Colin Koopman is in the Philosophy Department at the University of Oregon, where he is also Director of New Media & Culture. His articles have appeared in Journal of the History of Philosophy, Critical Inquiry, diacritics, Constellations, and elsewhere. His previous two books are Genealogy as Critique (Indiana: 2013) and Pragmatism as Transition (Columbia: 2009).
Why did you feel the need to write How We Became Our Data?
The book is addressed to a problem that we nearly all feel the force of and which we also tend to feel rather perplexed about. For me, those kinds of tensions are where philosophy can be at its best. The specific problem the book focuses on concerns the politics and ethics of data. We find ourselves awash today in myriad questions stemming from the proliferation of data technologies throughout multiple, perhaps even all, aspects of our lives. These questions concern issues from mass surveillance by state actors and corporate merchants to cyberbullying to social media civility to the dissemination of misinformation to algorithmic biases embedded in purportedly neutral technologies that are employed to make crucial decisions about our lives and life prospects. There is an increasing urgency around all of these issues. Yet as the problems scale up we also seem to be receding from the horizon of reasonable answers we can work with. This is unsettling. I think philosophy, informed by a rich engagement with history, can be of some help.
Were there any specific events that motivated your concern with these issues?
My life has long been immersed in information technology from my childhood Commodore computer to spending an awkward teenage existence on BBSs (early message-board prototypes) to taking my first ‘grown-up’ job working on web content taxonomies at a boisterous dot-com in San Francisco. I have always felt the friction of technological transformation. So I wasn’t spurred to this book by any single event. That said, surely a moment of awakening for many, and one that certainly set a loud bell ringing in my head, was the Snowden affair. That aftermath to Snowden’s revelations makes poignant the problem at the heart of my book. Everyone who heard about this mass-scale clandestine state surveillance reacted with deep consternation. Yet the dismay we all felt at first eventually dwindled into feelings of helplessness, then apathy, then (for some) clever cynicism. Why? People gave up not because they do not care about the harms of mass-scale digital surveillance, but rather because we do not know how to conceptualize those burdens, and so we are at a loss for how to assess such unprecedented data harvesting and what to do about it going forward.
What is the book’s argument?
How We Became Our Data offers a philosophical-historical excavation of our contemporary condition of data-driven selfhood. My argument is that we find ourselves in a moment in which we are inextricably entangled in data technologies. As such, the formats of data now form a terrain over which social burdens and benefits are distributed. For example, we find ourselves in a world in which it is possible for persons to suffer truly ruinous harms of data privacy invasion, or in which persons are enrolled from birth in various identity categories mandated by blank forms (on both bureaucratic documents and social media profiles). At the halfway point in my research I published a piece in The Stone at The New York Times whose title, “The Age of ‘Infopolitics’,” is meant to capture the idea that we are today subject to a distinctively informational politics, that is, an array of political and ethical questions that are both endogenous to information and irreducible to more familiar political categories. That, then, is half of the book’s argument (a recent journal article, “Infopolitics, Biopolitics, Anatomopolitics,” previews the book’s contributions to political theory).
The other half of my argument is that our becoming ‘subjects of data’ or ‘informational persons’ has a much longer history than we commonly suppose. We tend to think of the problems of data ethics and information politics as high-tech novelties. I argue that our contemporary problems are but the culmination of conceptions of selfhood that were being forged one hundred years ago. Social media and mass surveillance became possible only after everyone had already begun to think of themselves, and live their lives, as numbers, discrete data points, and predictable results of algorithmic assessments. Most recent scholarship treats the grip that data has on our lives as either shockingly new or, in some cases, as a relatively recent outgrowth of mid-century computerization. I argue that we need to go deeper into ourselves and thus further into our history. This takes me back to the early-twentieth century (my recent New Media and Society article “Information before Information Theory” summarizes the book’s contributions to the historiography of information).
Has the development of smartphones and similar technologies augmented the tracking of peoples’ data in notable ways, or is it just a variation of the same formula but saved in servers rather than on paper?
Oh yes, without a doubt newer technologies are changing the game. There is no denying that. At the same time, much of the conversation around contemporary tracking and surveilling neglects the crucial first step of ‘datafication’ (or what I conceptualize in the book ‘formatting’) itself. We can be tracked as informational persons only if we have first been made into information. That sounds like a tautology, but I believe countenancing this fact has important implications. With this point, we can begin to recognize how we format ourselves, and one another, with a fevered relentlessness today. That readymade formatting then gets taken up by smartphones, social media, and other socio-technologies that can simply presume informational persons as their starting point. With that in place our relatively self-sustaining data ecologies become fertile terrain for data harvesting by corporations, governments, and of course overtly malicious actors.
What are some of the specifics of the historical genealogy of datafication that you chart in the book?
The book tracks the emergence of an informational personhood from 1917 to 1937 across three domains that remain central to contemporary conceptions of self: psychological selfhood, racial identity, and documentary registration. Focusing on sciences of personality psychology, the book describes the emergence of this influential field of research in the work of scientists who were able to stabilize a series of psychological data points (“personality traits”) on which they could therefore perform algorithmic analysis (“personality measures”). In the domain of racialized accounting, the book narrates the fraught history of the role of data technologies in home mortgage market redlining (a government-backed practice brought back into recent attention by Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “The Case for Reparations”). Lastly, I examine identity papers, and specifically the understudied history of the standardization of the birth certificate, the document that remains the foundation of legal and bureaucratic identity in the United States today (a fact that points directly to why such paperwork is so political, for instance, for those barred from access to documentation). I take these domains as paradigmatic, but similar dynamics characterize other fields, such as credit reporting, or molecular biology’s cracking of the genetic ‘code’.
What is your take on recent headlines about the government imposing a record fine on Facebook and social media sites starting to police the content broadcast on their sites more? Is this a way of challenging the role of data, a façade for the public, or something else?
I absolutely think these kinds of regulations are important and needed. That said, two things must be kept in mind.
First, the U.S. regulatory environment is well behind the E.U. regulatory environment especially with regard to the General Data Protection Regulation operating in Europe. The U.S. environment is one where a behemoth-size company like Facebook can push things to the limit and suffer the consequences later after everyone’s privacy has already been violated—to be sure the multi-billion fine that the FTC is negotiating with Facebook is sizable, but at the same time it needs to be remembered how giant Facebook is as a company given that their market capitalization has been hovering somewhere between $450-$500 billion for the last few months.
Second, the regulatory environment to which we are (hopefully) headed is one that looks like it will be focused on downstream consequences of datafication. Such issues, privacy being the most newsworthy, are extremely important both morally and politically. But the upstream preconditions of these consequences—the initial work of formatting or datafication—is currently outside of the ambit of most regulatory conversations. If Facebook can intrude upon our information privacy (which they did) this is only because we have first been drawn up as persons who would need to have privacy interests in their information. That initial step is not itself immoral or unjust, but rather my point is that it demands additional scrutiny as a series of processes that create a terrain for possible moral and political abuses.
Lastly, who has influenced this work the most?
The book’s subtitle makes plain my debts to genealogical methodology. Specifically, I build on the philosophical-historical investigations of Michel Foucault and Ian Hacking. One thing I take from their work is the thought that good philosophy takes its cue from the present. Today everyone is tweeting about cyberhacking—I want to understand what makes this present moment possible. A second thing I take from genealogy is the idea that, in the words of Bernard Williams, “philosophy, in order to do its business, must move into history.” My work is philosophical in its commitment to the rigorous analysis of conceptual transformations and it is historical in situating the tendencies of those dynamics within specific contexts that can be empirically inquired into.
I have also learned enormously from dozens of contemporary books on these subjects, including Simone Browne’s Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness and Wendy Chun’s Programmed Visions: Software and Memory. Above all, though, I have learned from a group of fellow collaborators-in-genealogy including Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson, Ladelle McWhorter, and Kevin Olson. A broader group of us regularly gather (at what we call the Critical Genealogies Workshop) to work through shared questions and problems. These are probably the deepest influences I can trace, even while these engagements themselves decidedly bear the imprint of a shared philosophical inheritance.
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