Your Data Is Diminishing Your Freedom

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Interview by David Marchese: “It’s no secret — even if it hasn’t yet been clearly or widely articulated — that our lives and our data are increasingly intertwined, almost indistinguishable. To be able to function in modern society is to submit to demands for ID numbers, for financial information, for filling out digital fields and drop-down boxes with our demographic details. Such submission, in all senses of the word, can push our lives in very particular and often troubling directions. It’s only recently, though, that I’ve seen someone try to work through the deeper implications of what happens when our data — and the formats it’s required to fit — become an inextricable part of our existence, like a new limb or organ to which we must adapt. ‘‘I don’t want to claim we are only data and nothing but data,’’ says Colin Koopman, chairman of the philosophy department at the University of Oregon and the author of ‘‘How We Became Our Data.’’ ‘‘My claim is you are your data, too.’’ Which at the very least means we should be thinking about this transformation beyond the most obvious data-security concerns. ‘‘We’re strikingly lackadaisical,’’ says Koopman, who is working on a follow-up book, tentatively titled ‘‘Data Equals,’’ ‘‘about how much attention we give to: What are these data showing? What assumptions are built into configuring data in a given way? What inequalities are baked into these data systems? We need to be doing more work on this.’’

Can you explain more what it means to say that we have become our data? Because a natural reaction to that might be, well, no, I’m my mind, I’m my body, I’m not numbers in a database — even if I understand that those numbers in that database have real bearing on my life. The claim that we are data can also be taken as a claim that we live our lives through our data in addition to living our lives through our bodies, through our minds, through whatever else. I like to take a historical perspective on this. If you wind the clock back a couple hundred years or go to certain communities, the pushback wouldn’t be, ‘‘I’m my body,’’ the pushback would be, ‘‘I’m my soul.’’ We have these evolving perceptions of our self. I don’t want to deny anybody that, yeah, you are your soul. My claim is that your data has become something that is increasingly inescapable and certainly inescapable in the sense of being obligatory for your average person living out their life. There’s so much of our lives that are woven through or made possible by various data points that we accumulate around ourselves — and that’s interesting and concerning. It now becomes possible to say: ‘‘These data points are essential to who I am. I need to tend to them, and I feel overwhelmed by them. I feel like it’s being manipulated beyond my control.’’ A lot of people have that relationship to their credit score, for example. It’s both very important to them and very mysterious…(More)”.

Exploring data journalism practices in Africa: data politics, media ecosystems and newsroom infrastructures

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Sarah Chiumbu and Allen Munoriyarwa: “Extant research on data journalism in Africa has focused on newsroom factors and the predilections of individual journalists as determinants of the uptake of data journalism on the continent. This article diverts from this literature by examining the slow uptake of data journalism in sub- Saharan Africa through the prisms of non-newsroom factors. Drawing on in-depth interviews with prominent investigative journalists sampled from several African countries, we argue that to understand the slow uptake of data journalism on the continent; there is a need to critique the role of data politics, which encompasses state, market and existing media ecosystems across the continent. Therefore, it is necessary to move beyond newsroom-centric factors that have dominated the contemporary understanding of data journalism practices. A broader, non-newsroom conceptualisation beyond individual journalistic predilections and newsroom resources provides productive clarity on data journalism’s slow uptake on the continent. These arguments are made through the conceptual prisms of materiality, performativity and reflexivity…(More)”.

Mapping Diversity

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

About: “Mapping Diversity is a platform for discovering key facts about diversity and representation in street names across Europe, and to spark a debate about who is missing from our urban spaces.

We looked at the names of 145,933 streets across 30 major European cities, located in 17 different countries. More than 90% of the streets named after individuals are dedicated to white men. Where did all the other inhabitants of Europe end up? The lack of diversity in toponymy speaks volumes about our past and contributes to shaping Europe’s present and future…(More)”.

Ten (not so) simple rules for clinical trial data-sharing

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Claude Pellen et al: “Clinical trial data-sharing is seen as an imperative for research integrity and is becoming increasingly encouraged or even required by funders, journals, and other stakeholders. However, early experiences with data-sharing have been disappointing because they are not always conducted properly. Health data is indeed sensitive and not always easy to share in a responsible way. We propose 10 rules for researchers wishing to share their data. These rules cover the majority of elements to be considered in order to start the commendable process of clinical trial data-sharing:

  • Rule 1: Abide by local legal and regulatory data protection requirements
  • Rule 2: Anticipate the possibility of clinical trial data-sharing before obtaining funding
  • Rule 3: Declare your intent to share data in the registration step
  • Rule 4: Involve research participants
  • Rule 5: Determine the method of data access
  • Rule 6: Remember there are several other elements to share
  • Rule 7: Do not proceed alone
  • Rule 8: Deploy optimal data management to ensure that the data shared is useful
  • Rule 9: Minimize risks
  • Rule 10: Strive for excellence…(More)”

Decidim: why digital tools for democracy need to be developed democratically

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Adrian Smith and Pedro Prieto Martín: “On Wednesday 18 January 2023, a pan-European citizen jury voted Barcelona the first European Capital of Democracy. Barcelona has a rich history of official and citizen initiatives in political and economic democracy. One received a special mention from the jurors. That initiative is Decidim.

Decidim is a digital platform for citizen participation. Through it, citizens can propose, comment, debate, and vote on urban developments, decide how to spend city budgets, and design and contribute to local strategies and plans.

Launched in 2016, more than 400 organisations around the world have since used the platform. What makes Decidim stand out, according to our research, is developer commitment to democratising technology development itself and embedding it within struggles for democracy offline and online. Decidim holds important lessons at a time when the monopolisation of social media by corporate power presents democrats with so many challenges…(More)”.

The Sensitive Politics Of Information For Digital States

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Federica Carugati, Cyanne E. Loyle and Jessica Steinberg: “In 2020, Vice revealed that the U.S. military had signed a contract with Babel Street, a Virginia-based company that created a product called Locate X, which collects location data from users across a variety of digital applications. Some of these apps are seemingly innocuous: one for following storms, a Muslim dating app and a level for DIY home repair. Less innocuously, these reports indicate that the U.S. government is outsourcing some of its counterterrorism and counterinsurgency information-gathering activities to a private company.

While states have always collected information about citizens and their activities, advances in digital technologies — including new kinds of data and infrastructure — have fundamentally altered their ability to access, gather and analyze information. Bargaining with and relying on non-state actors like private companies creates tradeoffs between a state’s effectiveness and legitimacy. Those tradeoffs might be unacceptable to citizens, undermining our very understanding of what states do and how we should interact with them …(More)”

Machine Learning as a Tool for Hypothesis Generation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Jens Ludwig & Sendhil Mullainathan: “While hypothesis testing is a highly formalized activity, hypothesis generation remains largely informal. We propose a systematic procedure to generate novel hypotheses about human behavior, which uses the capacity of machine learning algorithms to notice patterns people might not. We illustrate the procedure with a concrete application: judge decisions about who to jail. We begin with a striking fact: The defendant’s face alone matters greatly for the judge’s jailing decision. In fact, an algorithm given only the pixels in the defendant’s mugshot accounts for up to half of the predictable variation. We develop a procedure that allows human subjects to interact with this black-box algorithm to produce hypotheses about what in the face influences judge decisions. The procedure generates hypotheses that are both interpretable and novel: They are not explained by demographics (e.g. race) or existing psychology research; nor are they already known (even if tacitly) to people or even experts. Though these results are specific, our procedure is general. It provides a way to produce novel, interpretable hypotheses from any high-dimensional dataset (e.g. cell phones, satellites, online behavior, news headlines, corporate filings, and high-frequency time series). A central tenet of our paper is that hypothesis generation is in and of itself a valuable activity, and hope this encourages future work in this largely “pre-scientific” stage of science…(More)”.

Whole of government innovation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Geoff Mulgan: ‘Whole of government’ approaches – that aim to mobilise and align many ministries and agencies around a common challenge – have a long history. There have been notable examples during major wars, and around attempts to digitize societies, to cut energy use and to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.

This paper has been prepared as part of a European Commission programme which I’m chairing looking at ‘whole of government innovation’ and working with national governments to help them better align their actions.

My paper – linked below – looks at the lessons of history. It outlines the many tools governments can use to achieve cross-cutting goals, linking R&D to law, regulation and procurement, and collaborating with business, universities and civil society. It argues that it is unwise to rely only on committees and boards. It shows how these choices link to innovation strategy and funding, including the relevance of half a century of experiment with moon-shots and missions.

The paper describes how the organisational challenges vary depending on the nature of the task; why governments need to avoid common technology or ‘STI trap’, of focusing only on hardware and not on social arrangements or business models; why constellations and flotillas of coordination are usually more realistic than true ‘whole of government approaches; the importance of mobilising hearts and minds as well as money and command.

Finally, it addresses the relevance of different approaches to current tasks such as the achievement of a net zero economy and society. The paper is shared as a working document – I’m keen to find new examples and approaches…(More)”.

Collaborative Advantage: Creating Global Commons for Science, Technology, and Innovation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Leonard Lynn and Hal Salzman: “…We argue that abandoning this techno-nationalist approach and instead investing in systems of global innovation commons, modeled on successful past experiences, and developing new principles and policies for collaborative STI could bring substantially greater benefits—not only for the world, but specifically for the United States. Key to this effort will be creating systems of governance that enable nations to contribute to the commons and to benefit from its innovations, while also allowing each country substantial freedom of action…

The competitive and insular tone of contemporary discourse about STI stands in contrast to our era’s most urgent challenges, which are global in scale: the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, and governance of complex emerging technologies such as gene editing and artificial intelligence. These global challenges, we believe, require resources, scientific understanding, and know-how that can best be developed through common resource pools to enable both global scale and rapid dissemination. Moreover, aside from moral or ethical considerations about sharing such innovations, the reality of current globalization means that solutions—such as pandemic vaccines—must spread beyond national borders to fully benefit the world. Consequently, each separate national interest will be better served by collaboratively building up the global stocks of STI as public goods. Global scientific commons could be vital in addressing these challenges, but will require new frameworks for governance that are fair and attractive to many nations while also enabling them to act individually.

A valuable perspective on the governance of common pool resources (CPR) can be found in the work that Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom did with her colleagues beginning in the 1950s. Ostrom, a political scientist, studied how communities that must share common resources—water, fisheries, or grazing land—use trust, cooperation, and collective deliberation to manage those resources over the long term. Before Ostrom’s work, many economists believed that shared resource systems were inherently unsustainable because individuals acting in their own self-interest would ultimately undermine the good of the group, often described as “the tragedy of the commons.” Instead, Ostrom demonstrated that communities can create durable “practical algorithms” for sharing pooled resources, whether that be irrigation in Nepal or lobster fishing in Maine…(More)”.

Citizen Z: Strengthening the participation of young citizens in democratic and civic life

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog of the European Commission: “Contemporary political attitudes are characterized by significant political indifference, disengagement from public life, and a decline in political participation, especially among young people, whose level of interest in politics is steadily declining in almost all EU countries. The ‘Citizen Z’ project, which started in November 2022, applies deliberative methods, to both stimulate interest in civic and political life among young people aged 15 to 25 and to involve them in the decision-making process. Special attention is devoted to the intersectionality principle and those groups that are often affected by low levels of participation: migrants, disadvantaged communities, girls and women.

The ‘Citizen Z’ project aims to respond to the European Commission priorities outlined in the European Democracy Action Plan and the EU Citizenship Report 2020 by enhancing civic engagement and democratic participation of EU citizens, particularly youth aged 15 to 25.

The project is also in line with the position supported by the European Committee of the Regions, which in 2019 encouraged a ‘cultural change’ towards experimenting with deliberative democracy tools as developed at the local level (European Committee of the Regions, Putting citizens at the Centre of the EU agenda), as the most authentic democratic participation originates in the context closest to the citizen…(More)”.