It’s widely believed that ‘the data’ admits us to a comforting future of increasing precision and predictability. But there’s another, darker and far less explored, side to this precious coin.

Considering data today as simply an essential ingredient of information and knowledge is no longer adequate. It throws up genuinely existential challenges, forming an entirely new context.

The same data, devices and networks that enable our navigation of the phenomenal world, informing and enhancing our moment to moment understanding, decisions and actions, create another radically different, alien environment, for which neither the human mind nor society are prepared. 

These abstracted, ethereal ‘maps’ not only create new ‘territories’: they have the power to influence and manipulate our experience, to undermine and even overwhelm it.