This illustrates what I particularly appreciate about the approach that Wiggins and Jones take: they are seeking to bring a conversation typically shaped by an attitude of technological determinism under the auspices of historical inquiry. In shedding light on the circumstances and contingencies that enabled data, and the idea of data-driven decision-making, to come to occupy its current place of societal honor, they take aim at the idea that the current status quo was inevitable and that it must remain in place forevermore.

According to them, data’s ascendance emerged from the dynamic interaction between new technologies and the role various social actors imagined—sometimes compulsively or myopically—for these technologies. Such interactions unpredictably shape the terrain of power, create and ensconce new categories of expertise, and spur investment in tools to reify particular modes of reasoning. Discovering whichever element of these interactions proved most decisive in specific moments of push-and-pull kept me turning the pages even as bits of jargon went over my head, a testament to the authors’ storytelling ability. Their desire to craft a narrative that is approachable to readers with varying levels of familiarity with data-related fields and technologies is evident, and they are relatively successful in that regard; when a subject is treated with technical depth, it generally feels in service of fleshing out the overall historical arc rather than acting as a sidebar for the technologists to nerd out on.

What I found less developed is the vague way forward proposed at the book’s conclusion, as well as the build-up to it. Wiggins and Jones argue that the rapid scale at which data technologies have been deployed leaves our norms and values vulnerable to modification before our ethical imaginations catch up—as they say in one of my favorite of their chapter-ending summative statements, “Ethics, no matter how well considered and well intentioned, tends not to scale well.” They do devote a couple of chapters to the slippery, unanswerable question of who can authoritatively define and enforce data ethics, but I found myself hungry for a deeper treatment of the concepts of justice and fairness that ground these accounts. Moreover, the final chapter keeps focus on the unstable relationships between various powers that will shape the future of data—state power, corporate power, and people power—offering recent examples of how each has worked to exert its influence over the trajectory of data amidst the counterbalance of the others. This is a fine way to conclude; indeed, acknowledging and sitting in the tension of complexity strikes me as a refreshingly honest rejoinder to the temptation of using data (even historical “data”) to predict the future—the same temptation that Wiggins and Jones critique over the arc of the book and that I have bumped into, in various shades, over the course of my career.

But that conclusion also seems insufficient to generate another outcome that the authors seem to desire: stoking readers to imagine alternate futures where the use of data is subservient to our norms and values rather than potentially generative of them. They insist, in a resistance to technological determinism that I applaud, that alternatives to the current status quo are possible—but if they have robust visions of what these alternatives might be, they don’t describe them in detail beyond negation of what we currently contend with, such as advertisements based on mass surveillance. In response, I wondered—what kind of commerce would fill a world where such ads have vanished? Would data have any productive alternate role to play, or would it inevitably engender temptation toward the unachievable promise of control? Imagining answers to those questions requires resources and frameworks beyond what is supplied in How Data Happened. But if nothing else, the history it presents serves, if a bit indirectly, as an invitation to search for them.