If ever there were a domain of science that draws on and fuels imaginaries of a total archive, genomics is it.[1] Genomics promises to reveal the secrets of life, to…

1. Pursuing the twentieth-century dream of capturing all sociological data in a single clearinghouse, a group of American social scientists in the mid-1950s attempted a bold, if not completely unprecedented,…

Historically, casinos have been eager adopters of technologies that help them to gather knowledge about their customers. The knowledge-gathering repertoire of the modern casino has shifted from telephone surveys, focus…

In a 1962 lecture to the War Industrial College, the Director of the US Office of Emergency Planning (OEP), Edward McDermott, described his agency’s mission. Charged with preparing the nation…

Deep inside the Walmart website, a page opens with a question you would not expect from the world’s biggest retailer: How much do you know about what’s behind a product’s…

Journalism and hacking are getting closer in recent times. WikiLeaks, the Snowden case and the other published “megaleaks” have blurred the boundaries between newsrooms and hackers and inspired the rise…

At the Macy Foundation conference on cybernetics in 1951 the inveterate inventor of information theory, Claude Shannon, shocked an assembled crowd when he debuted an electronic rat he had…

The Cairo Genizah is an accumulation of 1,000 years of Jewish culture in the lands of Islam. From the time of its discovery in the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat,…

The Third Plague Pandemic likely originated in Yunnan, China, in 1855. After arriving in Hong Kong in 1894 it spread from there across the globe. The epidemic was a testing…

Fahrenheit 451 (1966). As I write this in August 2015, we are in the middle of one of the worst refugee crises in modern Western history. The European response to…

by: Javier Lezaun Suppose you wanted to test the reality of democracy. Tired of claims and counter-claims, of endless debates about ideals and aspirations, and deeply unconvinced by the arguments…

“Our response was too orientated toward the management of previous outbreaks,” explained Jean-Hervé Bradol, the director of Médecins Sans Frontières’ (MSF; Doctors Without Borders) internal review body, the Centre de…

[ Ed. note: This is the third of a three part collaboration on “Excrementa Estates.” Read parts I and II. ] I In July 2016, I was invited to a…

Vast accumulations of data, documents, records, and samples saturate our world: bulk collection of phone calls by the NSA and GCHQ; Google, Amazon or Facebook’s ambitions to collect and store…