The political data firm Cambridge Analytica has been accused of unauthorised “data harvesting” from millions of Facebook accounts. This handily avoids allegations of “theft” or even just “mining”, but why the agricultural metaphor?
The harvest is the collection of ripe crops in the autumn, which has its own church festival: we gratefully collect what the all-powerful has put there for us. This sense of gathering up what is natural persists in the talk of “harvesting” cells in biological experiments (from 1946), but has become irreparably perverted in the euphemistic use of “harvesting” to mean hunting whales. “Data harvesting” itself emerged from scientific information management in the late 90s, and soon became a buzzphrase for online marketers. In other words, data harvesting is about as old as the modern web, and might even be viewed as its entire purpose.
If something is “harvested”, it must spring, like wheat, from a renewable source. And so, as long as we continue trustingly to tell the tech giants everything about ourselves, the harvest will be fruitful for the dark farmers of our digital lives. After all, you reap what you sow.
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