Data Empire (Hardcover) by Roopika Risam

"Pollan’s real genius—the word is not too strong—remains intact. That is his uncanny ability to scent the direction in which the culture is headed. He did it with food and psychedelics, and now, though A World Appears focuses on AI only intermittently, he has done it again." —Charles Finch, The Atlantica

BARACK OBAMA’S 2026 SUMMER READING PICK

An NPR, New Scientist, Nautilus, and Next Big Idea Club Best Book of the Month

“Here is the new history of mankind demanded by our times.” —Jaron Lanier, author of Who Owns the Future?

“A must-read.”—NPR, “15 Books Our Critics Can’t Wait to Read This Summer”

“Essential reading for understanding the opportunities and dangers of the technological revolution now transforming our world.” —Jonathan Kennedy, author of Pathogenesis

From clay tablets to the algorithmic state, a groundbreaking new lens on human history arguing that information has always been the seed of power, for readers of Nexus and The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

Long before writing existed, at the dawn of civilization in Mesopotamia, rulers pressed marks into clay to keep track of land, people and grain. To rule, they had to keep count. It is no accident, then, that the first written name in human history was neither a god nor a king, but an accountant.

As ships and navigation expanded our horizons, a new age of European empires took control of more than 80 percent of the world’s surface using censuses, maps and ledgers to decide who belonged, who owed, and who could be sacrificed. Today, we live in the third great era, when trading our information for access can feel harmless or inevitable – yet from targeted advertising to border policing and mass surveillance, data shapes the course of our lives.

With our earliest tools like ancient cave markings and knotted strings, to colonial record-keeping and the algorithmic state, Data Empire reveals how data has always been the seed of power: a technology of control that has shaped civilizations and upheld empires. Empire was never just about weapons or ships. It was built on collecting information on us, to rule us. Both a sweeping history and a sharp critique, Data Empire is a call to recognize the power data holds—and to imagine what resistance looks like in an age defined by it. In looking at the history of data, readers will understand:

• Data made civilization possible: Long before algorithms and AI, systems of counting, recording, and organizing information enabled everything from agriculture to taxation. The infrastructures of data are as old as cities themselves, and they are the precondition for large-scale human coordination.
• Every system of data is also a system of power: From clay tablets in Mesopotamia to colonial censuses to modern databases, data determines who is visible, who is legible, and who can be governed.
• The modern data state was built in moments of crisis: In the twentieth century, governments became vast information-processing systems. What we now think of as "data” was created in response to economic collapse and geopolitical conflict.
• The “data” we know now is built on much older inequalities: Today’s digital systems inherit the logics of earlier recordkeeping regimes, including those shaped by colonialism, racial classification, and forms of government that extract from land and from populations. The biases we see in algorithms are not new but continuations of a long history.
• We are living through a transformation in who controls data—and therefore power: For most of history, data infrastructures were largely state-driven. Today, they are increasingly owned and operated by private corporations, even as they structure public life. This shift raises urgent questions about accountability, sovereignty, and the future of public life.

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of How to Change Your Mind, a panoptic exploration of consciousness—what it is, who has it, and why—and a meditation on the essence of our humanity

When it comes to the phenomenon that is consciousness, there is one point on which scientists, philosophers, and artists all agree: it feels like something to be us. Yet the fact that we have subjective experience of the world remains one of nature’s greatest mysteries. How is it that our mental operations are accompanied by feelings, thoughts, and a sense of self? What would a scientific investigation of our inner life look like, when we have as little distance and perspective on it as fish do of the sea? In A World Appears, Michael Pollan traces the unmapped continent that is consciousness, bringing radically different perspectives—scientific, philosophical, literary, spiritual and psychedelic—to see what each can teach us about this central fact of life.

When neuroscientists began studying consciousness in the early 1990s, they sought to explain how and why three pounds of spongy gray matter could generate a subjective point of view—assuming that the brain is the source of our perceived reality. Pollan takes us to the cutting edge of the field, where scientists are entertaining more radical (and less materialist) theories of consciousness. He introduces us to “plant neurobiologists” searching for the first flicker of consciousness in plants, scientists striving to engineer feelings into AI, and psychologists and novelists seeking to capture the felt experience of our slippery stream of consciousness.

In Pollan’s dazzling exploration of consciousness, he discovers a world far deeper and stranger than our everyday reality. Eye-opening and mind-expanding, A World Appears takes us into the laboratories of our own minds, ultimately showing us how we might make better use of the gift of awareness to more meaningfully connect with the world and our deepest selves.