Way back in the 19th century, Friedrich Nietzsche argued that truth was impossible and the best we could hope for was to work in the realm of interpretation. “There are no facts,” he declared at various times (with variant wordings) in his career, because for the German-Swiss philosopher at least, there was no such thing as ‘absolute truth’.
Here in the 21st century, Mark Shepard has borrowed Nietzsche’s famous words for the title of his analysis of ‘attentive algorithms, extractive data and the quantification of everyday life’. It’s a provocative use of the quotation because we tend to think that our digital ecosystem based on zeros and ones must be ‘true’ to work properly. But you can see why it appealed to Shepard because, that same technology has accelerated the spread of information and data in our post-truth world, where objective facts seem to be secondary to opinion and feelings.
A rare crossover between technology and philosophy, ‘There Are No...