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So? If you allow yourself to be controlled by people who only care about the data (i.e. managers, shareholders, ...) then you become a data processing unit. Alternatively you can tell them to fuck off and go work somewhere else where success is measured by the impact your work has on the people around you. Don't expect people whose sole purpose is to manage data to change anything about it.
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Dataism, transhumanism and nearly every other idea that became massively popular in the last 100 years except maybe communism is fundamentally individualist. How you fit into society is the wrong question, as the individualist approach to society is based on two sets:
- what's available and at what cost
- what you want and how much you want it
The possibilities of the information revolution pose a threat on everyone's livelihood, but this is simply the nature of change, not the new world order. Blaming new options for forcing you to change your life was never constructive since the saboteurs of the first industrial revolution. -
As for Harari, First, the complaint expressed in the post is nonsense because he has the career of a celebrity which has always been like this, and secondly for everyone else who relates to it, indicates that one needs to identify "more free time" as an objective and find a means to achieve it, probably at the cost of some other goals.
In a sea of rapidly changing options, we can find guidance by pinning down the things that are important to us and mercilessly evaluate options based on whether they help us towards those goals, occasionally taking the time to reevaluate the objectives but treating them as invariant in the mean time. -
I like Harari's economic insights but his insistence on forming an authoritative opinion on everything is starting to become a bit frustrating, particularly when he assigns excessive intent to the way the digital world works, showing that he has no idea about the absolute chaos that defines all but most controlled projects, and the lack of coordination that is actually a hallmark of IT; a good interface can be defended without referring to any of the actual clients that will interact with it.
Harari said of the idea of Data-ism:
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In its extreme form, proponents of the Dataist worldview perceive the entire universe as a flow of data, see organisms as little more than biochemical algorithms and believe that humanity’s cosmic vocation is to create an all-encompassing data-processing system — and then merge into it.
We are already becoming tiny chips inside a giant system that nobody really understands. Every day I absorb countless data bits through emails, phone calls and articles; process the data; and transmit back new bits through more emails, phone calls and articles. I don’t really know where I fit into the great scheme of things, and how my bits of data connect with the bits produced by billions of other humans and computers. I don’t have time to find out, because I am too busy answering emails.
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I was initially entertained by the punchline, but that was soon followed by the rather depressing realisation that my only value to greater society is essentially as a data processing unit
rant