Colin Koopman

We are now acutely aware, as if all of the sudden, that data matters enormously to how we live. How did information come to be so integral to what we can do? How did we become people who effortlessly present our lives in social media profiles and who are meticulously recorded in state surveillance dossiers and online marketing databases? What is the story behind data coming to matter so much to who we are? 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 its erosion.

A Genealogy of the Informational Person

How We Became Our Data

Mike Sandbothe

Alexander Groeschner

Richard Rorty was one of the most important philosophers of the last half of the twentieth century. His work helped effect global transformations in the way philosophy thinks about its work and role midst contemporary culture. He was influential across a diversity of disciplines in perturbing our inherited self-understandings of the place of intellectuals in culture and the roles of art, literature, science, and religion in contemporary liberal democratic society. This collection of essays, by an international and interdisciplinary group of eminent scholars and thinkers in their own right, including Jürgen Habermas, Saskia Sassen, Robert Brandom, and Richard Shusterman, presents the first complete posthumous study of Rorty's work as a whole. The collection reflects on Rorty's myriad accomplishments, with particular attention on the role of pragmatist philosophy in Rorty's increasing identification of his thinking with the work of cultural politics. The book covers the full range of Rortyan themes, including the practice of philosophy and metaphilosophy, the politics of culture, and Rorty's place in the contemporary philosophical and critical-cultural landscapes. These reflections serve to both introduce the arc of Rorty's thinking and advance the critical reception of his work.

Colin Koopman

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