How We Became Our Data

Of all the critical accounts of our becoming subjects of and to data, Koopman's is the most unsettling--which is to say, the most necessary. We simply cannot understand the crisis of the present without the two inextricable stories presented in this book: how the concept of information emerges as the necessary precondition for the 'information society' and how our lives have become almost unthinkable without the sociotechnical apparatus of documents. That this is ultimately an affirmative and even mobilizing tale, instead of a paralyzing horror, is a credit to Koopman's narrative skill and meticulous scholarship. --Rita Raley, author of Tactical Media Brilliant. Urgent. Essential. Koopman's study of the genealogy of our future-present selves, and how we became these informational artifacts, is crucial to developing new critical knowledges for politics, for aesthetics, and for life. --Davide Panagia, author of The Political Life of Sensation How We Became Our Data is a landmark contribution to contemporary philosophy of subjectivities and a must-read for anyone interested in the digital age. Koopman masterfully traces the birth of the informational person, meticulously excavating the informatic archives of the early twentieth century--from birth registration to personality testing to racial data on real estate and crime--to demonstrate how we have become our data today. Koopman develops a provocative new model of how power circulates in the informational age, providing an essential link between the statistical and confessional model of the nineteenth century and the digital profiling of the twenty-first. --Bernard E. Harcourt, author of Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age