[liberationtech] How We Became Our Data

[Yosem Companys]

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 it.

*Colin Koopman* is associate professor of philosophy and director of the
New Media & Culture Program at the University of Oregon. His books
include: *Pragmatism
as Transition: Historicity and Hope in James, Dewey, and Rorty
*(2009); *Genealogy
as Critique: Foucault and the Problems of Modernity *(2013); and *How We
Become Our Date: A Genealogy of the Informational Person (2019)*. His
published articles on pragmatism have appeared in *Journal of the History
of* Philosophy, *diacritics*,* Metaphilosophy*, *Contemporary Pragmatism,
Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society*, and elsewhere.
https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/H/bo38181810.html
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