Data can be seen as an abstraction at best, or at worst, a way to introduce the robotic quality of programmatics into creativity. We might associate it with digital's way of converting the tangible, the soul of things, into pixels—compressed files that can be more easily stored and tracked, but that also, in the case of art like music or films, siphon away some of the original's quality (while dulling our appreciation of it).
It probably doesn't help that, to advertisers and marketers, we are also data—people reduced to demographics, custom profiles, brand affinities and buying preferences that must be pushed toward optimized touchpoints.
We concede that all of that is pretty gross. But is it the whole story? With data, it never is.