Author: Caitlin C. Rosenthal via Made by History on February 18, 2019

What happens when [people simply] crunch data and [use it to] offer advice?

Surprisingly, the history of American and Atlantic slavery offers insight into this question. Running a slave plantation involved lots of data carefully entered into paper spreadsheets and reports that were passed along to absentee owners in England. From the comfort of counting rooms, plantation owners could review this data without having to think too hard about the people it represented.

Some planters received standardized reports every month from their sugar plantations in Jamaica and Barbados. These careful records tracked the daily tasks of the hundreds (sometimes thousands) of people they enslaved, all with an eye to maximizing profits. The accounts monitored the output of plantations as well as the “increase” and “decrease” of laborers, slaveholders’ chilling economic shorthand for births and deaths.

When you understand the context of these records — high mortality, punishing slave labor, racialized violence — the records are horrifying. But without that context, they erase as much as they reveal. They look like antiquarian versions of Excel spreadsheets. And, absent a moral perspective, the productivity enabled by data-driven analysis could be seen not as a marker of degradation but of progress.

Planters in the American South also entered data into early versions of spreadsheets. The most sophisticated among them monitored enslaved people’s productivity in gridded journals, collecting data on the pace of cotton production. They tracked cotton picking on an individual basis, weighing output as many as three times per day. The surviving account books from these plantations contain thousands of data points. Even as the data illuminated productivity, it obscured other aspects of plantation life. It hid the immense human costs of slavery.

Plantation owners could pore over data looking for opportunities to tweak production and increase profits without thinking much about the violence of the system. In a sense, slaveholders’ reports were dashboards that synthesized information into [what management consultants usually call] “key performance indicators” so that owners could monitor assets from afar. They could manage assets and maximize value without considering the horrifying violence of plantation life. They could calculate how to accelerate production without considering the exploitative conditions that made this speedup possible. Or ponder how to increase efficiency without dwelling on the synergies between their calculations and the overseer’s whip.

The ease with which this happened offers a cautionary tale for modern business. It is all too easy to overlook and excuse immoral contexts. When consultants arrive at clients’ offices, they scoop up data and parse it to make recommendations. They analyze spreadsheets full of numbers that represent people — people whom, for the most part, they will never meet.

Considering data at a distance makes it perilously easy to overlook the stories the data does not tell. What would a strategic management consultancy have done if they had been handed the data of wealthy slaveholders? Would they have suggested ways to tweak profits? Or perhaps recommended lobbying Congress to prevent abolition? Hopefully not.

But history suggests making the right decision in circumstances like this is immensely difficult. It requires looking beyond the data and considering the broader context.

Link to Bunk version here: https://www.bunkhistory.org/collections/q7fffk/resources/3878