The rhetoric of dark data frames all un-datafied behavior as a threat requiring capture

Evidence

Unstructured data cannot merge and flow in the new circuits of liquefied assets bought and sold. They are friction. Green fixes on the declarative term that simultaneously names the problem and justifies its solution: dark data. The message we saw honed in the online world—“If you’re not in the system, you don’t exist”—is refined for this new phase of dispossession. Because the apparatus of connected things is intended to be everything, any behavior of human or thing absent from this push for universal inclusion is dark: menacing, untamed, rebellious, rogue, out of control. The stubborn expanse of dark data is framed as the enemy of IBM’s and its customers’ ambitions. … The tension is that no thing counts until it is rendered as behavior, translated into electronic data flows, and channeled into the light as observable data. Everything must be illuminated for counting and herding. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 655

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘dark data’ as a legitimating euphemism, not a neutral technical term — central to the book’s framework.
• XREF: Echoes the ‘if you’re not in the system you don’t exist’ refrain from earlier chapters, and parallels Foucault’s panopticon/herding logic. — connects to: Dark data rhetoric supplies the moral and legal rationale for capturing unpredicted behavior — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 656; Industry discourse framed data exhaust as a benign by-product recycled to improve services — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1873

Broader Connections

• Dark data rhetoric supplies the moral and legal rationale for capturing unpredicted behavior #expands (0.95) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 656