The Modern Babel
We have inherited from religions and philosophies the idea that humans confess to be purified. Here, however, confession is stored, indexed, measured, and sold. When we log into Facebook, the first thing we see is a gray message on the wall asking us: “What’s on your mind?”. I have pondered this phrase for a long time, for in my view, it is not an innocent question but an invitation to confess. It is as if the screen has become a modern confessional, and the server receiving our answers a priest who neither forgets, forgives, nor remains silent. The question that imposes itself here is: where does all this confession go? The answer leads us to gray, virtually windowless buildings, situated in the suburbs of cities, in cold deserts, and on riverbanks. No one enters them, and people do not know what goes on inside; yet, everything we write, buy, search for, and fear passes through them. These are data centers, the physical embodiment of what I called in one of my studies the “electronic body” of data.
One might argue that discussions of economic power begin with factories, ports, and oil wells, not with silent buildings. But I believe this is exactly what has changed. It is often said that data is the “new oil,” a comparison I find tempting yet misleading. Oil is extracted from beneath the earth and perishes upon consumption, and it is owned by whoever owns the land. Data, on the other hand, is not extracted but produced, and it is produced by humans simply by living. It does not perish with use; rather, its value increases the more it intersects with other data. The most crucial difference is that oil does not know its buyer, whereas data knows us one by one. Therefore, I prefer to liken it to a field that plows itself, voluntarily cultivated by its owners, with data centers acting as the mills that turn its harvest into wealth.
I find that this economic ascent is explained by three arguments. First, power has shifted from the monopoly of content to the monopoly of infrastructure. In the gold rush, those who sold pickaxes profited more than those who dug the mines; today, storage and computing capabilities are concentrated in the hands of a few giant corporations, to the extent that a vast portion of the digital economy — from small shops to hospitals and even states — operates on servers they do not own. This resembles a city’s reliance on the electricity company; no one has the option to opt out, because opting out means exiting the market itself. The second argument is that value accumulates through network logic. The more data a center holds, the more the algorithms feeding on it improve, attracting more users who produce even more data, thus widening the gap between those who own and those who do not at an accelerating pace. Let us not forget what we said earlier: big data is the fuel for machine learning. The machine only learns from abundance, and abundance dwells where the servers are. The third argument is that investment itself has shifted its destination. Major corporations today spend hundreds of billions building these centers, and countries compete to host them in pursuit of cheap energy, cold climates, and flexible laws. Electricity, water, and desert lands have become the raw materials for an industry that produces nothing tangible save the capacity to predict. Here we touch upon the shift I mentioned regarding the economy, where the focus transitions from explaining causes to predicting events, and whoever owns the prediction owns the market.
But I do not wish to dwell on this aspect; economists can articulate it better than I can. What occupies me is the question they ignore: what is the fundamental nature of the thing this economy trades? It is neither a commodity nor a service in the conventional sense; rather, it is us, or more precisely, our traces. From here, I transition to a question I believe has not been sufficiently posed: what is the fate of forgetting in a world that never forgets? Nietzsche wrote that forgetting is not an incapacity but a power, and that a healthy life requires a degree of darkness, for a person who remembers everything cannot change, as his past remains present forever. Data centers are the first institution in history to possess a complete memory of millions of human beings simultaneously. So, who holds the right to be forgotten? And can a human being start anew if their digital shadow precedes them to every door?
I pause at this shadow itself. When algorithms harvest our clicks, our movements, our hesitations, and the moments we linger on a certain image, they construct a version of us. This version is not us, yet it is the one that is evaluated, categorized, and upon which decisions are made: the loan, the job, the advertisement, and sometimes, justice. That is to say, there is a “second I” living in the servers, making decisions about the “first I” without consulting it. Which of us, then, is the original, and which is the copy? And if the copy is more accurate in predicting my behavior than I am in knowing myself, who is more deserving of the title of the “Self”?
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From these questions branch out others concerning the relationship between the corporation and the individual following this revolution. The first: are we customers, raw material, or laborers? In the classical economy, the laborer sells his labor power and receives a wage, while the customer buys a product and pays its price. In the data economy, however, the user works without realizing it, for every click enriches the machine, and he is then given his wage in the form of a “free service.” He is also the raw material because his behavior is what is processed, and he is the product sold to advertisers in the form of attention. He is capital, laborer, and commodity all in one body. What does it mean for an individual to encapsulate what Marx divided among the classes? And can one speak of exploitation when everyone seems satisfied?
The second question pertains to the value of consent. We have seen how terms of use can reach twenty pages, while the user merely wants to communicate with his family and friends. This very question was posed to Mark Zuckerberg before Congress after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and we witnessed the same with WhatsApp when it imposed new clauses and curtailed the privileges of those who did not agree. Can this be called a “contract” in the philosophical sense, meaning an agreement between two free, equal wills? Or is it closer to a ritual everyone performs to enter the city, like someone passing beneath an archway whose symbols they do not understand? And when we remember that the corporation can amend the terms whenever it pleases while the individual can amend nothing, we realize that the scale is not merely imbalanced, but that one of its pans is entirely invisible.
The third question is what worries me most: are we witnessing the birth of a new feudalism? In the Middle Ages, the peasant worked land he did not own and paid its lord from his harvest in exchange for protection. Today, we work on platforms we do not own and pay their masters with our data in exchange for a service. The new land is called the “platform,” and the new lord needs no castles; a data center is enough for him. But the peasant of old knew his lord and saw his castle; we, however, see no castle and do not know the borders of the land. Is the most dangerous kind of power, then, the one that does not appear?
Sometimes, I imagine a massive data center as an updated version of the “Library of Babel” envisioned by Borges — a library containing all possible books, where the reader finds nothing because everything is present. Big data carries the exact same peril, for meaning is not born from abundance, but from the question. I have said before that data without a human mediator is mere binary code of no value; who, then, bestows meaning? If we delegate this to algorithms alone, we hand the key of interpretation to that which knows no bewilderment.
Here comes the role of the philosopher and the artist, not as external critics, but as the last ones possessing the luxury of wonder. The machine answers what it is asked, but questions do not astonish it. I fear that the greatest thing we might lose in this revolution is not privacy alone, but the capacity to ask questions that serve no purpose and cannot be transformed into data.
Nevertheless, data centers remain an astonishing human achievement, and I call neither for their demolition nor for their glorification. I only urge that we see them as they are: institutions that possess our memory, forge wealth from it, and reshape the meaning of the individual, property, and freedom. I leave a final question to which I have no answer: in a world where everything is measured, does humanity retain a right to be mysterious, meaning a part of it remains outside the calculus? Perhaps this mystery, not absolute transparency, is the last thing that distinguishes a free being from a mere datum.
by: Sarah Belmadani
