Blinded by Big Data
Encryption, Infolust, and Oedipus
The FBI’s recent attempts to force Apple to “unlock” the phone of San Bernardino shooter Syed Farook have brought into focus, on a tangible scale, the abstract debates occurring at the intersection of privacy, security, and technology. Silicon Valley has been styled a modern Florence and Athens, but it’s now being asked to play the part of a tragic Thebes.
The standoff between the world’s most powerful government and most profitable company has garnered significant media coverage. Indeed, this one locked iPhone has received more attention than a law passed by Congress in December that clears legal hurdles to the delivery of individual user-data from private companies to the Department of Homeland Security. But in spite of their differences, the San Bernardino iPhone and the Cybersecurity Act of 2015 together highlight the modern state’s insatiable appetite for digital access and information as data grows from “big” to “bigger.”
Data collection is taking place through new channels and on an unprecedented scales, but the quest for information is as old as myth. The unending search for more information, the building blocks of knowledge, is a central (and often problematic) part of being human. Our “infolust” is observed at individual and collective levels alike. It is this fraught relationship with data that myths can so powerfully probe — perhaps nowhere more than the story of Oedipus.
The Oedipal myth presents a dense narrative, weaving together diverse thematic and psychological strands. But it is Oedipus’ relationship with data, specifically, that makes the myth an urgent parable for contemporary society. Oedipus offers us moderns a cautionary tale, not only for nations pursuing security through data but also for individuals pursuing self-betterment by gluttonously over-stuffing ourselves with information.
Oedipus is well-suited for the third millennium. A recent compilation of course syllabi declared Sophocles’ Oedipus the King the most assigned drama in American colleges. On the printed page and backlit screens, Oedipus continues — if you’ll pardon the digital media expression — to grab eyes.
But the play’s position atop the literary canon hardly implies that the work is being understood for our time rather than for all time. For instance, when accounting for the protagonist’s tragic fall, educators regularly point to Oedipus’ hybris — whatever meaning that ethical catch-all still retains today. I would counter that it is intelligence, in both senses of that word, which is Oedipus’ defining feature and disastrous flaw.
Hailing from a decidedly non-digital age, Oedipus’ resume is not so different from what we might imagine from a security intelligence analyst today. Let’s start with the backstory: A startling revelation and a complicated misunderstanding with his parents prompt Oedipus, a brilliant though mocked and misunderstood loner, to set out on the road. In his wanderings Oedipus has some violent encounters, but arrives in Thebes composed enough to cut his teeth on a high-stakes game of public code-breaking.
At that moment, the Sphinx, a mashup of lion-bird-woman, has Thebes in thrall. Like all monsters, the Sphinx manifests a specific set of social anxieties — in this case, the human fear of the hidden, the unknown, the encrypted. In contrast to the adversaries of A-list heroes like Heracles or Odysseus, defeated through some combination of strength, strategy, or deception, the inscrutable Sphinx is overthrown by a simple password, the answer to the (now-famous) riddle: “What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening?
To crack this code, the youthful Oedipus consults no oracle and gathers no information. He reflects on his own life, his past and his future, to arrive at the correct answer: ‘Man,’ which is to say he who crawls as an infant, walks as an adult, and uses a cane in old age. A clever hacker who saves Thebes by unlocking the Sphinx, Oedipus is rewarded with the late king’s throne — a rise to executive power through intelligence shared, it may be pointed out, by the likes of Vladimir Putin and George H. W. Bush.
Many quiet years pass before, once again, there is something rotten in the state of Thebes. This time the danger is obscure: a supernatural plague descends on the city. The citizens, terrified by this vague but existential threat, rally around their head of state and former savior. At a loss for what might be causing the disaster, Oedipus sends a delegation led by his brother-in-law Creon to the oracle for divine intelligence from Apollo. The god’s response is clear: the late king Laius’ murderer still lives in Thebes, bringing pollution upon the city.
Receiving this intelligence, Oedipus is outraged by the state’s former response to this threat to executive power and vows to expose the murderer:
OEDIPUS: Your ruler had been murdered! What crisis
Could have kept you from a complete investigation?
CREON: The Sphinx. Her riddles made us set aside
That mystery; we had to deal with the trouble at hand…
OEDIPUS: Watch, as I join the fight for this land
As the god’s true instrument of vengeance.
I do not do this for some far-off cousin.
I have my own reasons for driving out this infection;
The killer, whoever it may be, could kill again
And lay those deadly hands on me. (128–131, 135–140)
(The Meineck and Woodruff translation is used throughout)
Oedipus immediately begins a public information gathering campaign:
OEDIPUS: I will make this decree to all of Thebes;
If any man knows who killed Laius, son of Labdacus,
I command him to disclose everything to me.
Do not fear that you will condemn yourself.
I offer amnesty and drop all charges —
Only exile, and you will leave this land unharmed.
Should anyone know that the murderer is a foreigner,
Let him not keep silent any longer… (223–230)
Though he tempers his decree with amnesty, Oedipus effectively serves a blanket subpoena upon Thebes. The myth speaks to a broader truth: facing a hidden threat from within, the state is eager to claim the right to all information. There can be, in the words of congressman Trey Gowdy (R-SC), no “evidence-free zones”.
Indeed, Oedipus is keenly aware of his executive prerogative. When the citizens of Thebes make the obvious request that the king inquire the specific name of the killer from Apollo, Oedipus balks:
CHORUS: As you request, sir, I will speak on oath:
I did not kill him, and I cannot name
The man who did. Apollo set us on this search;
Apollo should reveal the man who did this.
OEDIPUS: You are right, but there is not a man alive
Who can force the will of the gods. (276–281)
Couching his response in a display of humility, Oedipus blocks popular sentiment and centralizes intelligence within the confines of the state. Whether pious or calculating, Oedipus recognizes that if he cannot force the will of the gods, he can at least control the action of his subjects.
But as witnesses fail to come forward, Oedipus requests an audience with the blind prophet Tiresias. The seer’s opening words are pregnant with meaning:
TIRESIAS: Oh, it is a hateful thing to know, when nothing
Can be gained from knowledge. (316–317)
Tiresias lays bare the danger of intelligence, referring not only to his own condition but also the fate that soon awaits Oedipus. The prophet’s appearance marks a turning point in the narrative when Oedipus’ tireless need for more information begins to incapacitate him. Tiresias first demurs and then outright refuses Oedipus’ persistent requests for more knowledge, eliciting forceful backlash from the king.
Tiresias is in a difficult position indeed. While the real threat lies hidden, those who make a living by informing the state become targets as soon as they question the judgment, efficacy, or moral standing of their frustrated superiors. In the argument that ensues, Tiresias at last provides Oedipus with the whole truth — that he is his father’s murderer, his mother’s second husband. But by that point, Oedipus thinks he has already found the culprit, and this crucial piece of intelligence falls on deaf ears.
Oedipus accepts only information that conforms to what he seeks. This confirmation bias impels him to search ever more crudely and violently. Oedipus lobs wild accusations, seizing upon suppositions while abandoning facts. He threatens execution and uses force, even upon the elderly, to acquire more actionable intelligence.
Gone is the young upstart who defeated the Sphinx through introspection. Propped up by authority, Oedipus the king outsources his intelligence. He gathers data that is lightly processed and poorly weighed. He disregards current information from reliable sources in favor of outdated rumors, like a false report that Laius was murdered by a group rather than one man.
The realization of his identity, of course, comes too late for Oedipus. Some point to “Fate” or that overworked concept of hybris. But for me, the true source of Oedipus’ tragedy is his empirical fall from open-eyed introspection to a narrow, compulsive search for a preconceived notion of a threat. Even if we were to accept that Oedipus himself was doomed from the start, we cannot help but recognize the many sufferings he brought upon Thebes by refusing to know himself and come to terms with his own acts.
What can we take away from Oedipus’ failed relationship with intelligence? To begin, a correlation may be proposed: as the quantity of information available or potentially available grows, the data set increasingly becomes what analysts call “flat” and undifferentiated. Abstracted from its original context, the unique qualities and special applicability of any given piece of information becomes lost.
But the flaw was not simply to be found in the quantity or quality of his information. The Siren song of data itself lured Oedipus into the rocks. In his quest to pick up any and all cold leads, Oedipus failed to take into account key events of Laius’ murder — its timing and circumstances — he himself had known from the very beginning. It’s tempting to believe more information provides more answers, but there are occasions when insight comes instead from a deeper engagement with information already available, seen from a new perspective or in a new light.
Rather than smugly look down upon the tragic hero, we might ask ourselves: are we, or are we becoming, Oedipus? Big data is the nostrum of our time, the culmination of a self-styled information age. Ours is an epoch of digital empiricism, where arguments are not just tested but also conceived through massive data sets. As artificial intelligence increasingly uses algorithms to comb big data, it is becoming a tautology to talk separately of information and knowledge. Are we falling into the Oedipal trap?
In spite of its innumerable points of contact with our breathing world, the parallel data-universe is, of course, only a simulacrum — or, to exchange Greek for Latin, an eidolon. This data-verse is plastic, fungible, and abstracted; it is built to be searched, crunched, scaled, and stored. To know data is not, ipso facto, to know truth.
Big data holds out the promise of making a hopelessly complex world legible. It is our successor to the ancient Greek prophet, the fulfillment of the Enlightenment bureaucrat’s dreams now firmly under the technocrat’s thumb. To borrow James C. Scott’s phrase, big data allows its analysts to “see like a state” — to organize information and, with it, society.
But if scale is the source of big data’s strength, it is also its vulnerability. Not only is tremendous computing power and space needed simply to process the exabytes of information floating through the internet, a so-called “dark web” of encrypted data lies just outside the searchlight. There will always be more information for us to desire to compute.
Access to user information and, increasingly, big data has proven attractive to police and government security organizations seeking to leverage the scale of digital search to narrow lists of potential real-world threats. As the San Bernardino iPhone case most recently illustrates, tech companies have publicly rejected calls from government agencies to insert “encryption backdoors.” Even so, in January 2016 NSA director Michael Rogers, FBI director James Comey, and other top government officials met with Silicon Valley executives to discuss, among other things, the creation of social media algorithms used to determine whether an individual may be undergoing violent radicalization.
Law and national security policy experts like Karen Greenberg optimistically suggest that judicial circumspection will put a human check on, for instance, the inevitable false positives arising from such a proposed “terrorist algorithm”. But we may still worry that, by quantifying a highly individuated experience (and constitutionally protected right) like radicalization, we reify, rather than address, our fears.
Nor should we assume that we know what the face of terror will look like. The bête-noir of Islamist terrorism provides a powerful rallying cry for saber-rattling politicians. But as several real American tragedies in the last year have shown, ideologically inspired mass shooters come in all stripes. Often the enemy comes from within.
Even if few of us share in the ecstatic technoutopianism occasionally spouted in Silicon Valley, collectively we have placed a quasi-religious faith in data-driven technology. Classicists should not be surprised: this is, after all, not the first time humanity has located a superior, all-knowing entity in a Cloud. Buoyed in our daily lives by the conveniences of technology’s swift rise, it is today’s creed that bigger data makes better knowledge — that is to say, knowledge that is more accurate, more exhaustive, more useful in obtaining our ends.
Wearing FitBits and AppleWatches, we amass data to make our bodies and habits more legible. But when will we become more preoccupied with our FitBit count than the real (if metaphorical) steps taken to know ourselves? Such data is already distracting us — at what point will our infolust overwhelm us? Personal biometrics is a nascent field and it is only a matter of time before the “little data” produced by these instruments becomes “big data” to be crunched. The benefits of these devices are obvious and substantial. The unintended consequences will have to be seen.
As a result, a peculiar understanding of the Delphic command to “know thyself” is being heeded as never before in 2016. And yet many of us today do not practice the sort of deep introspection with which the young Oedipus successfully banished the Sphinx. Empowered and distracted by our technology, we seek a newer brand of self-knowledge through data. Let’s just see that it doesn’t blind us.
Al Duncan is Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the views of the Paideia Institute.
