| |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="FirstEssay" |
|---|
Your profile defines your future. | | | The "smart" objects were supposed to make our lives easier, but they were rather designed to collect our behavior patterns. Free digital services are like free dinners, if you’re not on the table, you’re on the menu. Our travels, purchases, internet searches, our heart pace are examples of the data collected by our new tech-toys/behavioral trackers. | |
<
< | At the data collection stage, our behavioral data is a huge, incoherent, decontextualized mass of data. After collection, data must be processed. Algorithms will compute all the collected raw data and recognize behavioral patterns. Behavioral patterns are built on the basis of how you and other people having similar profiles behaved. Your behavioral patterns, all put together constituting your profile. | >
> | At the data collection stage, our behavioral data is a huge, incoherent, decontextualized mass of data. After collection, data must be processed. Algorithms will compute all the collected raw data and recognize behavioral patterns. Behavioral patterns are built on the basis of how you and other people having similar profiles behaved. Your behavioral patterns, all put together constitute your profile. | | | There are multiple applications of profiling: marketing, surveillance, city management, security, etc. They all learn about, predict and influence our behaviors. On the basis of an individual’s profile, continuously evolving over time as data comes in, his/her behaviors can be predicted, triggered, guided through incentives, personalized recommendations, suggestions, warnings or other stimuli. Such guiding has at least three undesirable consequences: (i) a new non-democratic normativity regime; (ii) a new conception of the human being; (iii) locking people into their profile.
| | | New non-democratic normativity regime
| |
<
< | As profiling is capable to influence people’s behaviors, it has normative power. Contrary to classic forms of norms, produced by law, politics and social control, profiling normativity does not ban or constraint, but rather makes the disobedience the norm unlikely. As pointed by researcher A. Rouvroy, it is a “relatively subliminal mode of government that consists of directing people’s attention towards certain things, in modifying the informational or physical environment so that behaviors are no longer obligatory but necessary.” (Link here) | >
> | As profiling is capable to influence people’s behaviors, it has normative power. Contrary to classic forms of norms, produced by law, politics and social control, profiling normativity does not ban or constraint, but rather makes the disobedience the norm unlikely. As pointed by researcher A. Rouvroy, it is a “relatively subliminal mode of government that consists of directing people’s attention towards certain things, in modifying the informational or physical environment so that behaviors are no longer obligatory but necessary.” (see here) | | | This new form of normativity is not conducted in the name of certain shared values, a philosophy or an ideology. It is the death of idealistic/value-based politics. Politics is all about transforming the state of affairs by means of ideas, projections, and imagination. The world of profiling is not aiming at transforming things by means of communist, capitalist, or any ideologically supported regime. At most, behavioral predictability could claim to govern society objectively and efficiently with the sole aim of optimizing social life as much as possible, without bothering to know whether the norm is fair, equitable or legitimate. In fact, it is a non-democratic regime of optimization of the existing state of affairs for the benefit certain actors, be it private actors serving their private monetary interests (as in Western liberal democracies) public actors serving social order (such as in China).
|
|