The latest issue of The New Atlantis has an excellent review of Jacob Siegel’s The Information State by Nicholas Carr. Regarding the failure of the “whiz kids” in Vietnam, Carr writes:

rather than triggering an honest assessment of the flaws of large-scale data mining, the fiasco had the opposite effect. The problem wasn’t that computer-based decisionmaking had limits, the technocrats concluded. The problem was that the computers weren’t supplied with enough data.

This conclusion would, as Siegel shows with example after example, turn into a perverse tenet of the information age: Every failure of automated data processing becomes an excuse to collect even more data.