Jonny Saunders (he of the Institute of Pirate Technology), continues to amaze:
The world is Big Data, and The Cloud is its landlord. It is our responsibility to ferret it out of its primitive unknown, mine it, harvest it, dump it by the tanker-truckful into great Data Lakes overhung by computational Clouds to refine the Actionable Insights from its desiccated husk. The Cloud promises us an infinite, seamless expanse of Knowledge. If only we can harness the wily spray of our Organic Content, filtering our every action, affection, and affiliation through a thicket of algorithmically optimized platforms then The Cloud might teach us enough about ourselves to finally be happy.
These are the opening sentences of his brilliant paper, last updated in 2015, on “surveillance graphs” and corporate capture. The piece is ambitious, layering itself above scholarly communication, above the “cloud,” above LLMs, to focus on the “Knowledge Graph of Everything”—enabled by naive publicly funded infrastructure projects. His solution? “Vulgar linked data”:
Predicated on relationality, heterogeneity, distribution of power, and vernacular expression, vulgar linked data infrastructures attempt to empower people to socially organize information in a truly decentralized sociotechnological commons, rather than empowering systems to rent knowledge organization for profit.
This piece deserves a hell of a lot more (human) attention.