What would happen if we made all of our data public—everything from

wearables monitoring our biometrics, all the way to smartphones

monitoring our location, our social media activity, and even our internet
search history?
Would such insights into our lives simply provide companies and politicians
with greater power to invade our privacy and manipulate us by using our
psychological profiles against us?
A burgeoning new philosophy called dataism doesn’t think so.
In fact, this trending ideology believes that liberating the flow of data is the
supreme value of the universe, and that it could be the key to unleashing
the greatest scientific revolution in the history of humanity.

What Is Dataism?
First mentioned by David Brooks in his 2013 New York Times article “The
Philosophy of Data,” dataism is an ethical system that has been most heavily
explored and popularized by renowned historian, Yuval Noah Harari.
In his 2016 book Homo Deus, Harari described dataism as a new form of
religion that celebrates the growing importance of big data.
Its core belief centers around the idea that the universe gives greater value
and support to systems, individuals, and societies that contribute most
heavily and efficiently to data processing. In an interview with Wired, Harari
stated, “Humans were special and important because up until now they
were the most sophisticated data processing system in the universe, but this
is no longer the case.”
Now, big data and machine learning are proving themselves more
sophisticated, and dataists believe we should hand over as much
information and power to these algorithms as possible, allowing the free
flow of data to unlock innovation and progress unlike anything we’ve ever
seen before.
Pros: Progress and Personal Growth
When you let data run freely, it’s bound to be mixed and matched in new
ways that inevitably spark progress. And as we enter the exponential future
where every person is constantly connected and sharing their data, the
potential for such collaborative epiphanies becomes even greater.