A Legible Landscape
The famous communication theorist Marshall McLuhan once quipped, “The medium is the message.” He was right. The underlying data substrate is immensely important as it can facilitate or hinder certain knowledge operations, depending on its design and/or physical properties. Furthermore, that substrate and the way data is represented on it has varied greatly over time. Much of that variance is the product of a civilization’s focus, attitudes, and values.
In 2006, British mathematician Clive Humby coined the phrase, "Data is the new oil." This maxim arrived at just the right time. In the early 2000s, data and computational scientists were just beginning to recognize the vital importance of data for machine learning. Humby, of course, was thinking of the thick black stuff pumped from the ground when he formulated this statement. However, from another perspective, data is not the new oil. Data is the old oil. It's the oil every empire, every civilization has run on since the dawn of time. Even so, it's worthless if there's no information system or way to move facts, knowledge, and ideas to those in need of them. The same can be said of energy. Oil is worthless without wells, tankers, pipes, refineries, delivery trucks, and service stations all connected in a petroleum distribution system. The system makes it valuable. The system keeps the economy humming.
I’ve become increasingly interested in civilizational data and information systems (CDIS) while reading James Scott’s book, Seeing Like a State, and Geoffrey Yeo’s, Record-Making and Record-Keeping in Early Societies. I highly recommend both if you have an interest in this topic. In fact, I plan to explore CDIS in depth as it connects to a much larger project currently underway here at the University of Florida, led by the Hamilton Center. Scott’s text, in particular, is fascinating in that he asks an interesting question, “If the state was a person, how would it see the world? What would be its desires and concerns?” To answer that question, he introduces the reader to the concept of legibility. Scott argues that a state’s first and most important desire is to create a landscape it can read. The question of who owns what is therefore front and center. Land is divvied up into parcels and data (deeds) recorded by clerks because doing so makes the landscape legible, allowing a state to read those documents and derive taxes from them. Yet this is not the only thing a state wants to read. To deliver basic services and maintain a military force, it needs birth and census records. Religious concerns are also important because sacred texts add legitimacy to a regime’s claims to legitimacy.
Each civilization exhibits a unique personality, a particular orientation to the world that informs its relationship to its underlying data and other cultures. That way of seeing, as Scott puts it, is then translated into specific data requirements. If we want to perform activity x, then we need a specific kind of data to do so. Take, for example, the census mandated by the United States Constitution. Because the framers of our republic wanted to create a representative form of government, they needed to know who lived where so as to properly apportion seats in the House of Representatives amongst the 50 states. Here, we see a nation’s particular way of seeing expressed in data. That data and information system, in turn, guides and directs the ongoing American democratic process. On the other hand, 17th century France under Louis XIV did not collect census data in any systematic way. It didn’t need to because that state could not envision itself as a democracy. The king was absolute, and shared governance was unthinkable. From this comparison, we can conclude that legibility meant something entirely different for pre-revolutionary France than it did for America in the 18th century. Or, as Scott might say, it’s as if we’ve met two distinct personas: one that loves romance novels and another that prefers science fiction thrillers. One preference may not be better than the other, but the preference itself informs the relation between a civilization and its data.
Finally, it should be noted that most civilizations share a common set of legibility practices. Everyone needs to generate revenue for state operations, and that often results in similar (isomorphic) information systems. The term biologists use is convergent evolution. It occurs when organisms that are not closely related to each other evolve the same features. The similar body shape of sharks (fish) and dolphins (mammals) is but one example. The same dynamic is at work when we see two distinct civilizations respond in almost identical ways to a perceived need. The Chinese generated revenue from property taxes just as we do in the West. Thus, the solutions – the data collected, the legal infrastructure, the storage and retrieval of documents, even the way taxes are collected – may resemble each other.
I’m confident an exploration of the civilizational data interface, as I’m calling it, will lead to some interesting discoveries. Each generation tends to view itself as unique, the first to confront alien technologies, the first to face an avalanche of data. The history of civilizational data, though, might tell a different story. It might reveal that those who came before us held many of our present concerns. Can we learn something from their experiences? I believe we can.