Datafication & Technology

Datafication, Phantasmagoria of the 21st Century

Category: Phantasmagoria

Predictive AI Fails At… Predicting

30 August 2025 / / 0 Comments

You would think that with all the hype around “AI” (in quotation marks because the word has become a catch-all bag, covering a whole range of poorly defined realities), and our civilisation’s enduring blind faith in the omniscience of digital technologies, at least, the technology would perform its function remarkably well.

I mean wouldn’t you?

Well, it seems not.

The Markup is “a nonprofit newsroom that challenges technology to serve the public good.” (Check here if you want to know more, I have been following them for years, they do remarkable work.)

This is what they found out (see below).

A software company sold a New Jersey police department an algorithm that was right less than 1% of the time. Read the whole article here.

It is NOT a blip. It is NOT an exception, an anomaly, a special case. It is another day in the office for predictive AI. And those issues will NOT go away with the next model iteration.

They are here to stay because they are an intrinsic feature of the technology. As a technology of quantification, AI (or whatever name we want to give the Digital) does NOT and, in fact, can NOT reliably handle qualitative aspects of life.

This is why the likes of Facebook employ human content moderators to detect and remove gore, violence and generally harmful content from the platform. (By the way, those people are often sub-contracted, so they do not appear on the main companies’ annual reports, and their contracts contain a clause they won’t sue if they get PTSD on the job, which they often do. Read here about what happened when they did).

So, despite all the hype, “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” When it comes to the social, predictive AI mostly fails at predicting.

Datafied. A Critical Exploration of Knowledge Production in The Digital Age (PhD)

22 March 2023 / / 0 Comments

This is a short abstract of my PhD research. I will post more details in the coming days and weeks.

I first look at the epistemological processes behind datafied knowledge and contrast them with the processes of tacit knowledge production. I extract 5 principles of tacit knowledge and contrast them to 5 principles of datafied knowledge, and I contend that datafied knowledge is founded on a reductionist ideology, a reductionist logic of knowledge production, reductionist data and therefore, produces a reductionist type of knowledge. Instead of helping us to understand the world we inhabit in more systemic, holistic and qualitative ways, it relies essentially on quantitative, disembodied, computationally structured computer-ready data, and algorithmically optimised processes.

Through the filter of Walter Benjamin’s work “The Arcades Project”, I argue that datafication (defined as the quantification of the qualitative aspects human experience) is a Phantasmagoria, a dream image, a myth, a social experience anchored in a culture of commodification. The digital production of knowledge is supported by a need to reduce uncertainty and increase productivity and efficiency. It essentially serves a predictive purpose. It does not help us to understand the intricate, beautiful, fragile, qualitative, embodied experience of being alive in a deeply interconnected and interdependent world, an experience that to a great extent, defines humaneness and life in general. In this sense, datafied knowledge is hostile to life.

Finally, I call for a rebalance between tacit and datafied ways of knowing, and a shift to a more regenerative ecology of knowledge based on the principles of living systems.

Helene Liu – PhD Thesis Visual Map

Datafied. A Critical Exploration of the Production of Knowledge in the Age of Datafication

9 September 2022 / / 0 Comments

This is the abstract of my PhD submitted in August 2022

As qualitative aspects of life become increasingly subjected to the extractive processes of datafication, this theoretical research offers an in-depth analysis on how these technologies skew the relationship between tacit and datafied ways of knowing. Given the role tacit knowledge plays in the design process, this research seeks to illuminate how technologies of datafication are impacting designerly ways of knowing and what design can do to recalibrate this imbalance. In particular, this thesis is predicated on 4 interrelated objectives: (1) To understand how the shift toward the technologies of datafication has created an overreliance on datafied (i.e., explicit) knowledge (2) To comprehend how tacit knowledge (i.e. designerly ways of knowing) is impacted by this increased reliance, (3) To critically explore technologies of datafication through the lens of Walter Benjamin’s work on the phantasmagoria of modernity and (4) To discover what design can do to safeguard, protect and revive the production of tacit knowledge in a world increasingly dominated by datafication.

To bring greater awareness into what counts as valid knowledge today, this research begins by first identifying the principles that define tacit knowledge and datafied ways of knowing. By differentiating these two processes of knowledge creation, this thesis offers a foundation for understanding how datafication not only augments how we know things, but also actively directs and dominates what we know. This research goes on to also examine how this unchecked faith in datafication has led to a kind of 21st century phantasmagoria, reinforcing the wholesale belief that technology can be used to solve some of the most perplexing problems we face today. As a result, more tacit processes of knowledge creation are increasingly being overlooked and side-lined. To conclude this discussion, insights into how the discipline of design is uniquely situated to create a more regenerative relationship with technology, one that supports and honours the unique contributions of designerly ways of knowing, are offered.

Fundamental principles framing Grounded Theory are used as a methodological guide for structing this theoretical research. Given the unprecedented and rapid rate technology is being integrated into modern life, this methodological framework provided the flexibility needed to accommodate the evolving contours of this study while also providing the necessary systematic rigour to sustain the integrity of this PhD.

Keywords: datafication, tacit knowledge, phantasmagoria, regeneration, ecology of knowledge

Datafication as Phantasmagoria

12 April 2021 / / 0 Comments

My main argument is that that datafication is the phantasmagoria of the 21st century, the same way mass consumerism was the phantasmagoria or the dream of the 20th century. My inspiration is the work of Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project.

I am defining datafication as the quantification of qualitative aspects of life, i.e. human experience generally.

I am arguing that this phantasmagoria is creating a massive epistemological shift towards a more impoverished type of knowledge because in this massive enterprise of quantification, what cannot be turned into computer data or in other words what cannot be quantified is just abandoned. And now that algorithms are making decisions in most areas of life such as education finance justice and so on this quantification has a direct impact on the system as we live in.

More on this later…

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