Under the garb of digital efficiency and smart systems, the world has vowed not to stop just by mapping our territories; it seeks to map our interiority
HARDEEP KOUR BALI
To be human is to possess the capacity for the ‘swerve’, which means a sudden, irrational deviation from a logical path that gives birth to the very concept of free will. It is about the uncomputable part of our nature, the very ability to act against the data, to surprise the observer and to remain mysterious even to ourselves. Yet, unfortunately, we are witnessing a slow and steady war on this unpredictability. Under the garb of digital efficiency and smart systems, the world has vowed not to stop just by mapping our territories; it seeks to map our interiority.
This transition is not just a technological convenience but a fundamental change in the nature of being; it is an ontological shift. Historically, the relationship between an individual and the society was mediated through law, i.e., a specific set of static public rules, but now that relationship is increasingly mediated through an algorithm, i.e., a dynamic invisible set of instructions applicable not to a whole human but to a “dividual”.
‘Dividual’ is an old-fashioned adjective that signifies separate, divisible, or shared among many, originating from the Latin term ‘dividuus’. In contemporary philosophy and social theory, it denotes an individual perceived as a component of a larger entity or a ‘fragmented’ self, frequently contrasted with the unified ‘individual.’ Humans are now treated as bankable data points.
So, when systems use predictable analytics to understand needs, risks and interventions, they are not interacting with a person, but rather interacting with a ‘ghost’ produced by the model. The digital footprint is a shadow of the self, but often treated with more authority than the living reality. Off late, we have traded ‘I’ for the ‘IP Address’ operating under this dangerous view that by measuring this digital shadow, we have understood the individual.
The gaze of the algorithm is inherently reductionist because it requires clean data as it abhors poetic, ambiguous and contradictory elements that otherwise make life worth living. In culturally diverse areas, reductionism takes a sharp edge as digital tools attempt to read the public; it flattens the nuances of those regional identities.
The algorithm cannot hear the grief in a mother’s voice, or the historical weight behind a specific grievance; instead, it sees only a ‘ticket raised’, a ‘sentiment score’ or ‘response latency’. In this kind of environment, we are coached to interact with the world in ways that machines can understand. We learn to speak in the keywords or prompts that can trigger a chatbot. In doing so, we are pruning parts of humanity that algorithms cannot categorise.
The true human agency demands a future that is open and can bring something different than yesterday, but these predictive models are leading to the loss of that future. These models are essentially backwards-looking as they use the data of the past to forecast the behaviour of tomorrow. This somehow creates a predictive trap. For example, if a certain community has been historically ‘disengaged’, the algorithm will envision the future in the same manner, hence it does not predict the future rather colonises it thus turning potential for change into a self -fulfilling prophecy of data.
Now, how do we resist the pull of the data-ghost? The answer does not expect the rejection of technology but demands for a philosophy that prioritises the human in the loop. We must insist on a digital existence that values the unknown or un-computable. We need systems to acknowledge their own limitations when faced with the profound mystery of a human life.
We should have the right to be messy and contradictory. The right to be seen as more than just a cluster of data points, because the ultimate test of a civilisation is not how much data it can collect, but how much humanity it can preserve in the face of that data. We must refuse to be reduced to a pattern. We must remain stubbornly and beautifully human in the face of ghosts hidden in the machine.
(The Author is a poet, columnist and doctoral researcher. Feedback: writerbali007@gmail.com)Box: We must insist on a digital existence that values the unknown or un-computable. We need systems to acknowledge their own limitations when faced with the profound mystery of a human life