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A specific form of the Formal Guillotine that severs data from its conditions of production. It treats data as pure, objective recordings of reality, ignoring that data are always cleaned, filtered, transformed, and interpreted by human agents. The Data Guillotine is wielded to dismiss critiques about data provenance, missing values, measurement error, or researcher degrees of freedom. By declaring that “the data don’t lie,” it hides the countless small choices that turn raw observations into “data.” This guillotine is common in big data and AI circles, where data is fetishised as neutral fuel.
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