Adrian Lobe Speichern und Strafen. Die Gesellschaft im Datengefängnis
[Store and Punish. Society in Data Prison]

Not long ago we presented in these pages sociologist Armin Nassehi’s historical study on the precursors of digitalization. Nassehi traces back the collecting of personal data to the emergence of statistics in the late eighteenth century. From a media-history perspective, modernity is thus an emancipation from the unpredictable isolated event. For two centuries, Nassehi argues, the project of modernity was largely devoted to representation, symbolizing things through abstract signs and revealing hitherto invisible “patterns” – the title of Nassehi’s book. But the twenty-first century, in his view, underwent an epistemological transformation. The signs – meanwhile reduced to zeroes and ones – have detached themselves from their representative function and now lead a productive life of their own. Disconnected from the real world they originally served to represent, they have become creative in their own right. Entire worlds have emerged that no longer refer to an external reality. “The data itself is the material used to create things: knowledge, but also products, services, political control, law enforcement, intelligence, technical monitoring, etc.”

This is where Adrian Lobe’s book “Store and Punish: Society in Data Prison” comes in. Where Nassehi argues as a social scientist, Lobe does so as a journalist, addressing the specific areas where digital technologies are being applied and investigating their inherent logic. Though none of this is new, it still comes as a shock to be shown just how rapidly digital survey technologies have developed in recent years and which particular challenges this poses to our democracies, our understanding of the law, and our very idea of humanity.

Even technology optimists can’t deny after reading this book that something needs to be done. Many of these developments, after all, are disguised as ways to reduce our workload. For example, when Google Street View maps out entire streetscapes, generating “litigable by-catch”: drug dealers, burglars, prostitutes, undocumented workers. But digitalization not only helps catch criminals red-handed. Algorithms can come to certain conclusions based on conspicuous data patterns. Thus, the City of Boston has introduced a “CityScore” index, calculating its performance with regard to select criteria: the reaction time of emergency services, the amount of garbage produced, the number of potholes, traffic jams, etc. If the score is good, the city’s inhabitants can take to the streets with confidence. There is even a trend index for stabbings and shootings. “Rule by data” is what Adrian Lobe calls this seemingly harmless citizens’ service. Computer-aided prognostics of this sort are particularly useful in police work. But they also challenge our understanding of the law when crimes that have not even been committed become the subject of police investigations. For example, when a person is no longer punished for drunk driving, but a facial recognition system bars them from getting a license on account of a purely statistical tendency to engage in excessive behaviors. The method is known as predictive policing and is already being used by so-called precrime units in America. If the datacenter calculates a high probability of burglary in a certain neighborhood, the police sends out a patrol car.

In itself this hardly seems new. Prevention has always been part of police work. Yet the trend to computerized data mining could potentially lead to something that Lobe refers to as the “post-penal society.” The end result would be a society that is so well policed with the aid of digital technologies that crime in its function as a system-stabilizing deviation is entirely abolished. We would then no longer be living in a state under the rule of law in which the possibility of committing a crime is a paradox of freedom, but in a state that nips crime in the bud with the help of fear-inducing disciplinary measures. What makes this technique of rule so perfidious, Lobe writes, is that “civil rights and liberties no longer need to be restricted, but cannot even be exercised in the first place.”

The interaction between computer-aided techniques of power and authoritarian governments can already be seen in the case of China. A new social-credit system keeps the country’s citizens in check and ensures the regime the greatest possible conformity. Those who don’t assimilate are punished with a sluggish Internet connection. Vice versa, a high social-credit rating entails a range of privileges for the newly emerging Chinese middle class, things like a larger apartment, a travel visa for Singapore and similar amenities. Europeans are obviously loathe to give in to such temptations on account of their recent history.  

New surveillance technologies are frequently dismissed as harmless, and yet it’s precisely the more subtle techniques of rule that are sneaking their way into our daily lives. Siri, Alexa and Cortana are the voices of stochastic programs that evaluate us and predict our behavior. The ever more invasive security checks at airports using full-body scanners reveal more about our lifestyles than we would normally care to share. Foucault, the philosopher attributed with the concept of the disciplinary society, mostly blamed the church and psychiatry for encroaching on our freedoms. In the twenty-first century, it is algorithms that define what is normal.

The book’s last chapter addresses the possibility of a “post-election society.” Algorithms, Lobe argues, know us better than we know ourselves. “Wouldn’t it make sense to allow better-informed virtual assistants to vote for us?” Technology companies have responded to the “excessive demands of liberty in a society with endless options” by offering us a tempting solution: the “techno-authoritarian” option. Governing thus becomes a form of continuous “process control.” This could indeed be our future. It is high time, in other words, to honor individual decision-making. Data could feasibly become the nail in the coffin of Western democracies threatening to take over our lives if it loses its connection to the real world and hence no longer functions in the service of human beings. The value of these democracies is well worth discussing. Especially in a world where they are rapidly being eroded all across the globe by politicians with authoritarian agendas.