Coauthored with Aram Sinnreich
MIT Press, April 2024
WINNER: Nancy Baym Annual Book Award, Association of Internet Researchers, 2025
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How data surveillance, digital forensics, and generative AI pose new long-term threats and opportunities—and how we can use them to make better decisions in the face of technological uncertainty.
In The Secret Life of Data, Aram Sinnreich and Jesse Gilbert explore the many unpredictable, and often surprising, ways in which data surveillance, AI, and the constant presence of algorithms impact our culture and society in the age of global networks. The authors build on this basic premise: no matter what form data takes, and what purpose we think it’s being used for, data will always have a secret life. How this data will be used, by other people in other times and places, has profound implications for every aspect of our lives—from our intimate relationships to our professional lives to our political systems.
With the secret uses of data in mind, Sinnreich and Gilbert interview dozens of experts to explore a broad range of scenarios and contexts—from the playful to the profound to the problematic. Unlike most books about data and society that focus on the short-term effects of our immense data usage, The Secret Life of Data focuses primarily on the long-term consequences of humanity’s recent rush toward digitizing, storing, and analyzing every piece of data about ourselves and the world we live in. The authors advocate for “slow fixes” regarding our relationship to data, such as creating new laws and regulations, ethics and aesthetics, and models of production for our datafied society.
Cutting through the hype and hopelessness that so often inform discussions of data and society, The Secret Life of Data clearly and straightforwardly demonstrates how readers can play an active part in shaping how digital technology influences their lives and the world at large.
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Press/Podcasts for Secret Life
“How Our Data is Really Being Used” – Cool Science Radio, KPCW, Utah
“The Data Age Has Transformed Music” – Music Tectonics
The Culture with Farajii Muhamand – Black Star Network
“Surprising ways in which data surveillance and constant algorithms impact society” – ABC News
“The Secret Life of Data” – Internet Archive
“The Secret Life of Data: Navigating Hype and Uncertainty” – Bridging the Gaps
Book talk – Georgetown Center for Digital Ethics
“The Algorithmic Mirror: Reflecting data’s role in modern life” – Secure Talk
“The Secret Life of Data” – Ethical Machines
“The Secret Life of Data and Surveillance” – The Digital Transformation Podcast
“The Secret Life of Data” – New Books Network
“We spied on Trump’s ‘Southern White House’ from our couches to demonstrate the takeaways in our book, ‘The Secret Life of Data.’” – Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA)
“What are Data’s Secrets?” – Hearsay Culture
“The Secret Life of Data” – JUST Health Data Labs
“Science Series” – Town Hall Seattle
Praise for Secret Life
“This book makes a distinctive and timely contribution to the study of data and, more importantly, a critical intervention in how we understand the cultural, political, and social significance of data in contemporary life. The book addresses one of the most pressing issues in internet research and public policy today: the ways in which data circulate, mutate, and elude fixed meaning, shaping—and being shaped by—human interpretation across systems, societies, and time.” – Nancy Baym Award jury (AoIR)
“Chock-full of examples of new visioning and computing technology… The Secret Life of Data provides a broad, nontechnical, and highly readable introduction to the intersection of data, computing technologies, and contemporary society.”~Choice
“Sinnreich and Gilbert have written a nimble text that will be of use to a range of experts and nonexperts.”~Information & Culture
“At once fascinating and terrifying, The Secret Life of Data offers a kaleidoscopic view of the industries and technologies that collect, mine, churn, and trade our data, and what to do about them.”~Jonathan Sterne, Professor of Culture and Technology, McGill University; author of MP3: The Meaning of a Format and Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment
“With their concept of data’s secret life, Sinnreich and Gilbert go to the heart of the risks in today’s datafied social order. Smart, extremely well-informed, and highly recommended.”~Nick Couldry, Professor of Media, Communications and Social Theory, London School of Economics & Political Science
“I have been waiting a long time for a clearly written book that cuts through the hype and describes how data—big and small, old and new—actually operate in our lives. Neither utopian nor dystopian, The Secret Life of Data just tells it like it is.”~Siva Vaidhyanathan, Professor of Media Studies, The University of Virginia; author of Antisocial Media and The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry)