DATA EMPIRE

From Neolithic times to the present day, a social scientist reveals how human recordkeeping became a powerful, sometimes coercive technology for shaping human lives.

Risam, an associate professor of digital humanities at Dartmouth College, explores how data evolved into a tool for conquest all over the world. From a social science perspective, human recordkeeping—neither natural nor neutral—became a technology of dominance, wielded to gain economic advantage, wage wars, oppress, and enslave. Predating written language, ancient practices of making marks, shaping clay tokens, or tying knots in rope to record crop yields or flood years helped manage uncertainty and plan for the future. Risam notes that by the late-17th century, data “became synonymous with fact, understood as objective and neutral, even though it was fashioned by human hands and never independent of the people who created it or the places where it was made.” Many examples of data abuse are deeply moving. At the Nuremberg trials, “the Hartheim Register, pulled from the office files at Hartheim Castle in 1945, tallied the number of disabled people gassed at euthanasia centers, including at the castle, and even calculated ‘savings’ in food worth more than 141 million Reichsmarks.” Risam observes, “The cumulative logic of the Reich’s meticulous records became the most damning witness at its own trial.” Finally, Risam briskly calls out present-day data manipulators, including Elon Musk’s DOGE: “The richest man on Earth, presiding over a platform with hundreds of millions of users and a satellite network routing communications around the globe, was standing in the White House, ruling with the president.” The author also critiques the impending impact of AI-amplified data and possible dystopian futures. The volume’s global scope and focus on documentation is fascinating—though many transformative technologies are unexamined, and the pace may leave some readers wishing they could linger.

An expansive and sobering history of the interplay of human data, conquest, and control.