Colin Koopman, How We Became Our Data. A Genealogy Of The Informational Person. University of Chicago Press, 2019
We are now acutely aware, as if all of the sudden, that data matters enormously to how we live. How did information come to be so integral to what we can do? How did we become people who effortlessly present our lives in social media profiles and who are meticulously recorded in state surveillance dossiers and online marketing databases? What is the story behind data coming to matter so much to who we are?
In How We Became Our Data, Colin Koopman excavates early moments of our rapidly accelerating data-tracking technologies and their consequences for how we think of and express our selfhood today. Koopman explores the emergence of mass-scale record keeping systems like birth certificates and social security numbers, as well as new data techniques for categorizing personality traits, measuring intelligence, and even racializing subjects. This all culminates in what Koopman calls the “informational person” and the “informational power” we are now subject to. The recent explosion of digital technologies that are turning us into a series of algorithmic data points is shown to have a deeper and more turbulent past than we commonly think. Blending philosophy, history, political theory, and media theory in conversation with thinkers like Michel Foucault, Jürgen Habermas, and Friedrich Kittler, Koopman presents an illuminating perspective on how we have come to think of our personhood—and how we can resist its erosion.
Contents
Introduction: Informational Persons and Our Information Politics
Part I: Histories of Information
1. Inputs
“Human Bookkeeping”: The Informatics of Documentary Identity, 1913–1937
2. Processes
Algorithmic Personality: The Informatics of Psychological Traits, 1917–1937
3. Outputs
Segregating Data: The Informatics of Racialized Credit, 1923–1937
Part II: Powers of Formatting
4. Diagnostics
Toward a Political Theory for Informational Persons
5. Redesign
Data’s Turbulent Pasts and Future Paths
Reviews
Bernard E. Harcourt, author of Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age
“How We Became Our Data is a landmark contribution to contemporary philosophy of subjectivities and a must-read for anyone interested in the digital age. Koopman masterfully traces the birth of the informational person, meticulously excavating the informatic archives of the early twentieth century—from birth registration to personality testing to racial data on real estate and crime—to demonstrate how we have become our data today. Koopman develops a provocative new model of how power circulates in the informational age, providing an essential link between the statistical and confessional model of the nineteenth century and the digital profiling of the twenty-first.”
Rita Raley, author of Tactical Media
“Of all the critical accounts of our becoming subjects of and to data, Koopman’s is the most unsettling—which is to say, the most necessary. We simply cannot understand the crisis of the present without the two inextricable stories presented in this book: how the concept of information emerges as the necessary precondition for the ‘information society’ and how our lives have become almost unthinkable without the sociotechnical apparatus of documents. That this is ultimately an affirmative and even mobilizing tale, instead of a paralyzing horror, is a credit to Koopman’s narrative skill and meticulous scholarship.”
Davide Panagia, author of The Political Life of Sensation
“Brilliant. Urgent. Essential. Koopman’s study of the genealogy of our future-present selves, and how we became these informational artifacts, is crucial to developing new critical knowledges for politics, for aesthetics, and for life.”
Foucault News 