How we became our data: A genealogy of the informational person

In the wake of Michel Foucault’s analyses of disciplinary surveillance and biopolitical regulations, or of Gilles Deleuze’s remarks on the ‘society of control’, in the past few years, many political theorists have developed compelling work on so-called ‘data politics’. From Maurizio Lazzarato’s ‘noopolitics’ and Tiziana Terranova’s ‘communication biopower’ to Grégoire Chamayou’s ‘datapower’ and Davide Panagia’s ‘#datapolitik’ (to mention only a few examples; for a more detailed list, see p. 169), it is widely accepted that one of the main ways in which power now functions is by collecting, storing, and exchanging vast amounts of personal data. Colin Koopman’s book, How We Became Our Data, does not merely add to this already vast literature new insights on what he calls ‘infopolitics’ (i.e. the politics of information) and ‘informational persons’ (claiming that we are invariably ‘inscribed, processed, and reproduced as subjects of data’, p. 4). Drawing from Foucault – both methodologically and conceptually – Koopman advances two original claims that have the ambition to transform some of the most deeply rooted assumptions in the field of data politics. First, Koopman convincingly argues that to understand how information became so important for the kind of subjects we are today, we should avoid focusing exclusively on the last few decades – that is, on the age of personal computing, internet, and social media. We should also problematise the widely accepted narrative that our ‘information era’ began in the aftermath of WWII, and more precisely with the elaboration, in 1948, of the so-called Wiener-Shannon theory of information (pp. 16–17). At the same time, Koopman argues that informational persons are not to be confused with confessing individuals and statisticalised populations of the nineteenth century. Informational personhood emerged between the mid-1910s and the mid-1930s. Indeed, the way in which subjects started to be formatted into data at that time (through birth certificates, psychological assessments, education records, financial profiles, etc.) still remains with us today. Koopman provides convincing historical evidence for this claim by analysing in