Society's Genome

Little is more staggering than how much information is now captured in digital form—it often feels like it encompasses practically everything. The vast archive growing globally has brought entirely new responsibilities to society. Questions such as what constitutes privacy today, what rights may exist for data to be forgotten or erased, or, in other cases, what rights may exist to capture information and retain it have a bearing on the structure of democracy itself. Global thinking about these matters is currently maturing and will lead to new practices. Moreover, defending data, or the infrastructure carrying it, from cyber threats is now as important as defending lives and land, and the scope of threats faced may be broader than what any traditional warfare has shown us.

Because these new perspectives have evolved from the technology world, it is not a surprise that companies building infrastructure for digital data have knowledge that is hard to match. They have seen firsthand how it is handled across the wide spectrum of the cloud, corporations, government, science, defense, and intelligence.

One of these companies, Spectra Logic, has been doing this for nearly 40 years, and Nathan Thompson, its founder and CEO, is the author of this book. And, yes, Society’s Genome is a very worthwhile read. It takes the reader on a unique survey of this digital landscape, covering many interesting kinds of data, and is set against the backdrop of the responsibilities that now come with technology, the safety of data, and political governance. By the time I turned the last page, I had developed

a new appreciation of how precious and rich our data really is—a genome indeed.