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Colin Koopman. How We Became Our Data: A Genealogy of the Informational Person.

Colin Koopman. How We Became Our Data: A Genealogy of the Informational Person. Colin Koopman’s How We Became Our Data: A Genealogy of the Informational Person offers a lineage of the ways in which institutions in the public and private sectors began classifying persons as collections of data points. Koopman describes the emergence of a new “informational person”—accompanied by a new form of power—in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. This genealogy can shed light on the diverse ways in which global regimes of data are now intervening in our lives. Take an example not examined in the book: a large-scale datafication project in India. Beginning in 2009, the government of India began to roll out, at first voluntarily, a system known as “Unique Identity” (UID). Colloquially referred to as “Aadhaar” (foundation or base), the system consists of a twelve-digit identification number linked to a database containing biometric information, such as iris scans, fingerprints, and photographs. Currently documenting over 1.2 billion individuals, Aadhaar is the world’s largest biometric identification system (see uidai.gov.in). The implementation of such a vast biometric database was justified by the Indian government on the grounds that it would improve the delivery of government services to those who needed it most (Payal Arora, “Benign Dataveillance? Examining Novel Data-Driven Governance Systems in India and China,” First Monday 24, no. 1 [2019]: 1–16). Prior to UID, farmers and urban poor were often unable to claim pensions, subsidies, and other benefits due to a lack of documentation. Worse, identity thieves, “rice mafia,” and other fraudsters were managing to siphon off food and other goods intended for the indigent. Aadhaar seems to have improved things. There is some evidence, for example, that Aadhaar has helped to stanch the losses of government subsidies for household cooking fuel (Prabhat Barnwal, “Curbing Leakage in Public Programs: Evidence from India’s Direct Benefit Transfer Policy,” International Growth Centre, working paper, no. E-89111-INC-1 [2017]). Despite such documented successes, the expansion of Aadhaar has not occurred without resistance. Attempts to compel the use of UIDs were rebuffed by India’s Supreme Court, which affirmed that Aadhaar cannot be a precondition for opening a bank account, obtaining a phone number, or attending school. One of the central concerns expressed was the risks that UIDs posed to personal privacy. In 2018, an English-language Indian newspaper, the Tribune, managed to purchase (for $8) an entire database of UIDs and (for an extra $5) print the associated ID cards (Rachna Khaira, “Rs 500, 10 Minutes, and You Have Access to Billion Aadhaar Details,” Tribune, January 3, 2018). With such easy access, it is no surprise that UID data have been bought, stolen, and repurposed for a variety of criminal, corporate, and surveillance purposes (Arora [2019]). Indeed, the flux of UID data from the public to the private sector is considered, by some at least, a feature, not a bug. The first chairperson of the Unique Identification Authority of India, Nandan Nilekani, was the cofounder of Infosys, one of India’s largest software companies. Now, another company closely tied to Aadhaar, iSPIRT, is expanding the identification system into something they called “India Stack.” A set of layered application programming interfaces, India Stack aims to create software for cashless payments, digital records, and digital authentication all tied to UIDs. What has been underway in India over the past decade seems entirely congruent with the broader story of the “datafication” of persons that has taken place elsewhere. Koopman argues that we have “become our data” in a remarkably fundamental way: “Our data are not mere externalia attached to us from which we might detach our truer selves as we please, but are rather constitutive parts of who we can be” (8). India’s UID, like other recent data regimes, forms a “foundation” on which to build the “stack” of the self, linking us in ever more powerful and entangled ways to our data. Despite the rulings of India’s Supreme Court, to forego Aadhaar is not just to remain outside the system, but rather it is to almost cease to exist. Koopman calls this effect, binding us ever closer to our data, “fastening.” Fastening involves both fixing us down into specified categories and speeding us up—our datafied selves are reduced selves, but they also make more and more things possible for us. An Aadhaar-self consists of only a number, name, gender, date of birth, fingerprints, and iris scans, but it enables all manner of rapid interactions with the public and private sector, both online and off. Fastening remakes humans into subjects for transaction. But such fastenings, for Koopman, are not just side effects of our recent digitization and computerization; they are not merely a byproduct of video surveillance, structured query language databases, laser scans, or deep learning. Nor are their origins to be found in postwar cybernetics, information theory, or computing. Rather, they have a history that belongs more properly to the development of standardized forms, census work, filing and office machinery, paper tabulation, and statistics. Koopman is hardly the first scholar to make this historicizing move: there are Ian Hacking’s The Taming of Chance (1990), Dan Bouk’s How Our Days Became Numbered (2015), Jon Agar’s The Government Machine (2003), and the recent Osiris series volume on data histories (Elena Aronova, Christine von Oertzen, and David Sepkoski, eds., Data Histories [2017]), to give just a few examples. What is perhaps more unique is that Koopman chooses to locate the critical period for the creation of our datafied selves quite specifically in the decades just prior to World War II in the United States. Here—wedged between the nineteenth-century emergence of statistics and sociological analyses of population on the one side and the tumult of postwar Shannon-Weiner informatics on the other—Koopman sees the accelerating deployment of forms and procedures for fastening people into data. The three empirically driven chapters of the book highlight three particular domains in which this acceleration took place: the creation and standardization of birth certificates, personality testing in psychology, and the practice of “redlining” in real estate. Between roughly 1903 and 1933, Koopman argues, birth certificates in the United States went from hardly used paperwork to vital technologies for creating datafied selves that could be acted on by the state. Above all, this depended on the creation of standardized forms, procedures for using and filing them, and auditing procedures. The latter was affected by volunteer committees (mostly composed of women) of the Children’s Bureau who went door to door to measure birth registration. This “universal” attempt at enrolling citizens as data was followed up in the 1930s with the creation of the US Social Security number for all US workers. In the domain of psychology, the story is centered on Harvard psychologist Gordon Allport, as he became the most influential proponent of the personality test. Building on tests for IQ and “traits,” in the 1920s and 1930s psychologists learned how to turn individuals’ answers to standardized questions into “personalities.” Individuals were “fixed” to personalities (such as “submissive” or “ascendant”) via mathematical procedures. Likewise in real estate, in the 1920s, property appraisers turned to increasingly algorithmic tables and formulas for computing the value of a building. By scoring a neighborhood’s value in terms of “social undesirables” or “foreign elements,” race discrimination became built into real estate valuation. In the 1930s, these private-sector evaluation criteria were carried over into assessments by the Federal Housing Administration and the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, institutionalizing discrimination within the US government. There is no doubt these episodes are significant ones in the history of data and datafication. And Koopman’s instinct to explore the predigital origins of data is surely the correct one. But since datafication appears to be an increasingly generalized phenomenon, it is important to interrogate the implications of his narrow (both temporally and geographically) choice of examples. The fixation of data to individuals surely has a history that is both older and newer than Koopman’s account would suggest, extending from, at least, colonial information processing systems to China’s social credit system. Of course, all histories must narrow their scope somewhere and somehow. But Koopman argues that “America has been the province within which was worked out the terms of so many of the most scalable implementations of universalizable information technologies . . . that increasingly define who you and I can be” (31). He makes a similar claim for his chosen time period. Such notions are not easy to substantiate. But they also run the risk of suggesting that there’s only one way we could have become fixed to our data: that we got set in a particular way in the 1920s and 1930s and that much of what has happened elsewhere or since is merely intensification with small variations. It is important to point out here that How We Became Our Data: A Genealogy of the Informational Person is not aimed solely, or even primarily, at historians. The notion that the entrenched minutiae of forms, formats, data structures, databases, and standards carry politics should not be a shock to historians of technology. Instead, a good deal of Koopman’s work is devoted to mobilizing this history toward claims within the field of political philosophy. In this respect, the book lives up to the promise of its subtitle to offer a genealogy of the “informational person,” following the methods of Michel Foucault. This upshot of this genealogy is an account of the mode of power embedded in the information technologies that appear in the chapters about populations, psychology, and race. Here, and this is the central theoretical claim of the book, Koopman argues that this form of power—its techniques, mode of rationality, and style of reasoning—are irreducible to other Foucauldian analytics of power. Infopower, as Koopman labels it, is not biopower, nor sovereign power, nor disciplinary power. Rather, it is a form “layered” or “sedimented” on top of these forms that deserves its own distinct kinds of analysis and attention. At first blush, this seems like a very appealing and plausible intervention—there indeed does seem to be something special about the ways in which data and information are acting on our lives. We need, as Koopman maintains, new critical tools for analyzing and resisting the construction of our data-based selves. But separating out infopower requires some careful archaeology. Infopower, according to Koopman’s telling, is remarkably elusive. It “does not normalize us” and is not targeted at our “corporeal materiality” (166); it does not “prohibit, forbid, or exclude anything” (168). So what exactly is this infopower doing? Where do we feel it? The answer seems to lie in data’s ability to format us, to fasten us to particular selves that may have nothing to do with our bodies. A UID, for example, creates an Indian subject fixed to an address, an occupation, an educational certificate, a mobile phone number, a bank account, and so on. These data can be aggregated, disaggregated, analyzed, reformatted, stolen, or sold without intervening on an individual’s body. Koopman is attempting to focus our attention on these largely invisible churnings of information. But there is a worry here that this sort of analysis may actually divert our attention from the ways in which data do, in fact, act on us. As historians of information systems have been at pains to show for some time, for all the hype-filled pronouncements about the virtual and the immaterial, digital systems are dependent on their materiality in profound ways. Data do not roam free in some magical realm but are tied to paper or magnetic tapes or silicon gates. The power of information is not lurking in the cloud, but rather manifests in the ways it pushes back on our physical world. Paper forms, formats, and databases do, in fact, physically constrain us. They force us to write here or there, to type in that box or in that space, to press that finger into ink or place that eye into the iris scanner; they make us check yes or no, to choose A or B. And, once we make these choices, their effects press back on us, making us able to work or not, to behave in one way or another, or to live on one side of the tracks or the other. Significantly, Aadhaar has struggled exactly where it has failed to robustly link data to bodies. Farmers and manual laborers with fingerprints worn away and eyes scarred by cataracts have posed significant obstacles for the system. Likewise, the biggest problems with UIDs—fraud and theft—emerge when data are linked to the wrong bodies (or to dead bodies). Power, here, seems very much conjoined with data’s connections to the material, with their ability to compel bodies and things to move in particular ways. Data matter when they are tied to matter. In the final chapter of his book, Koopman outlines a program of resistance to our current data-based regimes, a “resistant informatics.” But his vision for such resistance is ultimately quite a conservative one: unable to escape from infopower’s grip, we must resist “within the operations of infopower: a resistance to this kind of fastening, a resistance to that kind of canalizing” (193; emphasis in original). We can work to change the forms and the formats through which infopower operates, he argues. Certainly we should. But perhaps we might hope for even more. If Koopman’s choice of examples projects a certain inevitability about our current datafication, then his dematerialized conception of infopower reinforces this. Casting information as a new form of power—independent of bodies—in some ways substantiates its spell over us. Disembodied and mysterious, data’s hidden workings become almost impossible to resist. But continuing to probe data’s manifold connections to the material may allow us to see where data are weakest. Perhaps we need to remind ourselves that data have been coupled and uncoupled to bodies in many contingent ways, at many times, in many places. This is to articulate the hope that we might be able—in some small ways at least, in some places and at some times—to decouple ourselves from our data. Maybe we haven’t quite become our data yet. © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png The American Historical Review Oxford University Press

Colin Koopman. How We Became Our Data: A Genealogy of the Informational Person.

Stevens, Hallam
The American Historical Review , Volume 126 (2): 3 – Sep 6, 2021
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Oxford University Press
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com
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0002-8762
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1937-5239
DOI
10.1093/ahr/rhab205
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Abstract

Colin Koopman’s How We Became Our Data: A Genealogy of the Informational Person offers a lineage of the ways in which institutions in the public and private sectors began classifying persons as collections of data points. Koopman describes the emergence of a new “informational person”—accompanied by a new form of power—in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. This genealogy can shed light on the diverse ways in which global regimes of data are now intervening in our lives. Take an example not examined in the book: a large-scale datafication project in India. Beginning in 2009, the government of India began to roll out, at first voluntarily, a system known as “Unique Identity” (UID). Colloquially referred to as “Aadhaar” (foundation or base), the system consists of a twelve-digit identification number linked to a database containing biometric information, such as iris scans, fingerprints, and photographs. Currently documenting over 1.2 billion individuals, Aadhaar is the world’s largest biometric identification system (see uidai.gov.in). The implementation of such a vast biometric database was justified by the Indian government on the grounds that it would improve the delivery of government services to those who needed it most (Payal Arora, “Benign Dataveillance? Examining Novel Data-Driven Governance Systems in India and China,” First Monday 24, no. 1 [2019]: 1–16). Prior to UID, farmers and urban poor were often unable to claim pensions, subsidies, and other benefits due to a lack of documentation. Worse, identity thieves, “rice mafia,” and other fraudsters were managing to siphon off food and other goods intended for the indigent. Aadhaar seems to have improved things. There is some evidence, for example, that Aadhaar has helped to stanch the losses of government subsidies for household cooking fuel (Prabhat Barnwal, “Curbing Leakage in Public Programs: Evidence from India’s Direct Benefit Transfer Policy,” International Growth Centre, working paper, no. E-89111-INC-1 [2017]). Despite such documented successes, the expansion of Aadhaar has not occurred without resistance. Attempts to compel the use of UIDs were rebuffed by India’s Supreme Court, which affirmed that Aadhaar cannot be a precondition for opening a bank account, obtaining a phone number, or attending school. One of the central concerns expressed was the risks that UIDs posed to personal privacy. In 2018, an English-language Indian newspaper, the Tribune, managed to purchase (for $8) an entire database of UIDs and (for an extra $5) print the associated ID cards (Rachna Khaira, “Rs 500, 10 Minutes, and You Have Access to Billion Aadhaar Details,” Tribune, January 3, 2018). With such easy access, it is no surprise that UID data have been bought, stolen, and repurposed for a variety of criminal, corporate, and surveillance purposes (Arora [2019]). Indeed, the flux of UID data from the public to the private sector is considered, by some at least, a feature, not a bug. The first chairperson of the Unique Identification Authority of India, Nandan Nilekani, was the cofounder of Infosys, one of India’s largest software companies. Now, another company closely tied to Aadhaar, iSPIRT, is expanding the identification system into something they called “India Stack.” A set of layered application programming interfaces, India Stack aims to create software for cashless payments, digital records, and digital authentication all tied to UIDs. What has been underway in India over the past decade seems entirely congruent with the broader story of the “datafication” of persons that has taken place elsewhere. Koopman argues that we have “become our data” in a remarkably fundamental way: “Our data are not mere externalia attached to us from which we might detach our truer selves as we please, but are rather constitutive parts of who we can be” (8). India’s UID, like other recent data regimes, forms a “foundation” on which to build the “stack” of the self, linking us in ever more powerful and entangled ways to our data. Despite the rulings of India’s Supreme Court, to forego Aadhaar is not just to remain outside the system, but rather it is to almost cease to exist. Koopman calls this effect, binding us ever closer to our data, “fastening.” Fastening involves both fixing us down into specified categories and speeding us up—our datafied selves are reduced selves, but they also make more and more things possible for us. An Aadhaar-self consists of only a number, name, gender, date of birth, fingerprints, and iris scans, but it enables all manner of rapid interactions with the public and private sector, both online and off. Fastening remakes humans into subjects for transaction. But such fastenings, for Koopman, are not just side effects of our recent digitization and computerization; they are not merely a byproduct of video surveillance, structured query language databases, laser scans, or deep learning. Nor are their origins to be found in postwar cybernetics, information theory, or computing. Rather, they have a history that belongs more properly to the development of standardized forms, census work, filing and office machinery, paper tabulation, and statistics. Koopman is hardly the first scholar to make this historicizing move: there are Ian Hacking’s The Taming of Chance (1990), Dan Bouk’s How Our Days Became Numbered (2015), Jon Agar’s The Government Machine (2003), and the recent Osiris series volume on data histories (Elena Aronova, Christine von Oertzen, and David Sepkoski, eds., Data Histories [2017]), to give just a few examples. What is perhaps more unique is that Koopman chooses to locate the critical period for the creation of our datafied selves quite specifically in the decades just prior to World War II in the United States. Here—wedged between the nineteenth-century emergence of statistics and sociological analyses of population on the one side and the tumult of postwar Shannon-Weiner informatics on the other—Koopman sees the accelerating deployment of forms and procedures for fastening people into data. The three empirically driven chapters of the book highlight three particular domains in which this acceleration took place: the creation and standardization of birth certificates, personality testing in psychology, and the practice of “redlining” in real estate. Between roughly 1903 and 1933, Koopman argues, birth certificates in the United States went from hardly used paperwork to vital technologies for creating datafied selves that could be acted on by the state. Above all, this depended on the creation of standardized forms, procedures for using and filing them, and auditing procedures. The latter was affected by volunteer committees (mostly composed of women) of the Children’s Bureau who went door to door to measure birth registration. This “universal” attempt at enrolling citizens as data was followed up in the 1930s with the creation of the US Social Security number for all US workers. In the domain of psychology, the story is centered on Harvard psychologist Gordon Allport, as he became the most influential proponent of the personality test. Building on tests for IQ and “traits,” in the 1920s and 1930s psychologists learned how to turn individuals’ answers to standardized questions into “personalities.” Individuals were “fixed” to personalities (such as “submissive” or “ascendant”) via mathematical procedures. Likewise in real estate, in the 1920s, property appraisers turned to increasingly algorithmic tables and formulas for computing the value of a building. By scoring a neighborhood’s value in terms of “social undesirables” or “foreign elements,” race discrimination became built into real estate valuation. In the 1930s, these private-sector evaluation criteria were carried over into assessments by the Federal Housing Administration and the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, institutionalizing discrimination within the US government. There is no doubt these episodes are significant ones in the history of data and datafication. And Koopman’s instinct to explore the predigital origins of data is surely the correct one. But since datafication appears to be an increasingly generalized phenomenon, it is important to interrogate the implications of his narrow (both temporally and geographically) choice of examples. The fixation of data to individuals surely has a history that is both older and newer than Koopman’s account would suggest, extending from, at least, colonial information processing systems to China’s social credit system. Of course, all histories must narrow their scope somewhere and somehow. But Koopman argues that “America has been the province within which was worked out the terms of so many of the most scalable implementations of universalizable information technologies . . . that increasingly define who you and I can be” (31). He makes a similar claim for his chosen time period. Such notions are not easy to substantiate. But they also run the risk of suggesting that there’s only one way we could have become fixed to our data: that we got set in a particular way in the 1920s and 1930s and that much of what has happened elsewhere or since is merely intensification with small variations. It is important to point out here that How We Became Our Data: A Genealogy of the Informational Person is not aimed solely, or even primarily, at historians. The notion that the entrenched minutiae of forms, formats, data structures, databases, and standards carry politics should not be a shock to historians of technology. Instead, a good deal of Koopman’s work is devoted to mobilizing this history toward claims within the field of political philosophy. In this respect, the book lives up to the promise of its subtitle to offer a genealogy of the “informational person,” following the methods of Michel Foucault. This upshot of this genealogy is an account of the mode of power embedded in the information technologies that appear in the chapters about populations, psychology, and race. Here, and this is the central theoretical claim of the book, Koopman argues that this form of power—its techniques, mode of rationality, and style of reasoning—are irreducible to other Foucauldian analytics of power. Infopower, as Koopman labels it, is not biopower, nor sovereign power, nor disciplinary power. Rather, it is a form “layered” or “sedimented” on top of these forms that deserves its own distinct kinds of analysis and attention. At first blush, this seems like a very appealing and plausible intervention—there indeed does seem to be something special about the ways in which data and information are acting on our lives. We need, as Koopman maintains, new critical tools for analyzing and resisting the construction of our data-based selves. But separating out infopower requires some careful archaeology. Infopower, according to Koopman’s telling, is remarkably elusive. It “does not normalize us” and is not targeted at our “corporeal materiality” (166); it does not “prohibit, forbid, or exclude anything” (168). So what exactly is this infopower doing? Where do we feel it? The answer seems to lie in data’s ability to format us, to fasten us to particular selves that may have nothing to do with our bodies. A UID, for example, creates an Indian subject fixed to an address, an occupation, an educational certificate, a mobile phone number, a bank account, and so on. These data can be aggregated, disaggregated, analyzed, reformatted, stolen, or sold without intervening on an individual’s body. Koopman is attempting to focus our attention on these largely invisible churnings of information. But there is a worry here that this sort of analysis may actually divert our attention from the ways in which data do, in fact, act on us. As historians of information systems have been at pains to show for some time, for all the hype-filled pronouncements about the virtual and the immaterial, digital systems are dependent on their materiality in profound ways. Data do not roam free in some magical realm but are tied to paper or magnetic tapes or silicon gates. The power of information is not lurking in the cloud, but rather manifests in the ways it pushes back on our physical world. Paper forms, formats, and databases do, in fact, physically constrain us. They force us to write here or there, to type in that box or in that space, to press that finger into ink or place that eye into the iris scanner; they make us check yes or no, to choose A or B. And, once we make these choices, their effects press back on us, making us able to work or not, to behave in one way or another, or to live on one side of the tracks or the other. Significantly, Aadhaar has struggled exactly where it has failed to robustly link data to bodies. Farmers and manual laborers with fingerprints worn away and eyes scarred by cataracts have posed significant obstacles for the system. Likewise, the biggest problems with UIDs—fraud and theft—emerge when data are linked to the wrong bodies (or to dead bodies). Power, here, seems very much conjoined with data’s connections to the material, with their ability to compel bodies and things to move in particular ways. Data matter when they are tied to matter. In the final chapter of his book, Koopman outlines a program of resistance to our current data-based regimes, a “resistant informatics.” But his vision for such resistance is ultimately quite a conservative one: unable to escape from infopower’s grip, we must resist “within the operations of infopower: a resistance to this kind of fastening, a resistance to that kind of canalizing” (193; emphasis in original). We can work to change the forms and the formats through which infopower operates, he argues. Certainly we should. But perhaps we might hope for even more. If Koopman’s choice of examples projects a certain inevitability about our current datafication, then his dematerialized conception of infopower reinforces this. Casting information as a new form of power—independent of bodies—in some ways substantiates its spell over us. Disembodied and mysterious, data’s hidden workings become almost impossible to resist. But continuing to probe data’s manifold connections to the material may allow us to see where data are weakest. Perhaps we need to remind ourselves that data have been coupled and uncoupled to bodies in many contingent ways, at many times, in many places. This is to articulate the hope that we might be able—in some small ways at least, in some places and at some times—to decouple ourselves from our data. Maybe we haven’t quite become our data yet. © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)

Journal

The American Historical Review – Oxford University Press

Published: Sep 6, 2021

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