In most things related to data gathering, I’m much like James C. Scott: data organizing is a means for control. Google is definitionally evil, looking through this lens; there’s no other way to think of the mass scale manipulation of human behavior via advertising that their “organize the world’s data” mission leads to (all for the product! (side note – it took switching back to Google Search in a Brave browser private tab to find that link; DuckDuckGo is a much less effective search engine)).
There is a light side to data, and it’s like the light side that organizations which can be easily exited have: when a large group of people mutually agree to a goal, data and its visibility help get that goal met. Or at least this is the hope. Perhaps data dulls the emotional responses that cause people to get fired up and change shit around. I’m not sure. But when there is a supposedly mild issue (let’s say air pollution in Madison, Wisconsin), perhaps granular data can lead to conclusively powerful stories that might persuade, change norms & rules, and ultimately change behaviors.
If I could show that the particulate matter in the air when the methane burning garbage dump was an unreasonably high level on certain days in certain places, I could definitively write stories (and maybe poems) about the harm said methane burning garbage dump was causing. Or the busy intersection with cars accelerating through it unreasonably quickly and dumping their gaseous diarrhea into the lungs of the biker waiting to cross perpendicular.
Such data could be gathered by bicycle- and walker- and car- and house-mounted sensors that are continuously measuring air quality and pollutant levels. Then, by time and specific location, one could dig through and figure out where things are the spikiest (meaning the lung canceriest) and set to work identifying the causes, then telling the stories in the right forums to get changes made in public policy, corporate shame-based action changing, and lawsuits.
Pollution Resollution Recipe
Five hundred thousand parts dollar (granted and/or donated)Three thousand parts sensor (sourced as cheaply with yet high accuracy)One hundred parts acre (choose a map segment well)Forty parts analysis-hoursThree parts visualizationOne part narrativeThirty parts weekly storiesTen parts city council sessionsTwo parts lawsuits against pollutersThree parts traffic flow changes & blockersOne part social movement (with concomitant corporate shaming)
I’m looking for the first ingredient, for a few friends that live on about a hundred acres.
Roman Ryan 