“Twitter is a sewer,” wrote New York Times opinion columnist Bret Stephens last week in one of the many skirmishes that have now coalesced into the phenomenon known as Bedbug-gate. The ongoing saga is quite beyond the remit of this blog (though we do a brisk trade in actual bedbugs). But I’ll take Stephens’ sewer observation. He meant it as an indictment of man’s inhumanity to man on the hell site, but by pure chance he may have stumbled upon a useful metaphor for personal data.
A lot of ink and many pixels have been spilled trying to figure out the exact metaphor that will best allow us to think about our data. The evolution of the metaphor itself is pretty instructive: it started out as gold, then got refined into the now-familiar (and possibly overcooked) oil trope. Back in 2008, Cory Doctorow floated a more prescient take: data as nuclear waste. Ignored at the time, it now gets periodically rediscovered, and no wonder – it’s a good way to think about what a toxic liability it has become to store people’s personal data in the age of perpetual leaks and hacks.
It’s right that people should be so consumed with zeroing in on exactly the right metaphor. The implications of our infinitely copyable, infinitely vulnerable digital exhaust are still revealing themselves. We haven’t yet come to grips with what is being taken from us and whether and why it should matter. A similar evolution happened at the turn of the last century with mineral rights and air space rights when people began to understand that the stuff under their land and above their homes had its own distinct value.
For that to happen with data, we have to pin it down with the proper analogy. That’s been hard because the concept of “data” is too vast and opaque, encompassing as it does everything from your credit card numbers to your medical records to your instagram stream. Maybe it’s worth focusing on one specific subtype.
Which brings us back to Twitter and social media more generally, which has been designed to catch a specific kind of personal data: the slipstream of thoughts that would once have floated away forever. So: what are thoughts? I like the description advanced by the 19th-century German philosopher and physician Carl Vogt:
All those capacities which we call mental activities are only functions of the brain; or, to use a rather homely expression, thought is to the brain what the bile is to the liver, or the urine to the kidneys.
And poop to the colon, he was too polite to add, but I imagine his analogy can accommodate my addition.
I’m not saying everything that comes out of the human mind is a turd – but thoughts follow the law of fertiliser. Fertiliser makes the plants grow, because urine and faeces contain important nutrients. But it takes time, effort and processing – along with other ingredients – to turn a fresh turd into mulch.
The same holds for all the jetsam that is constantly being excreted from our brain folds in response to real-time stimuli. Straight up turds. Turning them into fertiliser that nourishes a reader’s mind takes time, effort and processing. (Incidentally, this is also why every writer needs an editor [N.B.: this piece was not edited].)
None of this used to be a problem! We thought our dumb thoughts, immediately forgot about them, and no one was ever the wiser. Anyway that’s how it was for 200,000 years before Myspace, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram came along to give us some really fancy mason jars in which all us amateur Howard Hugheses could store our precious bodily fluids. Social media monetised the extent to which we all massively overvalue the output of our own brains. And now we all get to pick through the mind-faeces of the person whose meditations on childless women at Disney World sound like advertising copy for the Babadook.
Some people’s thought turds even make international headlines, like when the New York Times had to point out that mass shootings are still bad even if the flu kills people. Astrophysicists poop too, I suppose.
But what are Twitter and Facebook doing with all those jars of unprocessed mind turds?
Here it helps to consider how your more forward-thinking municipal agencies turn the stuff you put in your toilet into money. For example, a sewage treatment plant in Basingstoke, UK, heats up the effluent of 130,000 people in “pressure-cooker like reactors” to produce enough biogas to offset 100 per cent of its energy bills. This is very much how Twitter and Facebook have made a mint off storing the unprocessed shit streams of our minds, except brain turds are a lot more lucrative than the other kind.
In conclusion, we can thank Bret Stephens for helping to illuminate the process by which the Twitter brain-waste biogasification plant burns shitty takes for money. And as cholera and dysentery have taught us, shit begets shit: if you throw your unprocessed diseased turds into the general water supply, you can dial up other people’s shit production as well. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what you call a business model.
Credits:
Jack T. Ripper in Dr. Strangelove: public domain image at Wikimedia Commons. General Jack D. Ripper shares an intimate moment with Group Captain Lionel Mandrake in in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film, Dr. Strangelove.
