HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018390.jpg

gatekeepers. They can, if they wish, manipulate any step of life inside their enclosed orbs of power - and by extension, they can twist data and machines and you. The line between perverting search results and election results is a thin one. Such a manipulation of data is trivial, which means the manipulation of you and 1 is, technically at least, trivial. It involves the laying of our preferences - what do we usually read, watch, who do we talk to, where do we live - against machine logic and vast data fields. Manipulation of data = Manipulation of us. The idea of gatekeeping first emerged as it related to newspapers, back in the 1920s when politicians, advertisers and a few social scientists watched a print-information explosion - and developed an uneasy feeling about how the world looked through many newspapers. The personal whims of an editor, his political bent, his boss’ economic interest - all of these laid on “facts” like a heavy distorting blanket. Minor twitches were turned into fear-mongering bait. Major global shifts were ignored. The papers are (nearly) gone now, of course. And the idea of gatekeepers merely bending headlines to suit a personal whim seems charmingly nostalgic. Gatekeepers today have a far more profound, subtle reach. They might be governments or regulators or CEOs or machines or research committees, each controlling the design and development of some “rich get richer” tool we depend on and - by marking that “in or out” line - exerting historic, invisible control. Genetic engineering secrets. Unthrottled data flows. Product releases. Do you want accurate DNA analysis? Fast protection from epidemic? A cyber-defense system? You can’t have any of these, you know, unless you’re in someone’s fiercely guarded gateland. Even systems that look open - the Internet, the world of US Dollar transactions, the election rolls - are gated in certain ways. Of course there is - at times — a balance between the gatekeepers and the gatekept, between those of us inside a system and the tools and people who overmaster us. “In many cases, traditional literature focuses mainly on gatekeepers as elites who hold power in their hands while the gated are treated as powerless,” the information theorist Karine Nahon has written. “In networks, however, it is necessary to give sufficient weight to the role of the gated, since being subject to gatekeeping does not imply that the gated are powerless, lack alternatives, or that gatekeeping is forced on them. Actually, being a gated sometimes is a matter of choice.”229 But sometimes, of course, it is also a matter of inarguable necessity. In the slower, less wired worlds of our past, gates mattered too of course. Nations, governments, militaries, religious orders - all of these clustered behind (and defended) marked lines. Map lines, front lines, dogmatic lines. The Triple Entente that bound Britain, France and Russia together in the last century was as mucha gated system for their own security as the Peloponnesian League 2500 years earlier had been. Deciding who could swap silk for spice beyond the Tang Dynasty’s border was a gatekeeping choice, as consequential for Chinese strategists of the 8" Century as the decision about what might or might not be wheeled into the city was for the 230 “In many cases”: Karine Barzilai-Nahon, “Toward a theory of network gatekeeping: A framework for exploring information control.” Journal of the America Society for Information Science 59(9), 1493-1512. 158 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018390