This is the 3mn presentation I gave at the TEDxTinHauWomen open mic on June 16th, 2021.

27 years ago, my son Alistair was born. As many of you know, giving birth is an intense experience, a mix of fear and exhilaration, and so many emotions and sensations that I can’t even start to name or describe. And then when your baby arrives, finally, the love you feel at that time is unlike anything you have ever felt before.

After Alistair was born, I did not think there was enough space in my heart to feel more love, but then my daughter Aurelie arrived. And something completely magical happened. The infinite love I felt for my first child expanded infinitely for my second child.

I am not a mathematician, so I do not know if there is a formula that can infinitely grow the infinite, but in my books, love or any other human experience is not something that can readily be turned into numbers. There is just something magical about human experience that defies quantification.

Today we live in a world where infinite love looks like this: [see image below]. That’s the “datafication” of our qualitative inner experience and this so called knowledge is used to make money.

Today we live in a world where infinite love looks like this (Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay)

There is a school of thought anchored in positivism that believes that people are just their behaviours, and those behaviours can be divided into parts, turned into numbers, analysed and spit out a realistic picture of the world. It may be true in the hard sciences, it is not so true in the social realm.

This reductionist view of life predates digital, but until Big Data it was relatively contained. But in the early 2000s, Google needed to turn a profit. Their AdWorks team realised that they could use the collateral behavioural data (“breadcrumbs”) that people left behind during search to make ads relevant not to keywords, as had been the case up to then, but to people. Targeted advertising was born, and with it, one the most pivotal epistemological shift in the history of humanity.

In 1964, environmentalist Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, a compelling call for the world to wake up to the large scale slaughtering of our natural environment. Today, we are doing to human experience what we did to nature 60 years ago.

The digital datafication and the commodification of human experience is creating a false knowledge of the world. It is significant because it is widespread and it affects decision-making at small and large scales, it is dangerous because it is biased, it is overpowering other forms of tacit knowledge that are more human friendly and it is fed back to us to help us orient ourselves in the world, and it is deeply unfair because it creates massive asymmetries of knowledge and therefore of power.

YOU, WE can say no. But we have to become aware of what this means and we have to act together. This is my slightly desperate but mostly impassioned plea, and I hope you heard it!