"I am not a number, I am a free man!"

The problem with reducing people to data is that you reduce people to data.

I haven’t done much blogging of late, and for that I apologize. (One of the few people who actually read what I write here said something about that the other day.) Actually, I wasn’t writing this as a blog post but as a meme, but it got a bit long for that, and I didn't want to cut it. Read and enjoy, or ignore and move on, as you please.

We often label people according to what we think they should be based on their politics, or according to what we think their politics should be based on who they are (or rather, who we perceive them to be). We are often dismayed be the very existence of things like gay republicans, gun-owning democrats, conservative women, progressive billionaires, and so on. We wonder how they can possibly vote against their own self-interest. We wonder if they realize that by voting the way they do they could be voting against causes that they, or their own particular group, cherish.

But that’s the trap. Not a trap for them, but a trap for us all.

We’re great at pigeonholing people in this country. We like to classify people according to broad demographics and assume, from whatever group we’ve put them in, that we know all there is to know about them. We build complex models of human behavior that tell us what they’ll buy, who they’ll vote for, what television programs they watch, what toothpaste they use, and so on.

While this is certainly a valid approach when dealing with millions of people, it is far less reliable when dealing with individuals. Unfortunately, the principle power-groups in this country, corporations and political parties, have spent so much time developing this process that the individuals that make up these power-groups tend to see all of reality in that way, and dismiss any variations on the individual level as aberrant data.

They never consider how individuals might feel about being classified as aberrant data. This is because data does not feel, cannot feel; data is data. Numbers. Numbers cannot feel, cannot consider, cannot reason, cannot alter themselves in any way; numbers simply are. They are used to keep count but do not, themselves, count.

The real problem is that we all think that way; to some extent, we all reduce people to mere data. Maybe it’s because we live in a society so dominated by a few small powerful groups, such as political parties and corporations, groups that find it much easier to deal with data on millions than with the needs of an individual. Or perhaps we’re all just too lazy to get to know people more than superficially. Whatever the reason, we all do it.

We all look at people in a way that pigeonholes them as a liberal or conservative, a republican or a democrat, gay or straight, hawk or dove, and so on. We assume that if a person is a progressive that they must be totally anti-gun, that if a person is conservative that they must be vehemently anti-gay, that if a person is religious that they must be doggedly anti-science.

This is, of course, absolute crap. No position, no opinion, no philosophy can be assumed with regard to an individual. When you do, you’re reducing the status of that individual to that of a number. And that’s insulting.

Individuals, understandably, do not relish being reduced to numbers, to mere data points that are counted but do not count.

The Blues Viking
The opinions expressed here are mine and if you don't like them you can get your own damn blog.


The title for this article comes from the opening to the '60s British TV series "The Prisoner". But of course you knew that.