Colin Koopman

Everybody knows that Big Data has become a significant political issue, but few of us would be able to make sense of the claim that data is inherently political.If data is political, one would assume this has more to do with what certain actors -governments, corporations and hackers -are now able to do with data than the actual data itself.In How We Became Our Data: A Genealogy of the Informational Person, Colin Koopman argues that data is not only inherently political, but that there is a profound sense in which our subjectivity has been reshaped by data.In fact, he claims that we have become our data.This claim is supported by two 'corollary' arguments (11).The first argument is that there is a distinctive form of power 'that organizes a politics of informational persons' (10).According to Koopman, this 'infopower' is a distinct modality of power that is exercised through the work of 'formatting' -the various techniques that 'shape, constrain, and prepare whatever is collected, stored, processed, refined, retrieved, and redistributed as information' (12).For Koopman, the 'paradigmatic instantiation' of formatting is the checkbox-and-blank form, as it is 'among the most ubiquitous of shapes into which we regularly squeeze ourselves' (12).Such an act of formatting serves to 'fasten' subjects to their data -that is to say, that acts of formatting bound subjects to their data in a way that changes what it is possible for them to be or to do (12).For Koopman, 'fastening' is an operation of power that serves both to 'tie us down' and 'speed us up' (12).He allows both meanings to accrue throughout the book, and it becomes clear that each effect serves to intensify the other.The more tightly we are bound to our data, the more quickly data can multiply, and the more easily we are able to move through the rapidly expanding infrastructure created by information.In this way, to be an informational person is to be 'inscribed, processed, and reproduced' as a subject of data -a form of subjectivity that is enabled by techniques of formatting and constituted through operations of fastening (4).To support this first argument, Koopman claims that the unique character of infopower is tied to a very specific historical moment, and that its status as a distinct analytic of power can only be revealed through a genealogy of the informational person (11).Consequently, the first part of the book is dedicated to showing how infopower emerged as a historically specific phenomenon.Koopman's genealogy begins in the early decades of the twentieth century, a moment when 'information began to precede the person' and it became 'possible for information to draw up persons as if out of nowhere' (6).It is the REVIEW

Epistemology · Genealogy · Sociology · Big Data Technologies and Applications · History · Intelligence, Security, War Strategy · Philosophy

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