Opacity is also a practical consequence of operations. Data is collected, processed, and purchased so that particular actors can do particular things. The computing complexes available to corporate and state actors today are capable not just of automatically tracing the relations between large numbers of variables and categories but also of finding patterns in massively large data sets in which no order appears to exist. Underlying the much-hyped Big Data is a new model of knowledge called Machine Learning.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 392