This week, Futures is delighted to welcome back João Ramalho-Santos with his new story Data. A biologist based in Coimbra, Portugal, João has previously written stories for us called Emancipation, Variants, Manifesto and Invisible. Here, he reveals the inspiration behind his latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.
Writing Data
There are two angles to discuss the writing of Data in my mind. One is very short, has nothing to do with the actual story itself, and doesn’t matter much. But here it is anyway: it was written a good while back, sent out, lost in the ether somewhere, and then accepted in a totally unexpected way. In checking the proofs I read it again as a prodigal story returned, and noted the similarities in thought process to the excellent Black Mirror episode Hang the DJ’, which I saw months after submitting.
At this point readers should dutifully roll their eyes and sarcastically intone “yeah, sure buddy”. Regardless, this could be the aftermath of that type of scenario, the sad demise of one of the very few non-successful matches — with, and that is the second aspect (more) worth discussing, the adding in of a lot of Big Data considerations mostly focusing on biochemical and molecular biology aspects related to health, metabolism and ageing. Projects I am involved in were, as always, part of the actual ‘scientific’ triggers for the story. That and my interest in baseball as the most relaxing thing before ASMR videos, and constant befuddlement at how advanced statistical analysis (sabermetrics) are used almost blindly to manage teams and games. Stay out of football, please.
As all buzzwords in science (some useful, most not and mere gimmicks created for funding or blatantly political purposes — I know, shocking) suddenly everyone I was collaborating with, in all fields, was working the concept of Big Data and analysis of large data sets into their research. Add that to wearable devices that monitor (and can broadcast) all sorts of things in real time, cameras everywhere (check out The Circle by Dave Eggers, don’t bother with the movie), endless clouds of data storage, clear hacking opportunities, and the unending metrics we still cannot shake… To be completely honest, I felt the need to write in some more obviously ridiculous aspects (BDSM, anyone…?), as it seemed that the immediate plausibility index was higher than I usually like… Of course, another way of looking at it is that ridiculous/dangerous aspects almost always result from well-intentioned (or less so) initiatives to ‘help’ people that involve numerical-based reasoning and (now paperless) paperwork.
However, if the European Union ever launches a Marie Sklodowska Curie Action for the Training of Indigent Researchers (on better fundraising/panhandling strategies, sign-writing workshops, finding cheap lodging alternatives, good dumpster-diving practices and NGO assessment), I will officially consider myself a futurologist. I might even apply.