Generic discussion of digital data systems and complexity without specific allegations

ability to plug into and share with one another is the essence of their power.!!6 Your data-enabled phone or camera or database or stock-trading program is easy and powerful to use because so much of the world’s data - your Sigur Ros songs, your home movies, your skin temprature — can be reduced to ones and zeros, freed for fast transmission, endless storage and quick analysis.!1” A machine that can blithely handle digital inputs of one sort, whether it is trading orders or music files, has the capacity, in theory, to work with any data. Such adjustability is what forces app companies, gaming businesses, or phone companies onto an exhausting treadmill of constant upgrade. Interaction between the pieces of a system, every bit as much as design or mechanical manipulation, is the reason why change happens.!!8 Entrepreneurs mix GPS and phones to create a new business of tracking everything from our cars to our children. Algorithmic trading programs engineer completely virtual portfolios - you can buy the S&P Index but as your manager to strip out any performance from tobacco and gun companies, for instance. Or: Terrorists meet online and swap data. Some of the most astonishing systems of our new world have grown up this way. Google’s back-end search systems, for instance, were not “top- down” designed so much as they emerged, competed and evolved to deliver once- unimaginable loads of data. No one at Google is “The Architect.” There is no central approval for technology systems. Complexity and unpredictability and emergence are regarded as the best way to grow. 119 Long before the idea of a smart phone or 3D goggles, the British mathematician Alan Turing anticipated their arrival when he dreamed of what he called a “universal device”!2°: A notional box that, starting from the ones and zeros of digitized data, could be constructed to do anything. Since everything can ultimately be reduced to a binary encoding, nearly any sort of data can be shared, studied, combined or remixed. This easy programmability of so many objects around us now is why our world now is more complex than, say, a world of interconnected rail cars or ships might have been. Rail cars and ships don’t change much, and certainly not instantly. In the digital world, however, many of the most essential objects and nodes can be flipped around like digital Lego, connected in different ways. And because they are increasingly “always on”, they are also always changing and adjusting to what happens elsewhere on the network. This is true for some new operating system dumped onto your phone that makes it more intelligent as it is for an algorithm placed into a commodity market that causes unexpected chaos. 116 In fact; Paul Phister, “Cyberspace: The Ultimate Complex Adaptive System”, The International C2 Journal, Vol 4, No. 2 2010-2011 117 Your data-enabled phone: Gershenson, p4 118 Interaction between: Paul Dourish, Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001) 4 119 Complexity and unpredictability: Randy Shoup speech “Service architectures at scale: Lessons from Google and Ebay”, on infoq.com, July 14, 2015 120 Long before: S. B. Cooper and J. Van Leeuwen, Alan Turing: His Work and Impact. (Waltham, MA: Elsevier, 2013) 87 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018319