It took me a while to get through Michael Pepi’s The Postmodernity of Big Data. It’s dense, and the premise seemed so far-fetched that I wasn’t sure it would be worth the time investment:

But beyond economic motivations for Big Data’s rise, are there also epistemological ones? Has Big Data come to try to fill the vacuum of certainty left by postmodernism? Does data science address the insecurities of the postmodern thought?

Yes, I know, that sounds like a bit of a stretch. But I’m glad I stuck with it. The essay brings up some really interesting thoughts around the certainty promised by Big Data (even though some view it as nothing more than a clever marketing campaign for something that has been around a long time), and how that might be a response to the relativism of postmodernism:

Though both are projects that address positions about empiricism and meaning making, postmodernism and Big Data are in some senses opposites: Big Data is an empirically grounded quest for truth writ large, accelerated by exponentially expanding computing power. Postmodernism casts doubt on the very idea that reason can unearth an inalienable truth. Whereas Big Data sees a plurality of data points contributing to a singular definition of the individual, postmodernism negates the idea that a single definition of any entity could outweigh its contingent relations. Big Data aims for certainties — sometimes called “analytic insights” — that fly in the face of postmodernist doubt about knowledge. Postmodernism was confined to the faculty lounge and the academic conference, but Big Data has the ability to dictate new rules of behavior and commerce. An e-commerce outfit is almost foolish not to analyze browsing data and algorithmically determine likely future purchases, or as Jaron Lanier put it in Who Owns the Future, “your lack of privacy is someone else’s wealth.”

Consider this your difficult but satisfying weekend reading project.