[Source Illustration: Milad Fakurian/Unsplash]
The invention and use of clay tokens represents a foundational episode in the history of record-making. They illustrate the power of data and the different cognitive and social practices that develop in conjunction or around it.
Despite the simple materiality and technology supporting them, clay tokens show an impressive closeness to many of the organizational principles and rules of other forms of data.
Without the physical support and semiotic or signifying properties of clay tokens, it would have been unlikely to understand and make the abstract notion of exchange a generalized social practice. Clay tokens provided the standard basis for recording exchanges and objectifying transactions. A more complex idea of social exchange was born. Cast in this light, records are linked to knowledge and institutions that have historically helped to establish the social practices that developed around the notion of a generalized exchange and came to be associated with the use of standardized media such as numbers, money and prices, information, or letters of credit…
https://www.fastcompany.com/91136190/how-data-is-revolutionizing-work-and-the-economy
