Markets for Good: Information Infrastructure. pdf
Driven by Gates & Co. from Headquarters
What we need is a real critique of the underlying assumptions. Seeing like a State and Discipline and Punish come to mind. “Knowledge/Power” is Foucault’s way to expressing the connection between Big Data, as we now call it and top down control by technocrats who demand a simplification of reality, including the most personal side of life, so that it fits into a database and can be managed by the numbers.
What the Information Infrastructure report sees as “Unstructured Knowledge” that needs correcting and systematizing is actually personal knowledge, intimate knowledge, tacit knowledge, skill, knack, craft, practical wisdom, the embodied knowledge of professionals (doctors, teachers, farmers, tradesman, nonprofit volunteer) that can only be acquired through long apprenticeship and is exercised face to face within a cascade of information that is seen, felt, addressed with a practiced sensibility.
By accepting as final and definitive (as all inclusive and fundamental) the terminology of Results, and the Big Data, and protocols and managers from above that comes with it, the previously, autonomous expert or volunteer becomes the drone managed by the MBA from Home Office, Data Central, Foundation Headquarters.
So the social sector, the citizen sector, the independent sector, the voluntary sector, becomes another field to be managed like an industrial poultry farm, or an HMO, or school under No Student Left Behind.
Still, if this is where the money is, I am reporting for duty. Just show me the forms, give me the passwords and protocols, and the data taxonomy, and the authority, an ID card, maybe a badge or some kind of baton, and the incentives, and I can help you demand whatever must be demanded from the peasants. Could I have a driver for my car? That way I can do the paperwork effectively and efficiently while touring the villages we conquer, routinize, standardize, liberate, and improve. Markets for Good could be on the little flags on my desk. We could use them as pins on the map, in the War Room, showing where we have Done Most Good and mopped up the resistance.
