notational:

barelyconcealednuance:

The Tyranny of Edward Tufte

1. Collect all the data
2. Design all the data with integrity
3. ???
4. Achieve universal knowledge and understanding

When Edward Tufte tweets mockingly of the leaked NSA slides, he does so as the self-anointed king of presenting evidence. Empiricism’s head cheerleader, he has built an empire on telling everyone—lowly marketer to NASA bigwig—what Truth looks like.

And we eat it up.

But he has also perpetuated a culture where power is held by those with the data. As we shift our appreciation for discourse to those with the willingness and know-how to compress communication into bits and bytes of data-visualization and infographics, to what dangers do we open ourselves up? Do we move towards a future where we communicate solely via visualization, swap talking for looking, and seek to represent our own nuanced belief systems with universal iconography?

Perhaps, when he’s done critiquing the PRISM’s big green arrows, Dr. Tufte can realize that he helped get us into this mess to begin with.

Vote for this SXSW 2013 panel here.

Indeed.

This is probably the most compelling-sounding SXSW panel I’ve heard of since circa-2001.