The infrastructure being built by Silicon Valley is unlike the dystopian twentieth-century fantasises of the surveillance state, with oppressive secret police. Similarly, it is unlike statistical techniques of census, polling or surveys, which require specialists to go out into society and ask questions, potentially inconveniencing respondents in the process. The difference is this: we welcome digital surveillance into our lives, because it promises to bring our personal lives under control. It allows us to issue orders: 'we need more kitchen cleaner!', 'send me a driver!', 'tell me the weather forecast!' It is a bleak reflection on human psychology that we accepted the growing global dominance of Uber and the rest, mainly because they offer us the chance to exercise small acts of dominance ourselves, over taxi drivers, information and material goods.
Everything we do is leaving an impression. That impression is data. But data of this sort isn't quite the same thing as knowledge or facts. It is closer to the footprints that are left on a beach: evidence of some past physical activity. In the case of Silicon Valley's tech giants, the beach in question is open to the public, but privately owned and run, granting its owners exclusive rights to analyse the prints in the sand. In the utopia of Zuckerberg et al., every thought or emotion that passes through our minds will leave an impression, opening up the recesses of human psychology to inspection on a vast scale. Critics of Silicon Valley occasionally argue that data should really belong to the user, given that we produced it (as if ordering an Uber were like writing a poem). But if the beach analogy is correct, would it really make sense to say that my footprints are mine, especially if the sand itself was not? This is the crux of the problem. Unlike statisticians or social scientists, Silicon Valley is not seeking to create an accurate portrait of society, but to provide the infrastructure on which we all depend, which will then capture our movements and sentiments with the utmost sensitivity.
