The Double-Edged Code: How Data Became Both Our Salvation and Our Undoing

From medieval potato counts to predictive algorithms and AI, this is the story of how data built modern life — and why it now threatens to dismantle it.

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Data is beautiful and data is terrible. It is simultaneously helpful and dangerous. It is a construct that promotes progress, yet also can be the source of all human oblivion. Data binds and emulsifies modern society, and still is capable of crushing an individual and creating a dystopian future. How can these contradictions be possible?

A good place to start about how to understand data and its contradictions is to define it. Data is a tally or score. Technically plural, they are facts and statistics. Often it is expressed in the singular without significantly distorting the concept. A data set is many pieces of data clumped together, yet it is a whole. Data can be as simple as a count; such as the number of times you tap your foot at a book club meeting. It can also be as complex as the number of human interactions on earth in a given day.

Data has always existed, it is just how humans think about it that has changed. There are actually an infinite number of observable actions, moments and counts throughout the…