[D66] Dirty Data

[René Oudeweg]

"Jacques Rancière tells a mythical story about how the separation of
signal and noise might have been accomplished in Ancient Greece. Sounds
produced by affluent male locals were defined as speech, whereas women,
children, slaves, and foreigners were assumed to produce garbled noise.
The distinction between speech and noise served as a kind of political
spam filter. Those identified as speaking were labeled citizens and the
rest as irrelevant, irrational, and potentially dangerous nuisances.
Similarly, today, the question of separating signal and noise has a
fundamental political dimension. Pattern recognition resonates with the
wider question of political recognition. Who is recognized on a
political level and as what? As a subject? A person? A legitimate
category of the population? Or perhaps as “dirty data”? "

https://www.e-flux.com/journal/72/60480/a-sea-of-data-apophenia-and-pattern-mis-recognition/