For Good Measure: When Opinion Is Data

Obvious to all, the sea of data is rising. It’s a remarkable thing really. Even if all you can remember is 10 years back, the comparison of "then" with "now" is pretty startling. No, that does not qualify as news, but to reparse Orwell’s "Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present, controls the past," the data "we" collect now is what will soon enough become the past for a data-driven world. If that data past comes to exert a force in some sort of proportion to its volume, is there, or will there be, any room for mere human opinion?