Kafka in action

The digital age is an age of disruptive power. Big data is one such disruptive power. It poses a serious crisis for the state, society and democracy. The digital data universe is getting alarmingly big and available, from the internet, social media, smart phones, surveillance cameras, sensors and billions of people socialising online

With dataism becoming the new creed,Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari contends, we have become “tiny chips inside a giant system that nobody really understands.” Once the West claimed ideological victory over socialism following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, The Economist wrote rather pompously that capitalism “works well for most of the people most of the time.” If footloose capitalism believed “in the invisible hand of the market,” dataists believe in the “invisible hand of the dataflow.”

The conservative British magazine now says data is the most valuable resource on the planet ~ even more valuable than oil. Harari has popularised the term ‘dataism.’

His 2016 New York Times bestseller book Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow says that humans will become gods. Homo Deus is the next stage of evolution.

Its implications are farreaching and all-encompassing. At an extraordinary time of what Polish philosopher Zygmunt Bauman calls “liquid love,” when young men and women are unable to choose their partners for fear of missing out something better, Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Microsoft’s Cortana may perhaps choose our jobs and mates.

Or maybe not. Some would argue, why look for a life partner when you have what digital sociologist Yolande Strengers calls “Smart Wife, “feminized digital assistants who are friendly and sometimes flirty, occasionally glitchy but perpetually available.”

Will human history end when men become gods as Harari warns? It is perhaps too early to say. What is certain about technology is what Spanish writer and artist Irene Sola’s song says, “when I sing, mountains dance.”