Data is the commodity of the 21st century. Every day, we generate around 2.5 exabytes (2.5×1018) of data. We have also created unprecedented technological capabilities for collecting, storing, analyzing, and transferring data. These data are mined to extract various useful information that can be used for detecting business trends, predicting election outcomes, fighting crime, preventing diseases, finding customers, etc. Walmart, for example, processes over a million customer transactions every hour, creating enormous databases. The so-called “clickstream data” – or the traces we leave behind when using the Internet – are extremely valuable for the online economy, such as the Google search engine. The data economy is big business, and there is no aspect of life that is not exploited for data collection.
This increasing demand for data creates the need for the digitization of almost everything. Even organizational processes are being digitized, resulting in It considers any use of time and resources that does not directly lead to profit as “loss” and becomes a target for elimination.
This metric value extends to customers as well, and marketing uses the term “customer lifetime value” to predict the net profit that could be achieved in the overall future relationship with a customer.
The American company Acxiom collects consumer behavior data and categorizes customers into 70 categories from a purely economic standpoint. The group of people with the lowest consumer value is called “worthless”.
As the word itself suggests, the digital approach easily degrades human beings into objects and reduces them to binary numbers. However, the “big data” industry not only calculates the outcomes of human behavior, but it is also a psycho-political instrument that enables the manipulation and exploitation of people in an economic sense. The more data we share about ourselves, the better marketing knows how to stimulate our desires.
It is well known that the use of digital tools goes hand in hand with the devalorization of individual people or even entire populations. This was made clearer by the recent revelations of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where personal data obtained through Facebook was used to influence political campaigns.
Although we all think: “This doesn’t apply to me. I am not influenced by marketing tricks.” The profits that are being made definitely show otherwise. However, perhaps the biggest danger of digitalization lies in its ability to impoverish our thinking and emotions, and thus our experience of everything. Life, love, relationships, beauty, etc. cannot be reduced to algorithms and purely economic values. Every time we digitize something, we lose something subtle but important. If you have ever listened to the same recording recorded in analog and digital format, then you know what I’m talking about.