

4. 4
Mistakes like a bounced check or
a small overdraft have effectively
blacklisted more than a million
low-income Americans from the
mainstream financial system for
as long as seven years as a result
of little-known private databases
that are used by the nation’s
major banks.
Algorithm Ethics
• Most technologies have built in implicit value
judgements. This can be parameters that
someone (e.g. an engineer in the development
team) just set to a value that seamt to her
appropriate; it could also be governed by some
assuptions someone made at a certain point in
time.
• More often than not we cannot see into, let alone
access our gadgets and applications; so they
remain black boxes.
• Value judgements are neither per se bad nor
avoidable.
• However, it is our responsibility to demand access
to the "black boxes", to have transparency with
technology that effects on our lives, and as makers
of such technology to grant others access and
have an open conversation with them.
• It is also a strong indication to bring digital literacy
to people, making them understand the tools they
use, helping them becoming as active as possible.
For more see http://beautifuldata.net/2013/05/algorithm-ethics/
#qseu14, Joerg Blumtritt

5. "Privacy"
5
• Privacy - as shown here by the distribution of the
term within Google's ngram corpus - has been a
big thing in the 80s. It might be already on the
decline.
• Open data for the public good: There is huge
incentive in open data, for the society but also
economically.
• Examples are insurances demanding the
tracking of your driving, or various applications in
health care.
• So it will become increasingly difficult (and
expensive) to abstinate from sharing our tracking
data.
• We should help people understand what that
means, we should continuously discuss the
consequences of this development, too.
#qseu14, Joerg Blumtritt

6. "Data Protection"
6
• Data protection is on decline in Google trends.
• Heartbleed has demonstrated what is a proven
mathematical theoreme: there cannot be
guaranteed safty in software. (This is equivalent to
the halting problem in computer science).
• There is two possible routs to deal with this:
• Data parsimony, avoid collecting data (certainly not
what we intend to do in QS! Not without cause seen
as luddite approach.
• Postprivacy - just let go. This sounds easy, but it
would not work in a society with hierachies that
would turn it into a panoptikon (in Zygmund
Bauman's sense). If we want postprivacy, we really
have to work for a robust framework!
#qseu14, Joerg Blumtritt

7. 7
Veillance
• La veillance means "to watch" and "to care". Caring
for others and watching them is always closely
realted.
• Steve Mann came up with the typology of
veillance, shown in the diagram.
• We tend to see souvaillance as opposed to
surveillance. But Mann shows here, that it is rather
orthogonal - you can have both at the same time.
• The London Metropolitan Police has recently been
equipped with lifelogging cameras. This is - with
good cause! - called souveillance, becuase it is not
getting a view from above but staying on the
ground, looking back to people who also may
document the police with their devices (which
plays a most important role in protests nowadays,
as seen e.g. in the uprisings in Turkey).
• There is strong evidence that souveillance with a
police force tremendously reduces violence on
both sides.
The diagram is taken from http://www.webcitation.org/6Cb7y7KRb
#qseu14, Joerg Blumtritt

8. 8
"Data begs to be used"
(Bruce Schneier)
• "We’re living in a world with more transparency, we
need to learn to do intelligence with more
transparency too." (Bruce Schneier)
• In “Snow Crash”, Neal Stephenson imagines a
Central Intelligence Corporation, the CIA and NSA
becoming a commercial service where everybody
just purchases the information they’d need. This
was, what came immediately to my mind when I
read through the transcript of the talk on
“Intelligence Gathering and the Unowned Internet”
that was held by the Berkman Center for Internet
and Society at Harvard, starring Bruce Schneier,
who for every Mathematician in my generation is
just the godfather of cryptography. Bruce has
been arguing for living “beyond fear” for more than
a decade, advocating openness instead of digging
trenches and winding up barbed wire. I am
convinced, that information does not want to be
free (as many of my comrades in arms tend to
phrase). However I strongly belief Bruce is right:
We can hear data’s call.
Link to the event: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/2014/04/unownedinternet
Link to the transcript:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dJjE3lBfI2aiO7DGQvEGKx4p0qVcCMD5OH
6tWuRPn9g/edit
#qseu14, Joerg Blumtritt

9. Cyborg Rights
9
• My friend Enno Park, shown in this picture, is deaf.
But cochlea implants made him hear again. Enno
is a hacker, so he wants to access the technology
that has become part of his body. But he can't. It is
propriatory, DRM protected, a black box.
• So he founded the German Cyborg Association to
fight for the rights of people who entangle their
lives with technology.
• We should keep reminding people that our self-
tracking is just a very visible and striking aspect of
something that has long become ubiquitous.
Technology as always been an "extension of man"
(sorry for the gendered term, but it is a quote by
Teilhard from the 1930s). As it would have been
useless for someone in the 19th century to
seperate "the railroad world" from "the real world",
it is useless to maintain the ficiton of data being
somehow virtual. We have long become cyborgs.
Cyborgs e.V.: http://cyborgs.cc/
#qseu14, Joerg Blumtritt

10. 10
To what end shall we come?
Herbert Marshall McLuhan had a useful way to
structure his futuristic thoughts: the Tetrad.
For each technology we can ask for questions, to
better understand, what the technology changes in
our lives.
1. What does the new technology enhence? (It
certainly does something better, otherwise it
would hardly succede).
2. What does it render obsolete? (Other technologies
but also professions or even social or cultural
practices might get replaced by the new
technologies, even if it would not exactly fill the
gap that was left by the past technology).
3. What gets retrieved? (New technology might give
space to things that were abandoned)
4. What does the new technology become in the
end? (What happens if we push the new
technology to the edge?)
On the following page I put together some possible
answers for these four questions. Just my thoughs;
happy to discuss!
my blogpost on this: http://datarella.com/organizing-a-system-of-10-billion-
people/
#qseu14, Joerg Blumtritt

11. Enhances
Health
Fitness
Science
Communication
Retrieves
Temperance
Communal Life
Caring
Bucolic Village
Moral Control
Obsolesces
MDs
The Psychiatrist's Couch
Surveillance
Reverses into
Organizing a System of 10 Billion
Noo-Sphere
Angelization
Weltgeist
QS
#qseu14, Joerg Blumtritt11

12. 12
Jörg Blumtritt
@jbenno
http://datarella.com
#qseu14, Joerg Blumtritt