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 Cap…, loc. 655