PW Starred Review for Data Empire

Home / Media

Data Empire received a starred review from Publishers Weekly!

Data science is "not a modern tool but an ancient turning point in how humans learned to organize and imagine the world," asserts media studies scholar Risam (New Digital Worlds) in this brilliant history of "how those early marks grew into systems of power over everyday life." The first people who "figured out how to control nature by recording it'-by marking the changing seasons or tracking the locations of herds and edible plants-"eventually learned how to control other people too," Risam argues. "That turn- from keeping time to keeping score-is the root of the systems we live in now: tax ledgers, biometric databases, [and] predictive algorithms." In short: "We created records to remember, and they stayed to govern." To make her case, Risam tracks the development of data science from the ancient world, where "seasonal tallies and village lists" slowly morphed into "centralized infrastructure,' through the early modern period, when colonial powers used data to "remake distant lands and extract wealth" with "structured information" able to "convert land into property... labor into yield," and people into "risks to be assessed." The rise of digital computing in the 20th century "would take these systems to their extreme; 99 Risam concludes-"not just data collected by power, but data that was power" Today's "modern data state,' she warns, is built on infrastructure that can "think without conscience" and "calculate without context." Elegantly weaving scholarly research with trenchant political analysis, this is a must-read for those seeking to understand the deep history of the Al boom. July)
Posted in Media by admin
Write a comment