The Hymn of Acxiom
Vienna Teng

 Acxiom is not just a weird spelling of a mathy sounding word! It is a company that was founded more than 50 years ago in Arkansas and, at least as of 2012, had built what the New York Times described as the “world’s largest commercial database on consumers.”

These days it feels like this song could be about a lot of things – AI chief among them, probably – but it was written in 2013 when the role of technology in consuming our lives was, in some ways, only just starting to come into focus. Vienna Teng wrote it as she started to understand the impact that big data was having on her own personal life, andwantedto make it a critique not just of the platforms themselves but our own complicity in letting them control us. - Watsky