As I reassess my career as a database and API specialist in this Trumpian age I am thinking deeply about how our computational need to categorize and organize things into databases, so that we can help thend to actually reflect some much more deep seated authoritarian tendencies present in our American society. I have read numerous stories lately about how categorizing and standing up a database and even an API begins from a desire to help a group of people, but then it quickly becomes about controlling, pressing, and even disappearing the same group—-with no better example than our own indigenous population in the United States.
The United States Census began in this country in part to label, categorize, and document the indigenous population in this country, so we can help them. IBM emerged as a company out of this need, using punchcards and early analog compute to organize and count Americans, including indigenous who we’d soon round up and force off their land, and then force their children into boarding school for further programming. Punchcards, databases, and work that would eventually lead to aggregating or completely disappearing the indigenous within the physical world, as well as via popular culture in movies, television, and the stories mainstream Americans would consume.
I think a lot about how something we label, and then categorize and organize via a database isn’t always about making something more visible. There is something abut rendering something to what can be expressed as a punchcard, or via a database, can just as easily render something invisible, unseen, and isolated from mainstream view. Databases allow us to easily take some very messy and misunderstood aspects of being human and distill it down into a known and manageable schema, and aggregated data points. The goal is often to normalize our understanding so we can then stop seeing the nuance and detail of something and assimilate it into the mainstream, or move it out of the way to some remote region outside the popular imagination.
During my fifteen years working to making our digital resources and capabilities expressed via databases and APIs more visible I have also learned their super power in abstracting away what actually makes us human. At the beginning of this century I was almost always champion the creation of a database to track almost anything, as well as making the data available to a known audience via APIs. Now, I am painfully aware of how this is often used to define and showcase a group of people or a slice of our culture to initially help, but then it quickly becomes about exploitation of the very people we set out to help. It’s a topsy turvy world where up is down and good is bad. Now, all databases and APIs are suspect, until proven otherwise.
