Table Of ContentHow We Became Our Data
How We Became
Our Data
A Genealogy of the Informational Person
colin koopman
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago and London
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2019 Colin Koopman
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in
critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago
Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.
Published 2019
Printed in the United States of America
28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 1 2 3 4 5
isbn-1 3: 978- 0- 226- 62644- 4 (cloth)
isbn-1 3: 978- 0- 226- 62658- 1 (paper)
isbn-1 3: 978- 0- 226- 62661- 1 (e- book)
doi: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226626611.001.0001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Koopman, Colin, author.
Title: How we became our data : a genealogy of the informational person /
Colin Koopman.
Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2019. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: lccn 2018048197 | isbn 9780226626444 (cloth : alk. paper) |
isbn 9780226626581 (pbk. : alk. paper) | isbn 9780226626611 (e-book)
Subjects: lcsh: Information science—Social aspects—United States. |
Information society—United States—Psychological aspects. | Information
technology—Social aspects—United States.
Classification: lcc z665 .k787 2019 | ddc 303.48/33—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018048197
♾ This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1 992 (Permanence of Paper).
Contents
Preface vii
Introduction: Informational Persons and Our
Information Politics 1
part i: histories of information
1. Inputs
“Human Bookkeeping”: The Informatics of Documentary
Identity, 1913– 1937 35
2. Processes
Algorithmic Personality: The Informatics of Psychological
Traits, 1917– 1937 66
3. Outputs
Segregating Data: The Informatics of Racialized Credit,
1923– 1937 108
part ii: powers of formatting
4. Diagnostics
Toward a Political Theory for Informational Persons 153
5. Redesign
Data’s Turbulent Pasts and Future Paths 173
Acknowledgments 197
List of Figures 201
Notes 203
Bibliography 237
Index 263
Preface
We are swaddled in data. From cradle to grave, we accumulate an abun-
dance of information. The list of the databases we populate is long, growing,
and familiar: search engine and web browsing histories, social media reg-
istries, marketing and advertising profiles, predictive policing analyses, and
suspected terrorist lists. Add to these the still-m ultiplying legacy systems of
health records, education transcripts, financial data, insurance profiles, and
our government records at the federal, state, and county levels, all bookended
by our birth and death certificates.
We are not as separable from these data as we like to think. Our data do
not simply point at who we already were before information systems were
constructed. Rather, our information composes significant parts of our very
selves. Data are active participants in our making. The formats structuring
data help shape who we are.
Like any swaddling, our data are both constraining and comforting. Infor-
mation opens up possibilities for what we can be. Yet it also forecloses possi-
bilities for what we cannot be. Like a newborn whose movement is restrained
by tightly tucked fabric, we are soothed by data that calm us into stillness and
eventually into unthinking sleep. We learn to live within the formats of our
information and eventually come to depend on them. These dependencies
are dangerous, because where we all find ourselves formatted, it is possible for
us to be formatted unequally, even unjustly, and without anyone, including
those who most benefit, ever intending it.
Does our being stored away in databases really matter? Does our being de-
fined by data actually make a difference to how we live? Is there really a poli-
tics and ethics of data itself? Even the clearest instances of data politics are
viii preface
often met with skepticism. Consider our most unsettling data scandals of late:
Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing on massive state surveillance at the Na-
tional Security Agency, consumer credit rating firm Equifax’s exposure of the
personal information of almost half of Americans, and the tailored delivery
of fake news to millions of Facebook users during a presidential election.
The response to Snowden’s exposé is particularly noteworthy. The shock
we immediately felt when his story broke quickly dissipated into exactly that
indifference that we could not have possibly felt as our first reaction. Almost
nobody who heard about these revelations reacted with casual unconcern,
and yet almost everybody ended up barely caring, or not knowing how to
care. Is widespread indifference perhaps the deeper scandal of our new scale
and style of surveillance?
We need to ask why so many of us keep retreating into apathy, and even
outright cynicism, about the politics and ethics of information. We need to
understand why we do not question, and why we even eagerly participate in,
projects of government data harvesting, corporate data collection, and a raft
of programs designed to store and analyze every flake of data dandruff we
cannot help but leave behind in nearly everything we do.
One reason we want to be indifferent to the politics and ethics of data con-
cerns a deep-s eated conception we have of ourselves. Thinking of ourselves
as our data seems abstract, disconnected, and remote. Our lives do not feel
like information. And so we console ourselves with solemn insistences like “I
am not a number.” Yet the next day, or even the next hour, we unblinkingly
present ourselves to the clerk or the computer as just that: a number— for
instance, a bank account number, an employee number, a student number,
or any other number of numbers that we all in actual fact wield on a regular
basis. We want to believe that who we are is one thing, and that all our many
numbers are something else. “I am here,” we proudly state, fingers thumping
our chests or pointing at our skulls. And our data is over there, we maintain,
gesturing to a vague elsewhere. But what are we gesturing toward if we know
that those numbers always point straight back to us?
Our skeptical reactions are understandable. Many of the massive reams of
personalizing data we confront today did not exist a decade ago. It is easy for
us to insist that we are not our social media profiles since we so clearly lived
for so long without them. Understandable as this reaction is, however, it is
perilously misguided. This book proposes instead that we take quite seriously
the problems posed to us by the politics of information. There are two steps
to my proposal.
preface ix
The first step involves considering the consequences of the plain fact that
we find ourselves enrolled in a thousand databases. Who are we without all
these identifiers, numbers, and other bits stored away in countless many data
warehouses? Who could you be without your data points? What could you do?
Make a list of everything you have done this week. What on that list required
you to offer up your data in doing it? If you could not have done those things
this week (transact with the bank, check your email, see your grades or those
of your students, use your keycard to access your building), what other things
would you not be able to do next week? How long before you would lose your
job? Miss a few rent or mortgage payments? Suffer from lack of medical care?
How many weeks before you would be wholly reliant on others for maintaining
even your most basic life functions as eating and sheltering? We like to believe
that we are not our data. But we inhabit lives that rely on data in nearly every
act we perform. We are therefore our data as much as we are anything else. We
are many things, of course. But we are our data too.
If the first step of my proposal is to come to terms with the fact that we live
and act through our data, then the second step is to ask how we have become
our data. How were our current dependencies on data formed? What from
our past persists in conditioning our present lives of data?
Skepticism here redoubles. Information would have us believe that it has
no history. Information technology is purveyed as always new, and as de-
sirable precisely because it is new. Avant- gardism about data is frequently
assumed by both its biggest boosters (in the tech sector and the intelligence
state) and its most scrupulous critics (among data activists and my fellow aca-
demics). We need to disrupt these ahistorical assumptions about information.
Accepting information as ahistorical facilitates our tendency to take in-
formation technologies as closed, locked, and unchangeable. In using infor-
mation systems of all kinds, from tiny devices to enterprise platforms, we
familiarly find ourselves feeling that we must yield to the technology. We fill
out the form the way it wants to be completed. We produce the numbers
that the system solicits. We do exactly what the computer instructs us to—
and most especially when we cannot get it to do what we want. And yet the
designs of data are anything but immutable forms that we must acquiesce to.
In investigating the history of information, we establish contact with the mo-
bility and manipulability of data technology. For we can find in that history
a set of moments when data was not yet closed, but rather glaringly open to
contestation and recomposition.
The pasts of data show us that information technology is ever open to
revision. Yet those same pasts also show that the weight which information
