Your data is s**t

Abstract

Personal data is the chief commercial and informatic industrial raw material of the last forty years. But as an almost universal daily excretion composed of body with environment (personal with non-personal data), so much personal data is shit. This note addresses a data metaphor that seeks to explain and situate personal data and the data subject socially, politically, economically, and legally. Data models do not want messiness (shit) or inefficiency, only simple and logical input/output risk defiant certainties concerning population types and cohorts. But tending to the growing hot heaps of data involves an expanding complex of systems, networks, frameworks, rules, mechanisms, policies, and ideologies of governance and governmentality, both on- and offline. I call this complex a shitshow. Strategies for individuals, organizations, and economies are of paramount interest and concern as each attempt to navigate the shitshow. Echoing the work of Dominique Laporte, I consider how the shitshow leads to data hygiene practices for managing storage, cleansing, and refinement of shit data, and, increasingly, to extract profit from it.