Death By Data

On Mondays, I like to start the week with breakfast and coffee at Elemar’s Cafe in the village near my house.

It’s a lovely spot - a ramshackle upstart of a dining establishment run by an Italian chef and his wife (or, increasingly as it seems to me, an Italian wife and her chef).

It’s barely decorated - they only had a door installed in the autumn - and they play old Italian jazz and swing music.

The wife is incredibly lovely while the chef constantly complains about how bad business is and looks like he is permanently on the verge of a stress-induced heart attack.

They serve Italian food at awkward times that nobody really wants - Sicilian pasties, fresh pasta, homemade lasagne, and deep-pan pizza.

It’s delicious, but entirely inappropriate on a rainy Monday morning near Stockport.

They don’t seem to realize this, and you can see that each time someone comes in and inevitably orders a full English breakfast, they die a little inside.

This morning, as I was losing at online chess in the corner of the cafe, my interest was piqued upon overhearing their discussion with a middle-aged Scottish man who had grey designer stubble and a trendy orange beanie hat.

‘You’re busy this morning,’ he asked, with vague surprise in his voice.

‘Yes,’ the chef replied. It took him a second to find the complaint he was looking for.

‘It is very difficult. Business is very slow sometimes and very busy other times. I will hire a waitress and nobody will come in, and then on other days, it will just be me in the cafe and suddenly we will be full. I can’t get the food out on time and everybody complains.’

You could almost see the Scottish man’s eyes light up through the back of his head.

‘So, you don’t really know your customers and their habits then?’

He said it in the same slow, lilting voice with a rising inflection at the end that my mother uses when talking to taxi drivers on holiday.

He went on: ‘I’m a data analyst. We work with businesses to build AI models that predict the habits of their customers. They refine themselves over weeks and months by testing their prediction against the actual customer footfall until the software knows with incredible accuracy just how busy the business is likely to be on any given day and at any given time.’

He might as well have been speaking Mandarin to a hedgehog.

The wife served him his coffee and he left, though not without quickly (and smugly) reminding her that ‘knowing your customers inside out is crucial’.

He’s probably right.

But if Elemar’s Cafe became the sort of cafe that used artificial intelligence to predict customer footfall, I can almost guarantee you that everything else I currently like about the place would also have disappeared.

Imperfection is charming; it’s human.

Plus, the insights you get from ‘data’ aren’t always what they’re cracked up to be.

The analytics section of my Spotify for Artists account, for example, tells me that a large chunk of my listenership are middle-aged men.

(Thanks, guys.)

Which, as you can imagine, is slightly disappointing because like every other man who has ever picked up a guitar and learned to play it, I mainly did so in the hope that it’d one day increase my chances of sleeping with attractive women.

Should I, then, work harder to craft a musical identity that appeals more to attractive women?

It’s tempting.

But, like if Elemar’s Cafe hired a data analyst, I’d then cease to be what I am.

And, almost definitionally, that’s the only thing that I’ll ever be any good at being.

Though I may be at risk of sounding like a 21st-century Luddite, I’m tired of the way technology has been able to reduce the human experience to traceable metrics in so many different ways.

I’m constantly checking my social media accounts to see how unpopular I am, my bank account to see how broke I am, and the numbers next to my songs on streaming services to see how unsuccessful I am.

It’s exhausting and pointless and it doesn’t actually impinge on reality which, in actual fact, is lovely.

Knowing that 400 people streamed my music yesterday, whereas only 350 did today doesn’t do anything to alter the fabric of my life (beyond the sharp prod it can give my mood in either direction).

Real progress is slow; change takes time; building a future is a journey of a thousand tiny steps.

In my former life as a secondary school teacher, educational trends would come and go, much like cultural ones.

The profession would lean one way, overbalance, and correct itself by shifting back in the other direction.

When I trained to be a teacher, there was an unhealthy obsession with what was called ‘assessment for learning’.

A hip educational academic with an earring had coined the term, and we new teachers were hammered with it every day.

In every lesson, you needed to find regular, reliable ways of checking how much progress each pupil was making.

The logic was that if you couldn’t prove that pupils had absorbed the information you gave them in the first ten minutes of a lesson, how could you possibly be confident in providing them with more, potentially more complex information over the next ten minutes?

The results were that classrooms across the country were suddenly awash with multicoloured post-it notes, traffic light stickers, and complex hand-raising routines that teachers would have to use to get the kids to self-assess their own understanding every five minutes before they could move on.

You don’t need to be a genius to see the drawbacks here.

Firstly, human beings - especially teenagers who are entirely disinterested in what you’re trying to teach them in the first place - aren’t good at assessing their own understanding (or taking such requests seriously).

Ironically, you have to understand something pretty well in order to accurately understand how well you understand it.

Secondly, messing about with post-it notes and traffic light stickers all day in order to ‘check progress’ doesn’t leave much time for actually teaching anyone anything.

It feels like a decent analogy for my life at the moment.

I’m hoping that, like the Italian couple who run Elemar’s Cafe, I’ll get a little better at serving the Scottish data analyst his coffee and then raising my eyebrows as he walks back out the door.

In other words; I’ll do a little less checking and a little more living.

Keep dreaming,

Rob