Vulnerability, Crises, and the Rise of ‘Big Data’

The rise of Big Data in societies today present new and unique challenges to individual vulnerability. Increasingly, the accumulation of big data – and its accompanying privacy violations – can be seen in the analytical framework of a ‘creeping crisis’. A creeping crisis is a threat to shared societal values or life-sustaining systems that evolves over time and space, is foreshadowed by precursor events, is subject to varying degrees of attention, and is not fully addressed by authorities (Boin, Ekengren and Rhinard, 2020). The notion of a creeping crisis is a conceptual one, a heuristic device useful for helping to uncover hidden dimensions of today’s more pressing – some might say, existential – societal problems. There are two central aspects to this notion. First, the (nominally) objective dimensions of the problem: how it has emerged and evolved into a threat in time and across space. Second, the subjective dimensions of the problem: how it is perceived, framed, and acted upon (or not) by government authorities. Creeping crises exist only to the extent they are recognized as such. The goal of studying creeping crisis is not only to consider how they might be better managed, but also to reveal governance dynamics in an increasingly complex global threat environment. This paper explores Big Data as a creeping crisis and outlines the crisis management challenges that accompanies it.