Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
would produce its value. Data cannot “spoil” because it is now speculatively, rather than
statistically, calculated.
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The name for the disciplinary and control practice of monitoring, aggregating, and
sorting data is
dataveillance
, named as such by Roger Clarke, who suggested nearly
twenty-five years ago that it was then “technically and economically superior” to the
two-way televisual media of George Orwell's fictional universe.
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It is such because
dataveillance operations do not require a centralized system, provided a set of different
databases are networked and provided that they share the same means of establishing
individual identification, so that a single unit (an individual or number) can be identified
consistently across a range of data sets with a primary key. Dataveillance is not new to
information technologies and certainly one could construct a genealogy of biopolitical
management that would include paper-based techniques such as the U.S. census. Indeed,
in an early commentary on the “electronic panopticon,” David Lyon suggests that the
difference made by information technologies is one of degree not kind, that they simply
“make more efficient, more widespread, and simultaneously less visible many processes
that already occur.”
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However, one could argue that there have been qualitative as well
as quantitative shifts in dataveillance practices in the last decade, or, more precisely, that
an intensification of quantitative differences allows for the articulation of qualitative
difference. Dataveillance in the present moment is not simply descriptive (monitoring)
but also predictive (conjecture) and prescriptive (enactment). To invoke Gilles Deleuze
on the emerging structures of continuous control and assessment, “the key thing is that
we're at the beginning of something new.”
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The question then becomes: what are the materially distinct features of the new
unified and dynamic dataveillance regime? Large-scale data-aggregating corporations
such as Acxiom and ChoicePoint and increasingly sophisticated tracking technologies
such as Flash cookies and beacons indicate a shift in scale, while the emergence of data
exchanges indicate a shift in the evaluation and “appreciation” of data itself.
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The linking
of databases, corporate actors, and institutions—as is made possible by corporate acqui-
sitions of DoubleClick (Google) and ChoicePoint (the parent company of Lexis-
Nexis)—radically changes the scope of a query, as would the realization of a vision of
data storage “ measured in petabytes. ”
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Speculation lurks here in the incalculable, the
size of data storage exceeding conventional metrics and simply open to an unknowable
future. Thus is it necessarily the case that data markets should be speculative, their units
of exchange not even stabilized as such, and driven by techniques of “predictive opti-
mization” that attempt to generate future value.
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