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There Are No Facts: Attentive Algorithms, Extractive Data Practices, and the Quantification of Everyday Life
The entanglements of people and data, code and space, knowledge and power: how data and algorithms shape the world--and shape us within that world.
With the emergence of a post-truth world, we have witnessed the dissolution of the common ground on which truth claims were negotiated, individual agency enacted, and public spheres shaped. What happens when, as Nietzsche claimed, there are no facts, but only interpretations? In this book, Mark Shepard examines the entanglements of people and data, code and space, knowledge and power that have produced an uncommon ground--a disaggregated public sphere where the extraction of behavioral data and their subsequent processing and sale have led to the emergence of micropublics of ever-finer granularity.
Shepard explores how these new post-truth territories are propagated through machine learning systems and social networks, which shape the public and private spaces of everyday life. He traces the balkanization and proliferation of online news and the targeted distribution of carefully crafted information through social media. He examines post-truth practices, showing how truth claims are embedded in techniques by which the world is observed, recorded, documented, and measured. Finally, he shows how these practices play out, at scales from the translocality of the home to the planetary reach of the COVID-19 pandemic--with stops along the way at an urban minimarket, an upscale neighborhood for the one percent, a Toronto waterfront district, and a national election.
With the emergence of a post-truth world, we have witnessed the dissolution of the common ground on which truth claims were negotiated, individual agency enacted, and public spheres shaped. What happens when, as Nietzsche claimed, there are no facts, but only interpretations? In this book, Mark Shepard examines the entanglements of people and data, code and space, knowledge and power that have produced an uncommon ground--a disaggregated public sphere where the extraction of behavioral data and their subsequent processing and sale have led to the emergence of micropublics of ever-finer granularity.
Shepard explores how these new post-truth territories are propagated through machine learning systems and social networks, which shape the public and private spaces of everyday life. He traces the balkanization and proliferation of online news and the targeted distribution of carefully crafted information through social media. He examines post-truth practices, showing how truth claims are embedded in techniques by which the world is observed, recorded, documented, and measured. Finally, he shows how these practices play out, at scales from the translocality of the home to the planetary reach of the COVID-19 pandemic--with stops along the way at an urban minimarket, an upscale neighborhood for the one percent, a Toronto waterfront district, and a national election.
280 pages, Hardcover
Published November 22, 2022
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58 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
February 23, 2023
A part of me enjoyed this book and its exploration of how data is collected, presented, and manipulated to construct reality, any reality. However, another part of me felt that there was too much material without enough of an engaging narrative. The topics covered in the book are essential to read about, especially in our day and age, but ultimately, I was left wanting more.
While I may not have thought this book a page-turner, I’d recommend reading it to learn more about how companies and governments use data. One idea that has stuck with me is thinking of smart devices and social media as instruments that companies and governments use to place themselves into the daily lives of ordinary citizens – not just in public spaces but also in their private homes. There is a lot to explore there, and the book covers a lot of great examples.
While I may not have thought this book a page-turner, I’d recommend reading it to learn more about how companies and governments use data. One idea that has stuck with me is thinking of smart devices and social media as instruments that companies and governments use to place themselves into the daily lives of ordinary citizens – not just in public spaces but also in their private homes. There is a lot to explore there, and the book covers a lot of great examples.
February 21, 2024
We are all struggling with the reconfiguration of social space from a realm that was mainly physical, geographical, and tangible to one that is a hybrid not only incorporating the virtual spaces of the internet but also transforming actual space through the pervasive embedding of digital technology into homes, public buildings, and shared urban spaces. This is the crisis – I would name it a crisis – that Mark Shepard calls out in his recent book, There Are No Facts: Attentive Algorithms, Extractive Data Practices, and the Quantification of Everyday Life (2022, Cambridge: MIT).
This is serious scholarship of breadth and depth only suggested in the sub-title of the book. Shepard brings together description and analysis of a range of new technologies and practices that threaten to destroy both the public space and common knowledge in which democratic life is anchored. This includes the algorithms that shape the content of our internet feeds, appropriation of on-line data to micro-target citizens with politically strategic disinformation, and propagation of retail environments saturated with surveillance equipment to track and shape consumer behavior and preferences as well as to automate your check-out.
We are quickly becoming accustomed to the eerie feeling that our phones, social media apps, smart speakers, and maybe the very walls we inhabit are watching and listening. This seems benign enough when Facebook sends an ad for a brand of shoes we might like to buy or a friend of a friend we might like to know. But when these technologies are ubiquitous the question of who is collecting this information and how they might use it is impossible to escape. AI is everywhere, it seems, and implicated in major recent events such as the global pandemic and the January 6 insurrection.
It is interesting to note that the author’s background is in both digital technology and architecture. Since the late 1960s, computers have been an important part of architectural practice, first as a tool to draw what was previously produced by hand, then as a mechanism to design and fabricate a new generation of customized buildings, but now in Shepard’s scope, as a component deployed in the structures as much as steel, dry-wall, plumbing, and light fixtures. The problem is that pervasive digital technology in the built environment requires a whole different approach to understanding the character of social life in cities. Computers condition the quality of information – and ultimately truth – in a way far more profound than HVAC systems condition the air.
This is a rigorous piece of scholarly work and deadly serious. At the same time, it is perfectly accessible and extraordinarily current. That can’t always be said about academic books. Indeed, sometimes the reader will feel like they are learning about the future. And if Shepard does much more to specify the challenge to truth and democracy than to frame a response, this work can be appreciated for taking us at least that far.
This is serious scholarship of breadth and depth only suggested in the sub-title of the book. Shepard brings together description and analysis of a range of new technologies and practices that threaten to destroy both the public space and common knowledge in which democratic life is anchored. This includes the algorithms that shape the content of our internet feeds, appropriation of on-line data to micro-target citizens with politically strategic disinformation, and propagation of retail environments saturated with surveillance equipment to track and shape consumer behavior and preferences as well as to automate your check-out.
We are quickly becoming accustomed to the eerie feeling that our phones, social media apps, smart speakers, and maybe the very walls we inhabit are watching and listening. This seems benign enough when Facebook sends an ad for a brand of shoes we might like to buy or a friend of a friend we might like to know. But when these technologies are ubiquitous the question of who is collecting this information and how they might use it is impossible to escape. AI is everywhere, it seems, and implicated in major recent events such as the global pandemic and the January 6 insurrection.
It is interesting to note that the author’s background is in both digital technology and architecture. Since the late 1960s, computers have been an important part of architectural practice, first as a tool to draw what was previously produced by hand, then as a mechanism to design and fabricate a new generation of customized buildings, but now in Shepard’s scope, as a component deployed in the structures as much as steel, dry-wall, plumbing, and light fixtures. The problem is that pervasive digital technology in the built environment requires a whole different approach to understanding the character of social life in cities. Computers condition the quality of information – and ultimately truth – in a way far more profound than HVAC systems condition the air.
This is a rigorous piece of scholarly work and deadly serious. At the same time, it is perfectly accessible and extraordinarily current. That can’t always be said about academic books. Indeed, sometimes the reader will feel like they are learning about the future. And if Shepard does much more to specify the challenge to truth and democracy than to frame a response, this work can be appreciated for taking us at least that far.
February 16, 2023
Philosophically, “if everything is blue, then blue doesn’t exist.” The same can be said about fact: “ If everything is a fact, albeit alternative fact, then Facts do not exist.”
This is the premise of Mark Shepard, author to THERE ARE NO FACTS. However, Shepard introduces a multitude of research based instances where facts are skewed, strewed, and abused in historical instances in order to gain power, money, and prestige. Beginning with the practice of fact finding, the art of presentation, and the
usage for exploitation, Shepard presents a thought provoking glimpse into the world of data mining, which will lead the reader to question the ethics and practices of both the political and corporate world. Four cups of Authentic-I-TEA with a slice of
Ritz cracker apple pie., smothered in DreamWhip.
This is the premise of Mark Shepard, author to THERE ARE NO FACTS. However, Shepard introduces a multitude of research based instances where facts are skewed, strewed, and abused in historical instances in order to gain power, money, and prestige. Beginning with the practice of fact finding, the art of presentation, and the
usage for exploitation, Shepard presents a thought provoking glimpse into the world of data mining, which will lead the reader to question the ethics and practices of both the political and corporate world. Four cups of Authentic-I-TEA with a slice of
Ritz cracker apple pie., smothered in DreamWhip.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews