Those who move in digital space become predictable for data sellers, even if they try to deceive their pursuers. Is it even possible to escape from the data matrix? Are doppelgangers real?
A digital shadow precedes us on the internet. It’s already there when we click the buy button, when we order the chicken fillet at lunch or when we show the ticket on the train. Fed with real-time data from our behavior, this digital doppelganger is always one step ahead of us. It has the same preferences, the same moods, the same illnesses as we do. With every click, with every step, the contours of this shadow sharpen, from which we can hardly step out.
For a few years now, there has been talk of the “digital twin” in “Industry 4.0”. What is meant is a real-time copy or digital representation of a real object, for example, a car or airplane. This model is continuously fed with real-time data from development through construction to real operation. Based on the data, simulations can be carried out to show how certain components develop under the most varied of influences.
Data brokers know everything
In this way, signs of wear or the need for repairs to individual components can be predicted. A Formula 1 racing car, for example, sends sensor data into the pit lane, where the further course of the race and the influence of variables such as wind and precipitation are simulated. Copies are not only made of racing cars or industrial plants, but also of people.
Corporations collect massive amounts of data from individuals. Acxiom, one of the largest data retailers in the world, has created profiles of 2.5 billion consumers around the world, with up to 11,000 attributes per person. Age, gender, number of cars and homes, outstanding loans, illnesses: such data brokers know everything. With the help of algorithms, regularities and patterns in behavior can be derived from this amount of data – which series we will watch next, who we will meet, where we are going, what we will buy.
A few years ago, Amazon applied for a patent for a logistics system (“Anticipatory Shipping”) in which goods are shipped to regions in which there is suspected high demand. The logistics system would even go so far that goods are loaded onto a truck and “speculatively delivered to a physical address” without the recipient having pressed the order button. Is the future determined? Are we just extras in a computer simulation?
A two hundred year old vision is coming true
The French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace developed an interesting thought experiment in his “A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities (Essai philosophique sur les probabilités)” published in 1814: Imagine a being who would be endowed with unlimited intelligence and knowledge of all particle states. Because all physical processes are determined, this demon could calculate the states of the world ahead and back from an ideal observer position: “If there were an understanding that knew for a moment all the forces that invigorate nature and the mutual position of the beings that make it up, and at the same time comprehensively If this data were enough to be subjected to analysis, then such a data would express the movements of the largest celestial bodies and the smallest atom by one and the same formula: Nothing would be uncertain for him.”
A number of objections have been formulated against the deterministic-mechanistic world view of the “clockwork universe”, which was also represented by Kepler and Leibniz. The observer paradox states that an observer influences physical processes himself. Quantum mechanics refutes determinism insofar as nature does not obey deterministic laws, but rather an objective coincidence: the position of a photon or electron cannot be precisely determined in advance. The thesis of a world formula is not tenable.
Due to the advances in computer technology, however, the Laplace demon appears in a new light, because Laplace made his hypothesis dependent on the capacities of a data analysis – which at the time was still rudimentary. The adepts of the “Social Physics” school of thought start from the premise that society consists of atoms around whose cores individuals orbit in fixed orbits.
Partner, job, children? Everything determines!
If the biological code and regularly recurring patterns can be deciphered by algorithms and the “initial conditions” of life, such as genetic predispositions to diseases, are known, then biological and social processes could be simulated. Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg once said there was a “fundamental mathematical law that underlies social relationships.”
Partner? Job? Children? Everything is determined, everything is predictable! The US company Predpol, whose predictive policing software uses a mathematical model from earthquake forecasting, quotes the anthropologist Jeff Brantingham as saying: “Crime is a physical process.” If someone hits you with a fist or smashes a window, it is just a change in the state of atoms.
Any criminal lawyer and criminologist would disagree. It is true that free will has come under attack by the findings of neuroscience. However, according to constant jurisprudence, free will is at least an implicit prerequisite for culpability: the perpetrator could have acted differently and opted for the law or the legality of his act. Determinism does not exclude – at least from the point of view of compatibilism – this “ability to act differently”: the will to act for or against the law can also be deterministically caused. In other words: How an individual decides today or the day after tomorrow can be determined since yesterday.
On the other hand, the representatives of free will object that humans are not 100 percent predictable. The businessman who drives the same route to the office every day may one day choose a different route or switch to public transport. The fitness coach, who always chooses the couscous salad at lunch on Wednesdays, can switch to the schnitzel one day. And the management consultant, who only got a promotion yesterday and is satisfied with her job, can hand in the resignation overnight.
“I’m already there,” says the doppelganger
The techno-determinists would now counter that there is a plausible explanation for each of these actions: the construction site that forces you to change the route. Poor sleep or alcohol consumption the night before triggers the desire to eat meat. Or the need for care by parents, which makes a change of residence necessary. From the perspective of social physicists, the fact that such events are unpredictable is not due to the fact that the deterministic basic assumption is wrong. But simply because there is too little data. So is the Laplace data demon lurking over us after all?
As part of “anomaly detection”, data scientists try to identify such data points or events that deviate from the statistical norm: leaks in pipelines, credit card fraud, job changes and so on. Even if the individual revolted against their own predictability, for example by starting randomized search queries or deliberately taking detours to confuse the algorithms, that would be an anomaly that may be determined. There is no escape from the data matrix.
Big data analyzes bring subjectivity down, but at the same time constitute it, because the digital doppelganger is an exact image of the personality – an image that we might not have reached ourselves using techniques of self-questioning. In this respect, you cannot break away from your digital Siamese twin, let alone emancipate. This inner conflict cannot be resolved in the end because the supposedly counterfactual action in turn produces new data points and strengthens the double. Perhaps the futility of modern digital existence is also due to the fact that the digital doppelganger is always there where we want to go.
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