Dark Territory in the Information Age: Learning from the West German Census Controversies of the 1980s

Not many of us think to question so fundamental and banal a part of modern life as the census. Dark Territory in the Information Age, makes it clear that we ought to. In this timely, exciting, important, and vividly told historical geography of the West German census boycotts of the 1980s, Matt Hannah shows us not only why so many West Germans refused to participate in state plans to count and categorize them, but why it was so vital that they did. By bringing to light an almost-forgotten historical moment at the tail end of the Cold War, Hannah illuminates the dark territories through which power works, while making it clear that the real question facing us in the 'information age' is not what is done with all the information about us that corporations and the state collects (as so much privacy activism seems to think), but how and why it is collected in the first place. Dark Territory in the Information Age is at once a brilliant unfolding of a social struggle of lasting importance in and beyond Germany, and a blueprint for current struggles over the gathering of information in a world seemingly bent on citizenship defined by brutal and total exposure. Professor Don Mitchell, Maxwell School, Syracuse University, USA