User Agreements, Human Progress, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

 Roopa Vasudeva's Passive Acceptance and Our (Dis)Consent from Brooklyn Rail made me blush:

And yet we shrug our shoulders, and continue to click “accept” without so much as glancing over the thing we are accepting. Taking the time to really, truly comprehend the vast amounts of data we are leaving behind with every click, scroll, and like—along with the permissions we are giving Big Tech for how to use them, and the ways we are flattened and compartmentalized as a result—seems like an impossibility. It’s too abstract to understand immediately. Here we see another feedback loop: our resignation to the power differential embedded within the agreement leads to its perpetuation, which only leads to more resignation.

and delighted me what seems like the idea of real genius:

In 2018, I began a project called dataDouble, which draws inspiration from Kevin D. Haggerty and Richard V. Ericson’s concept of the same name. They wrote in 2000 that data doubles, or likenesses of individuals created from their accumulated data, work as “a form of pragmatics: differentiated according to how useful they are in allowing institutions to make discriminations among populations”². The data double, in other words, replicates you, but not exactly. It uses all the data you give up when you click “accept” on those terms of service to construct a version of you that is warped and reshaped to fit institutional goals that may not always have your best interests at heart.

Do read the whole essay, please.

How Do Humans Make Progress? Daniel Woolf reviews World of Patterns by Rens Bod  from The Millions marks out another book I would find interesting, and kicks up some ideas worth considering:

The key word in the title, however, isn’t “world,” but “patterns,” for it is precisely in the human capacity to recognize patterns--whether in the stars, in the course of events, in the behaviour of animals, plants and materials--that knowledge can be conceived, ordered, and advanced beyond the mere recording of observation and information. 

***

Among the most interesting and useful features of World of Patterns is Bod’s ability to make cross-cultural and trans-temporal comparisons. On the subject of reduction of principles, the “isnad” method developed by Islam as method of historical verification is comparable with earlier Greek developments in historiography, especially Herodotus’s principle of reliance on the most probably source among many, and Thucydides’ principle of privileging eyewitness accounts. Isnad (whereby a chain of transmission of Prophetic sayings was continuously maintained and studied to ensure a pure tradition), essentially unified the Herodotean and Thucydidean approaches into a single principle, though it failed to provide either a method of reconstructing an original text, something that awaited philologists of the Renaissance, or a way of disproving an outright but continuously transmitted falsehood. Other incisive connections are made in later chapters, such as that between Karl Lachmann’s (1793-1851) development of the family tree or stemma in linguistics, an organizational principle used in current DNA analysis.

***

Why is it, I wondered, that books such as this seem to be appearing at a great rate, works of synthesis aimed at telling “biggest possible picture” stories? Apart from long-span global histories of this or that discipline or group of disciplines, the “Big” and “Deep” history genres associated with the likes of David Christian and Daniel Lord Smail have struck a chord with readers, as have popular best-sellers such as Yuval Harari’s Sapiens (2014). Bod’s book is obviously a significant contribution to this macro-historical approach, and it operates at a higher level than many. In fact, the closest comparator I’ve come across recently is the equally brave, if more Eurocentric, work of a father and son team, Ricardo and David Nirenberg, Uncountable, which takes an even more reductive approach (and I do not intend that term invidiously but in Bod’s sense of “simplifying and ordering”), envisioning the progress of human knowledge as straightforward, multi-millenial dialectic between “sameness” and “difference”, apathia (unchangeability) and pathia (mutability)—what if we were to adopt Bod’s language, one might call meta-patterns that determine lesser patterns. Another such work (though one this reader found less compelling), would be The Dawn of Everything: a New History of Humanity by the late David Graeber and David Wengrow. Perhaps, like the post-ancients who sought to reduce the number of patterns and principles, our Zeitgeist now favours synthesis and integration, a reasonable reaction to the narrowness and general inaccessibility of a good deal of scholarship emerging in ever greater volume from academic presses and increasingly sub-specialized journals. 

 I have heard of but not read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, but The Guardian asked her about her reading. I will have to find one of her books (right after I find the time!)