Data Empire: How Information Has Shaped Human Life for 11,000 Years
The Empire of Information
In her sweeping new book, Data Empire, Roopika Risam traces the history of data from prehistoric cave paintings to today's biometric databases, arguing that information has always been used to organize, control, and dominate societies. With vivid stories of individuals caught in data regimes—from an ancient Egyptian land dispute to Frances Perkins assigning Social Security numbers—Risam shows how tools like censuses, deeds, and even library classifications carry hidden biases. She also highlights moments of resistance, such as William Still's records of escaped slaves, but concludes that data consistently empowers the powerful.
We are the data species.
- beloch
The article doesn't mention it, but I wonder if the author of this book discusses the economic value of data and/or data sovereignty. We live in an era were just a few nations (primarily the U.S.) dominate the international flow of information. Data has real, monetary value. Meta, Google, etc. can provide "free" services to entire countries based on the profits extracted from their data with money left over to pay employees, shareholders, and executives. Data is "exported" from nations all over the world, but it's value goes mostly untaxed. Any attempts to tax these companies usually provokes swift threats of tariffs or outright violence from the U.S. government.
This is not a situation that is likely to be stable long-term. As economic barriers go up and international trust breaks down, nations are bound to demand more sovereignty over their data and data networks are bound to splinter.
- PaulKeeble
A British Comedian called Jimmy Carr made the point that up to and including WW2 the Stasi in Germany was massive, it was a huge undertaking involving a massive percentage of the population just to monitor everyone and such a large organisation is going to have a lot of problems. That level of monitoring with todays cameras and software takes a tiny fraction of what it used to and can in many ways be more effective and its getting more effective with every advance in mass data processing and cheaper sensors.
- roenxi
> Risam’s own concluding words hammer home how data confers more power on the already powerful, over and over again.
I think the insistence of the body politic on giving more power to the powerful is what drives this. Our ability to gather and organise data is just the limiting technical capability. Which is to say, the more data a central authority can process the more power it is capable of wielding.
Unclear why people are so sanguine about that whole issue given the 20th century, but here we are.