Segments: Atlas of a Data Leak

MIND!!!
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Atlases have risen out of capture and colonial control. But what would a reversal look like? An atlas of something hidden, something we are all part of. The book maps and visualizes 650,000 leaked segments from the opaque but highly influential world of data brokerage.

Segments: Atlas of a Data Leak is an investigative atlas built from a single leaked dataset: over 650,000 audience segments compiled by 93 data brokers operating within one of the world's largest data broker infrastructures. These segments classify individuals across thousands of behavioral, emotional, and moral dimensions. As pro-life or pro-choice supporters, as people with eating disorders, as daily horoscope readers, as users of life-support devices.

Data brokers affect anyone who uses the internet, yet remain hidden from public and academic discourse. This book focuses on segmentation, the infrastructural core of the data broker industry. Combining the visual density of a reference atlas with the critical apparatus of design research and media theory, Segments shows how personal traces are captured, aggregated, and converted into tradable categories, and how those categories, once assigned, travel through the system as fact, rarely checked against the reality they claim to describe. Taken together, the segments form what the book calls an ontology of information capitalism: a description of humanity assembled from the perspective of turning behavior into profit.

The book arrives at a specific moment. As AI-driven targeting increasingly displaces human-readable categories with black-boxed inference, the leak may represent one of the last legible views into how the industry actually classifies. Segments preserves that view, mapping structure, geography, and scale, before the infrastructure it documents disappears from sight.

Data Analysis, Diagrams, and writing by Kim Frederic Albrecht.