Data that Matter: On Metaphors of Obfuscation, Thinking ‘the Digital’ as Material and Posthuman Cooperation with AI

This article argues that ‘the digital’ and ‘big data’ are metaphors of obfuscation, which are used to screen the real effects of technologies on lived experiences and the planet. Now that technology consumers are connected 24/7 to the Internet (or ‘Web’), their data can be gathered and monetized on a vast scale. The new data economies and AI technologies that have emerged as a result require careful evaluation regarding their effects on bodies, environments and new forms of knowledge. In this piece, I therefore lay out the material impacts of so-called digital phenomena: of data, their large-scale storage in the ‘Cloud’, and their use in training algorithms and emergent forms of artificial intelligence (AI). Building on scholarship by cultural theorists of technology including Donna Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Elena Esposito, as well as long-standing philosophies of metaphor and violence by Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx and Hannah Arendt, I make the case that thinking about new media and technology is more ethical where it is less metaphorical, and so more conscious of the entangled nature of technology with human and posthuman life, including AI. The resulting concept of data that matter is proposed with a view to more justice-oriented uses of data and machine cognition in the future.