The Contest between Information and Uncertainty

IF 1.1 2区社会学 Q2 ANTHROPOLOGY

Public Culture Pub Date : 2023-11-02 DOI:10.1215/08992363-10742579

Joy Rohde

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Abstract This article argues that the Cold War-era battle between information and uncertainty is a critical origin point for contemporary social theory-informed, dataintensive projects of the US national security state. Beginning in the 1950s, international relations experts and government officials turned to digital computing to help make decisions under the unavoidable pressures of geopolitical uncertainty. By the 1970s, their data banks of political knowledge and novel statistical tools purported to forecast political unrest long before an unaided human could. These efforts sparked a new epistemology of political knowledge, one that is now common in data science, in which designers and users prioritize correlation over causality and the instrumental management of problems over scholarly understanding or explanation. Far from a historical curiosity, this history is a warning. The sensibilities of Cold War technopolitical projects are continually rematerialized in contemporary computational security projects. Left unchallenged, their durability will continue to increase in tandem with the national security state's continued investment in computational social scientific projects for geopolitical management.

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信息与不确定性之间的竞争

摘要本文认为，冷战时期的信息与不确定性之间的斗争是当代美国国家安全国家的社会理论信息和数据密集型项目的关键起源点。从20世纪50年代开始，国际关系专家和政府官员转向数字计算，以帮助在地缘政治不确定性的不可避免的压力下做出决策。到20世纪70年代，他们的政治知识数据库和新颖的统计工具声称，在没有帮助的人类预测政治动荡之前，他们就能预测政治动荡。这些努力引发了一种新的政治知识认识论，这种认识论现在在数据科学中很常见，在这种认识论中，设计师和用户优先考虑相关性而不是因果关系，优先考虑问题的工具管理而不是学术理解或解释。这段历史绝不是历史珍品，而是一个警告。冷战时期技术政治项目的敏感性在当代计算安全项目中不断重现。如果不受到挑战，随着国家安全部门对地缘政治管理的计算社会科学项目的持续投资，它们的耐用性将继续增加。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Public Culture Multiple-

CiteScore

2.10

自引率

6.70%

发文量

期刊介绍： Public Culture is a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal of cultural studies, published three times a year—in January, May, and September. It is sponsored by the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, NYU. A four-time CELJ award winner, Public Culture has been publishing field-defining ethnographies and analyses of the cultural politics of globalization for over thirty years. The journal provides a forum for the discussion of the places and occasions where cultural, social, and political differences emerge as public phenomena, manifested in everything from highly particular and localized events in popular or folk culture to global advertising, consumption, and information networks. Artists, activists, and scholars, both well-established and younger, from across the humanities and social sciences and around the world, present some of their most innovative and exciting work in the pages of Public Culture.