Sacred Excess: Organizational Ignorance in an Age of Toxic Data
论文提出数据密集型产业中的组织通过过度生产数据来有意制造和维持无知，这种对数据过剩的崇拜类似于图腾宗教中的集体欢腾，使组织围绕无知而非知识来构建自身。
Actors in data-intensive industries at times deliberately induce and reproduce organizational ignorance by engaging in over-production of data. This observation leads the paper to make two claims. First, members of these industries fetishize data excess not in order to reduce, but in order to reproduce and stabilize organizational ignorance. Second, in this process of fetishization, organizational ignorance gives rise to forms of collective effervescence similar to that found in totemistic religions. This effervescence allows organizational actors to draw defining lines around that which is marked as awe-inspiring, dangerous and off-limits, namely the sacred. In reviewing organizational ignorance from the perspective of the sacred, this paper proposes that, paradoxically, contemporary forms of data creation allow companies and industries to organize themselves around ignorance as opposed to the promise of knowledge and insight. The paper uses this theoretical proposal in order to outline the contours of an alternative ontology of organizational ignorance, one that understands this phenomenon in terms of excessive presence of data and information.