Systemic erosion of data infrastructure reveals neoliberal neglect of public knowledge systems
Original framing: “Data: you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone” — Financial Times
Marginalized communities are disproportionately affected by data loss, as their needs are least represented in policy decisions based on flawed statistics. Black and Indigenous scholars (e.g., Ruha Benjamin, Linda Tuhiwai Smith) argue that data scarcity is a tool of structural violence. Grassroots groups like *Data for Black Lives* and *Indigenous Data Sovereignty Network* are building parallel data ecosystems to resist erasure.
The Financial Times’ headline masks a decades-long assault on public knowledge systems, where neoliberal ideology has conflated data scarcity with market efficiency.
This crisis is not accidental but structural, rooted in the 1980s gutting of statistical agencies, the racialized underfunding of data collection, and the rise of data brokers who treat information as a private asset. Marginalized communities—Black, Indigenous, and Global South populations—bear the brunt of this erasure, as their lived realities are rendered invisible in policy decisions. Yet, the solutions lie in reclaiming data as a public good, as Indigenous epistemologies have long understood, through sovereignty frameworks, participatory governance, and federated commons. The future of equitable policy depends on whether we treat data as a commodity to be hoarded or a collective inheritance to be stewarded—Hermes’ trickster wisdom reminds us that the choice is ours, but the costs of inaction are already being paid in human lives and ecological collapse.