Big Data and Cloud Culture - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 196

resembling evidence to support their contention, they plow forward: “By
letting us identify a really good proxy for a phenomenon, correlations help
us to capture the present and predict the future” (ibid., 53-54). What
could be more mythical and sublime, more evidence of the conjurer's art,
than the magic wand of correlation? Only this magic delivers more than
rabbits from hats. It can tell us what is and what will be.
Because myths matter, it is important to provide some critical relec-
tion on these claims. But it is also essential to understand the limits of
any such critique, however telling. The cloud and big data are more
than technical developments because their emergence has inspired a new
mythology that puts a fresh face on the digital sublime, which, at the end
of the last century, promised to end history, annihilate geography, and
transform politics. Like all myths, they are full of magical conjurers who
offer revolutionary transformations and happy endings that bid good-bye
to the temporal, spatial, and social constraints that make up the banalities
of everyday life and welcome a new world in the cloud. We can now know
the past, represent the present, and predict the future like never before,
with little of this contaminated by lawed human decision making. The
data will speak for themselves or through data-science magicians. Like
all myths, they cannot be fully judged based on their claims of truth, but
rather, as the philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre (1970) concluded, only on
whether they are living or dead. Myths live on if they continue to make
life meaningful and if they continue to make socially and intellectually
tolerable what otherwise might be experienced as painful and incoherent.
Myths do not disappear when they are falsiied—consider their persistence
after the dot-com bust and the inancial crash—as long they continue to
energize people and feed their hopes and dreams. The cloud and big data
do so by promising an endless supply of accessible information that will
be used to solve the problems that aflict the world and make it possible
to enjoy forms of perfection that have heretofore been little more than
the stuff of dreams.
Big Data: A Critique of Digital Positivism
Big data gives priority to quantitative over qualitative data, arguing that
the former provides the best opportunity for meaningful generalizations