Dec 15, 2011

I remember reading about the Singularity for the first time. It seemed an achievable – if not probable – dream (I was young) and I remember being excited about noticing the smallest of steps towards it.

One of those would be, I thought, the gradual quantification of everything that is subjective and ineffable. That would be the last conceptual barrier that machines would need to overcome before being able to contain us (because “understand” would be too romantic a term).

I remember being very excited about that prospect. An increasingly seamless translation of the subjective into the digital, turning “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to” into structured data. The ultimate XML. This somehow seemed ideal, friendly and open, and I saw no harm. I predicted a time when The Great Translation would be in its infancy, and that time is here.

If there's no button for it, it didn't happen.

With data mining as its background, the process now has a UI in Facebook’s new “Life event” button. Its subsections are a crudely generalised categorisation of everything that may matter in a person’s life. It is implicitly reductive, potentially insulting to one’s feeling of uniqueness. Fine, I thought, I can overcome that, the same way I push myself to get over the uncomfortable feeling that comes with every new interface.

But this was different. The data was me. Squeezing it into those categories felt very uncomfortable. As if Facebook were going for my Ineffable Parts (my proposed addition to the public and the private kind). The social version of Uncanny Valley.

For some reason, I didn’t feel like helping Facebook understand these things about me. I quickly sat down and asked myself why, panting in fear of being a closeted Luddite.

I found that privacy is not the issue. I’ve made the pact with publicness and agree with Jeff Jarvis’s point, for better or worse.

My problem is that Facebook’s Life Events feels like ancient technology. Because it is among the first visible steps towards the Great Quantification That is to Come, it feels antiquated from the start. Looking at it feels like looking back at it. Like a first generation gadget with revolutionary tech, that you know will be twice as good next year, and then the year after that. It feels ancient and ridiculous the moment you encounter it, because it contains a glimpse of its own extraordinary future. The Newton of next-generation social media.

Not a Luddite then, I concluded, but definitely not an early adopter. Being either too cautious or too lazy, I’m going to wait for data mining to catch up. I want Facebook (or the next corporate repository of human existence) to learn these things on its own, or from the brave front line of early adopters willing to teach it and do the parenting work. I want it to gather signals from places I’d never have thought of and understand things about me without my direct intervention (also, inevitably, without my consent).

All in all, I still welcome our robot overlords, but I just don’t have the patience to help see them through their infancy.