Dataism and Capitalism (I): Tracing the Connection HiA Network

share with your friends

Email X LinkedIn Facebook Telegram WhatsApp SMS

First published on 26 April 2024 – on The AfroDiscourse Substack

In the economic sphere, dataism is but the technological extension of capitalism, which is, essentially, institutionalized avarice.

(reading time: about 13 minutes)

Dataism: A Reduction of Truth to Quantities

Entering a matatu in Nairobi is a somewhat risky business. Young or old, with or without child, as soon as both your feet (and what really matters: your money-laden pockets) are planted on the bare and rusted floor of the vehicle, it jolts forward. Though not without some exaggeration, you could say that people are transported in a manner even less personal than the transport of animals. When transporting animals, we don’t count pockets, but “heads” of cattle, for instance. True, there is a degree of trust that the conductor and the driver place in the passengers to successfully keep their balance and wind their way to a seat in the rattling vehicle, similar to what we might charitably call the “blind trust” some of them seem to place in pedestrians and other road-users to intuit the intent behind their haphazard movements and get out of the way. But the line between “trust” and appalling indifference to persons in such cases is often imaginary. It frequently seems that passengers are reduced to their fare, and pedestrians and other drivers become mere obstacles to achieving maximum speed, a maximum number of trips per day, and a maximum daily income. And the passengers are not guiltless either. I ask you what I sometimes ask myself: How many times have you been in a matatu that is shamelessly overlapping and felt a surge of delight at how much sooner you’ll get where you’re going?

This reductive view of the person, unfortunately common in commercial contexts, is intensified by the dataist mindset, which Yuval Noah Harari describes as follows: “Dataism declares that the universe consists of data flows, and the value of any phenomenon or entity is determined by its contribution to data processing.” In short, dataism tends to reduce the world and everything (and everyone) in it to data points. It tends to reduce all truth to empty representation, to simulacrum. Moreover, it tends to reduce the world to measurable and processible (i.e., manipulable) quantities. For example, people are reduced to IP addresses, the number of clicks on a link, or the vectors of cursors on a webpage. More radically, their bodies themselves are reduced to information. In an incisive genealogy of dataism, the philosopher Marco Stango quotes the following words written by James Gleick in 2011:

“Information theory began as a bridge from mathematics to electrical engineering and from there to computing…. Now even biology has become an information science, a subject of messages, instructions, and code. Genes encapsulate information and enable procedures for reading it in and writing it out…. The body itself is just an information processor. Memory resides not just in brains but in every cell…. “What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire, not a warm breath, not a ‘spark of life’,” declares the evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins. ‘It is information, words, instructions…. If you want to understand life, don’t think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology.’”

This reduction of truth to measurable quantity is not without motive.

Why Dataism?

In Aristotelian and Thomistic terms, truth is the conformity of the mind to reality, and not in an imitative way, but rather in a connatural way. To understand what this means, it is helpful to revisit the notion of “essences” or “universals,” a notion that is by no means as esoteric as it might sound. Indeed, at least every noun, verb, adjective, and adverb that we utter presupposes the notion. In our words, we can discern the distinction between particulars and universals—between this tree and trees in general, between that man and men in general (just yesterday, for instance, a colleague of mine said, half-joking, “Men are liars.” Another colleague, a man, made the rejoinder: “I can accept that about him (and he pointed to the man on my left), but all men?”). Now, universal concepts do not refer directly to particulars, with all their quirks and peculiarities. The concept “tree” does not refer to that tree with the purple flowers and the gnarled bark and the crudely scrawled words, “Jamo was here”. It refers, instead, to something that all trees have in common simply by the fact of being trees. In fact, it refers to the “treeness” of a tree,¹ or the “humanity” of a man—the essence of the tree or the man. This essence transcends all the individual features of any particular tree or man—including the matter, the material, the stuff, that makes them be individual.² The essence is not made of matter. It is immaterial. And yet, because we see it in particulars, it is real! Moreover, in the same way that to know the sensible features of things is to contain them, in a sense, within ourselves (the “particles” that correspond to the sense of smell, the light that they reflect because of their nature, etc.), to know their immaterial essence is to contain it within ourselves. We become what we know insofar as we receive it within ourselves. Our minds truly touch the being of things, and are conformed to their essences—again, not in an imitative way, but in the sense that the essences of things mold our minds in their shape, so to speak.

The reduction of truth understood in this way to mere measurable quantity ends up reducing knowledge from the profound encounter described above to an imitative containment of representative symbols. We no longer know things; we only know things about things. And while the final step of knowing truth is that the mind rests in what it knows, that the mind contemplates reality, the final step of the knowledge of measurable quantity abstracted from truth is a nothingness in which the mind cannot rest, a nothingness which the mind must attempt to fill with its own emptiness—in short, a blank slate for the mind to manipulate for its own purposes. Here is the motive of the dataist mindset.³ The dataist mindset does not discover the purpose of man in the world without, but attempts to impose its own purpose on the world. What is primary in the dataist mindset is not objects of desire of objects of love, but desire itself. The dataist mindset tends to reduce the world to quantities for manipulation.

Admittedly, in an African context, the scientific dimension of dataism described by James Gleick is rarely encountered—and this fact tends to modify the manifestations of other dimensions of dataism.⁴ What we do encounter, however, is its economic dimension—and increasingly so. For better or worse (probably both), there are powerful incentives to amplify the integration of artificial intelligence into all kinds of activities on the continent, including, for example, an estimated $136 billion worth of benefits by 2030 for Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and South Africa if businesses in these four countries begin using more AI tools. If the design and purpose of digital technologies is informed by a dataist mindset (as they often seem to be),⁵ then the closer digital technologies get to ubiquity, the more dataism becomes the prevailing worldview, simply because we will interact with the world and with each other predominantly in a dataist manner.

Dataism in the African Context: Capitalism

Now, the economic dimension of dataism reveals that, in the economic sphere, dataism is but the technological extension of capitalism, which is, essentially, institutionalized avarice. For, in its design, capitalism an economic system that gives primacy not to wealth, but to its accumulation; and avarice consists in a desire not for good things, but a desire for money, because money represents the potential of having all things. D.C. Schindler makes an even more radical claim : there is something about “the nature, the inner logic, of money, that inclines it to usurp the divine throne….”

After reading such sweeping claims, you might be scoffing in disbelief, if not ridicule, contempt, and barely-restrained anger. A common retort to the claims made so far: “Spend a week without money, and I’ll be the first to believe everything you say.” But this retort misses the point. The point is not that money should be abolished, but that the desire for money should never occupy a primary place, and that something about the nature of money and our own nature tends to shunt money upwards in our hierarchy of values. The point is not that there are no just people or economic transactions in a capitalist economy, but rather that the inner logic of a capitalist economy places the desire for money at the apex, and that people in a capitalist economy have to fight harder against the avarice that the institutions of capitalism encourage.

“But,” you might add, “isn’t capitalism responsible for undeniable progress? Isn’t capitalism responsible for the drastic and unprecedented reduction of poverty in the past five decades? Isn’t capitalism responsible for the computer you yourself use to read about capitalism and to write this article denouncing it? And let’s not mention the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the house you live in, the transport system that gets you from home to work….” Again, these objections miss the point. The point is not that capitalism does not lead to economic growth, loosely speaking. After all, if the accumulation of things is primary, it seems inescapable that more things will be produced. The point is, rather, that in a system where the accumulation of things is primary, then it is the logic of accumulation that will tend to define the nature and purposes of the things produced, and the purposes to which they are put—and these purposes will be problematic in a manner similar to the dataist reduction of truth to mere measurable quantity.

The most economically “successful”⁶ products of a capitalist economy will tend to be animated by the inner logic of subordinating people and the world, all reality, to the accumulation of wealth—and truly beneficial outcomes achieved through those products will tend to be achieved despite those products’ inner logic. For instance, genuine connections will be made through social media platforms despite their addictive and divisive design; profound education, in which the student discovers in the teacher a guide in and into the journey of life, will occur despite the model of the educational institution being one of conveying abstract information about things (and especially about how to manipulate things and people—i.e., skills; the potential for education rather than education itself)⁷ for a fee; justice will be achieved by lawyers despite the high incentive to place a premium not on justice, but on securing maximum benefits for one’s clients; offering quality service that is truly disinterested and, therefore, truly service will happen despite the tendency to reduce “service” to a mere instrument to generate good feelings in clients and ensure their loyalty to the brand for profit’s sake, or the tendency to skimp on the costs that a good job requires and thereby save a few (or more than a few) coins.

What’s more, in all these cases, the extra money we are incentivized to earn will enable us to pay the interest on our compound-interest loans and mortgages, and our insurance premiums (tied to risk levels calculated to maximize the profit of insurance companies); or to purchase land or shares or other securities and (hopefully) watch them appreciate even further, until (or unless) we put a limit to the process of passive accumulation of wealth because of boundaries that lie beyond the logic of accumulation (e.g., a certain level of comfort for oneself and one’s family and no further, despite the incessant encouragement on all kinds of screens to indulge in all kinds of luxuries).

Examples abound.

What we’ve seen so far suggests that the connection between capitalism and dataism is a factor that seems common to both money and data, when they are made primary: the reduction of things and people to measurable, manipulable quantities. We’ve already explained how data reduces the world to quantity. As for money, this is a good point to return to that radical claim of D.C. Schindler, namely, that the inner logic of money inclines it to supplant God Himself in man’s hierarchy of values—and that will be the subject of the next article in this series on dataism and capitalism.

Notes

This is definitely not an uncontroverted claim. The nomisma Plato ascribes to the sophists of ancient Greece, the nominalism of the late Middle Ages, empiricism, Kantian idealism—all these offer different arguments why this claim is false. Though an adequate response lies beyond the scope of this article, I will say that a factor common to all these objections, a factor that is, in the end, their undoing, is their reluctance to trust in what we might call basic perceptions, which, with Fr. Paul, we might refer to as “metaphysical intuitions”—these are, by their very nature, unjustifiable, because they are primary. They are not conclusions but instead the first premises from which all other conclusions follow. Indeed, the attempt to prove all premises is impossible—if every conclusion has premises, then there must ultimately be some premises that are not conclusions. Otherwise, there would be an infinite series of conclusions, calling for an infinite series of premises to precede them. But an infinite series has no beginning (otherwise, it would be finite). Therefore, there would be no premise to justify any conclusions.
This is an oversimplification, but it gets the point across.
In fact, this motive is discernible in the philosophy that undergirds dataism, ranging from Descartes through Hume to Kant. As elaborated by Peter Kreeft in a series of books, all three philosophers seem to have had, as a primary aim of their intellectual quests, a desire to achieve in philosophy the certainty and replicability of method that they observed in science at the time—for the latter two, in Newtonian science. They sought a method that anyone could follow and arrive at the same conclusion always, without disagreements. They did not seek primarily to look reality in the face, but instead to ensure that their very act of looking would always yield the same results and, consequently, the same practical conclusions. In short, they did not let reality show them what purpose to aim for, so to speak, but rather to conform their visions of reality, and reality itself, to their “pre-selected” purpose.
A combination of the economic and biological dimensions of dataism can be seen, for instance, in the tracking of measurable parameters of an individual’s use of social media use and their translation into methods of measurable manipulation of their psyches and actions. The film The Social Dilemma recounts several notorious examples.

In the absence of more scientific dimensions, the economic dimension of dataism would be manifested in simpler and (thankfully) more transparent ways, such as digital credit providers taking from their customers the contact details of proposed guarantors for loans without the consent of the latter, and then bombarding these guarantors with messages and calls in the case of default. The guarantors are reduced, approximately, to (digital) money reachable via clicking a few “buttons” on a touchscreen. In fact, such cases are the subject of most of the 31 determinations of Kenya’s Data Commissioner issued in 2023.
Fabrice Hadjadj gives an impressive breakdown of how the dataist mindset (or, as he calls it, the “techno-economic paradigm”) informs all kinds of technologies and industries, from agriculture and manufacturing, smartphones and sleek, futuristic cars to energy, textiles, fitness machines, and smart dog-leashes. The essays can be found in his compilation Dernières nouvelles de l’homme (et de la femme aussi).
In capitalist terms, of course. That is to say, the products that would lead to the greatest accumulation of wealth.
See D.C. Schindler’s article “Why Socrates Didn’t Charge: Plato and the Metaphysics of Money”, here.