Data & Dreams

Me:chine, before I had the word

I have been looking back over my work, trying to understand how one idea led to the next, and I have just realised something that now seems completely obvious.

Data and dreams was Me:chine before I had the word Me:chine.

On 15 November 2016, I gave a talk called "Timing Is Everything" at TEDxWhitehallWomen, at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office in London. It was about time, decision-making and our relationship with the future. I said then that "the future is one of the best decision-making tools we've got."

What worried me was the acceleration of the present. Everything was becoming immediate, on demand, automatic. Under enough time pressure, I argued, we tend either to act on impulse or to outsource the decision. And more and more, I said, we would outsource it not simply to somebody else but to "something else like an algorithm."

This was 2016.

My answer was not that we should slow everything down. It was this: "I'm not arguing for taking more time. What I am arguing for is seeing more time." Seeing more horizons. Holding the present and the future together. Staying capable of imagining what could happen next, rather than merely reacting to what is happening now.

And I ended with: "The past can give us data, but only the future can give us our dreams." We should not rely only on big data for our big decisions, I said, but on our big dreams too.

Nearly ten years later, I can see the structure far more clearly.

Data looks backwards in order to infer forwards. It works with traces, patterns, behaviour and probabilities. It is enormously useful, and it is also the material from which machines now build their understanding of us.

Dreams work differently. They are not evidence of what has already happened. They can bring in something that is not yet in the record: imagination, desire, a future that cannot simply be extrapolated from the past.

That is the tension I now describe through Me:chine. Not because data simply equals machine and dreams simply equal human. The relationship is more interesting than that. But data belongs strongly to the machinable side of the self, to what can be captured, classified, inferred and acted on. Dreams point towards what that account can never exhaust: the person who can still imagine otherwise.

That is what the colon in Me : chine holds open. It is the space between what can be known about me and what I might still become. Between pattern and possibility. Between the evidence of the person I have been and the future I have not yet lived.

And suddenly I can hear the same argument in the little Me:chine poem:

Not a war between man and machine,
but a meeting of selves.
The part that can be copied,
and the part that never can.

That is a data-and-dreams poem.

The point was never to reject the data. In 2016, I was saying: do not let data make the whole decision; leave room for dreams. Today I would say: do not confuse the machinable account of a person with the whole person. Same instinct, different technological moment.

Perhaps that is why Me:chine has always felt less like an idea I suddenly invented and more like something I eventually found the right name for.

Data and dreams → machinable and unmachinable → Me:chine

Or, more simply:

The past gives us patterns.
The future gives us possibilities.
The self has to live between them.

That space between is still where I want to be.