The software giant Oracle has big claims about “big data.” They call it “the electricity of the twenty-first century — a new kind of power that transforms everything it touches in business, government, and private life.”

There is no consensus about what “big data” is, exactly, but fans and critics agree that it’s reshaping the way we live. Advocates confidently predict that ever-increasing volumes of complex data — combined with new techniques for storage, access, and analysis — will revolutionize everything we do, from basic scientific research to the way social interactions are organized. Prominent data scientists such as Alex Petland say that we are witnessing a fundamental social transition to a new “data-driven” society that has the potential to be “more fair, stable, and efficient.”

The skeptics are equally emphatic. The anti-consumerist magazine Adbusters recently pronounced the death of nation states, “stripped by the global machine of finance, computation, and all pervading Big Data algorithms.” Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum and co-author of a chilling new report on secret consumer scores, argues that we may be on the verge of the dystopian future described by Philip K. Dick in stories like The Minority Report where predictions from big data algorithms can “become someone’s destiny.”