Extract: Data Empire by Roopika Risam
Today, data is a byword for the power silently running our lives, sometimes beyond scrutiny and recourse. We often speak of it in impersonal terms, as if it were an inevitable abstraction, rather than a means of exercising control. The digital age did not create data; it inherited it. For most of history, people did not separate data from information or knowledge. An exchange of shells meant a deal was done. Tablets showed who owed labor. Chants passed down who had rights to land. But these were at once records and acts, naming who was recognized or silenced, and even who ruled. Distinguishing between data as unprocessed symbols, information as the insights that come from processing and structuring data, and knowledge as a combination of information and context that lets us make a decision is a twentieth- century phenomenon, the result of how data functions in computational systems.
We have forgotten this, in part because of the language we use to describe it. The word data comes from Latin datum, from dare, “to give.” Its roots lie in the Proto- Indo-European verb for “to give,” preserved in Sanskrit’s ददम (dadāmi) and the ancient Greek δίδωμι (didōmi). The Dutch gegevens and Hebrew םינותנ (netunim) carry the same sense of “that which is given.” In Mandarin, 数据 (shuju) combines the characters fornumber and evidence; in Arabic, تانايب (bayānat) connotes statements and clear signs. These words traveled with priests, traders, armies, taking for granted that information just appears, complete and true.
Nothing was ever given though. As media theorist Lisa Gitelman puts it, data is already “cooked,” so “raw data is an oxymoron.” A notch in bone— someone carved it. A census return— a person filled it out. Every count depended on what someone saw, every measurement on what they thought mattered. We pretend data is objective, but it’s constructed by and susceptible to human choices.
I felt the effects of the human hands shaping data several years ago at the Social Security Administration office, where I shoved my application for a replacement card, proof of my national identification number, under the scratched Plexiglas separating me from a bored clerk. She pecked at her keyboard and then, with excited suspicion, told me that her records said I was not a US citizen. But I was— I had completed the naturalization process when I was sixteen years old. Apparently there is little centralization among the information managed by government agencies in the United States, so news of my citizenship had not made it from the immigration agency to Social Security. For decades, no one noticed, and I’d held jobs since I was fourteen, blissfully unaware that I was incorrectly coded as a noncitizen in one cell of a massive government database. It took an extra $150, the cost of running a government records search, to fix the error and make me a citizen in her system.
At the time, it felt like an inconvenience, but the discrepancy had never affected my right to live or work in the US. Now, I am relieved she found the error and terrified to think of what may have happened otherwise. When the Trump administration began using these flawed records to identify targets for deportation and denaturalization in 2025, I realized that someone’s decision to keep those databases separate could have upended my life today. By finding the error, the woman at the Social Security office had done me a favor without either of us realizing it. Plenty of other immigrants have not been so fortunate.
These are the real stakes of data in our modern world. A single record can redraw the borders of a life. Many of us have the luxury of ignoring them, unless we or people we care about are caught in a government’s dragnet. But just this brief interaction with a government agency reminded me that data holds immense power over our lives, reaching well beyond the mundane. We participate in its rule in ways that feel ordinary, even trivial. Every click in a web browser, social media post, or online transaction generates information about our identities, demographics, and online behaviors that can be bought and sold. But that’s just part of the story.
To really understand how data controls our lives, we need to go back in time, to its invention. Our first technology of power was not wheat or the wheel but the ability to record. Freed from data’s abstract, technical, and academic moorings, we find a new kind of story: of a calculated instinct, one among many of the qualities that make us human. As an essential practice to the species, creating data is inseparable from human desires for power. Through this lens, we are better positioned to explore the key questions that tell us more about it— and ourselves. At the most basic level, what is data and where did it come from? How did it gain the power it currently holds over us? When humans had the choice between using it for good or evil, why did they so often choose poorly?
To our twenty-first-century eyes, the earliest forms of data are virtually unrecognizable— so much so that I could hang it on my bedroom wall for years and still miss it hiding in plain view. Once records could survive longer than the people who made them, someone else could grab them, study them, use them however they wanted. People who figured out how to control nature by recording it eventually learned how to control other people too. That turn— from keeping time to keeping score— is the root of the systems we live in now: tax ledgers, biometric databases, predictive algorithms. We have new iterations, but we’re using them the same way.
What has it meant— and what will it mean— when records that once served only to help us remember, come to rule? When a symbol meant to jog a memory becomes a category that defines a person’s rights or obligations? When the act of noting something down slowly gains the force of law? We’ll see the answers unfold in clay tablets and papyrus, temple records and colonial ledgers, census offices, and server farms. We’ll travel through Europe and the Andes, the Sahel, the South Pacific, and beyond. Everywhere, people have encoded information to survive, to command, and to resist.
This journey isn’t linear, far more episodic than cohesive. Marks and measures surface in one place, disappear, then reappear somewhere else: A scribe in ancient Sumer presses a stylus into clay to inventory the labor pool he needs to build a canal; a clerk in Han China, thousands of years later, painstakingly brushes a census record onto bamboo to identify men who can join the army, long after Sumer is gone. Sometimes they converge through scientific acts. In a British museum, a polymath measures human “fitness.” Four decades later, eugenics campaigns across the world begin sterilizing the “unfit.”
But they also grow separately and never meet. In the Soviet Union, a team of cyberneticists imagines a computer network to absorb economic data from across the satellite countries and improve governance, while planners in Chile build their own to collect factory production figures and stave off financial collapse during a massive transportation strike. Together, these fragments show how data and power have always been tangled. Once we began making data, it began remaking us, intertwined with our unique confluence of animal instinct, abstract thinking, and advanced toolmaking. We created records to remember, and they stayed to govern.
Starting this story in the deep history of our species shows us that much of what we assume about is data wrong— that it’s just numbers or facts, that it requires sophisticated devices like calculators or computers, that it’s beyond our control. Our predisposition to create data and use it for decision- making only grows in sophistication with the emergence of the earliest civilizations, evolving alongside ever more complex forms of statehood and empire over eleven thousand years. Without effort, we cannot see it. But once we do, we cannot unsee it.
While everything isn’t data, data is everywhere. When we look at it in the long context of world history and the inescapable human quest for power, we find that its operations today are a consequence of human history. This is the story of data, a story of ourselves— our pasts, our presents, and our futures.