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 it.
*Colin Koopman* is associate professor of philosophy and director of the New Media & Culture Program at the University of Oregon. His books include: *Pragmatism as Transition: Historicity and Hope in James, Dewey, and Rorty *(2009); *Genealogy as Critique: Foucault and the Problems of Modernity *(2013); and *How We Become Our Date: A Genealogy of the Informational Person (2019)*. His published articles on pragmatism have appeared in *Journal of the History of* Philosophy, *diacritics*,* Metaphilosophy*, *Contemporary Pragmatism, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society*, and elsewhere. https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/H/bo38181810.html
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