Contrary to the belief that data is a byproduct of complex societies, it was a prerequisite. Early writing systems weren't for literature but for administrative tasks like inventories and tax records. These records allowed for the coordination of large populations, making civilization possible in the first place.
Governments don't just measure society; they change it through classification. William the Conqueror's Domesday Book was for taxation and control. In colonial India, the British solidified fluid caste categories into rigid bureaucratic forms, altering political representation and social identity for generations.
Major leaps in data infrastructure are often responses to political crises, not just inevitable technological progress. The Great Depression, WWII, and the Cold War forced governments to develop new systems for tracking unemployment, managing logistics, and modeling conflict, creating the foundations of the Information Age.
Long before AI, classification systems embedded their creators' worldviews. Melville Dewey's 1876 system gave Christianity 70 classifications while grouping other religions into a single category. This demonstrates that bias originates in the human-made data and categories that AI systems are trained on, not just the algorithm itself.
The new form of corporate power is not merely extracting user data for profit. Companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Palantir now build, own, and maintain the core information infrastructures for healthcare, education, and national security, entangling public authority with corporate control and blurring lines of accountability.
Many Americans mistakenly assume a constitutional right to privacy exists. In reality, protections are implied, limited, and apply only to government intrusions, not the vast data-gathering activities of private companies like Netflix and Amazon. This legal gap is a primary reason for the lack of digital privacy in the U.S.