The counterpoint to Colin Koopman’s brilliant How We Became Our Data is perhaps Michel Foucault’s own 1977 introduction to a never-produced book called The Lives of Miniscule Humans. Foucault had considered putting together an anthology chronicling the lives of ordinary people who had disappeared from history completely except for brief entries entered into the bureaucratic records of a prison, asylum, or hospital—entries that Foucault would stumble upon while working in the archives of the French national library: “Jean Antoine Touzard, placed in the castle of Bicêtre, 21 April 1701: ‘Seditious apostate friar, capable of the greatest crimes, sodomite, atheist if that were possible; this individual is a veritable monster of abomination whom it would be better to stifle than to leave at large.’”1 These lines are the only data that remains of the life of the unfortunate Jean Touzard, although no doubt such fleeting archival records were already a step above the fate of most humans—the degree zero in which we die without leaving behind the slightest trace of our existence.2

Koopman’s book reminds us how far removed we are from such a world. In Foucault’s imagined book, data was produced primarily by institutions charged with caring for people considered to be “abnormal”—the diseased, the criminal, the mad. Today, in an age of information, we live in a regime of “infopower” where the data on each individual is massive (“big data”) and the scourge of abnormality has instead fallen on “undocumented” people, the sans papiers. The aim of Koopman’s book is both to analyze this new apparatus of infopower and to trace its genealogy.

Koopman’s argument is that infopower is a distinctive modality of political power that is exercised through the technique of formatting, an operation that serves to “fasten” subjects so tightly to their data that “we have become our data” (ix). For Koopman, this claim means that data can now determine what it is possible for an individual to be or do. Depending on our data, a financial transaction will be approved or blocked, a college admission will be accepted or rejected, entrance to a building will be granted or denied, a job application will be successful or unsuccessful, a border will be crossed or not. Data can both “tie us down and speed us up”; it can canalize future possibilities (63) as much as it can accelerate our existence (as in the constant stream of notifications we receive “as an elicitation for ever more engagement” [13]). Koopman is one of the few philosophers who has taken the notion of formatting and turned it into a rigorous philosophical concept.3

How We Became Our Data presents a history of our present, an analysis of the roots of the regime of infopower that has supplanted—or rather coexists with—the regimes of biopower and disciplinary power that Foucault himself analyzed. The information age, Koopman shows, began to appear long before the development of the World Wide Web, or the computer, or even the development of information theory in the late 1940s (Weiner, Shannon, Turing), which are the touchstones for traditional histories. Rather, Koopman shows that the regime of infopower coalesced in the beginning of the twentieth century, when “information began to precede the person” (6) as if it were a new infrastructure, a new “historical universal” (10) into which subjects were inserted. Humans were becoming “informational persons.”

Part 1 of the book—which is a stunning tour de force—proposes a Foucauldian genealogy of three new forms of data-based identity that constitute the informational person: documentary, psychological, and racial identity. Like Foucault’s work, Koopman’s analyses are deeply grounded in archival detail, and one might say they give a new meaning to “empiricism” in philosophy. The first chapter traces the formatting of the birth certificate, the first document that fastens individuals to specific data points, such as their race, sex, name and occupation of the parents, and even the “legitimacy” of their birth. Bookended by one’s death certificate, the birth certificate became an individual’s entry point into an ever-expanding network of informatics: social security numbers, bank statements, email accounts, drivers’ licenses, passports, university transcripts, market transactions, email accounts, genetic reporting, and on and on (44, 155).

More surprisingly, the second chapter (66–107) shows how the concept of “personality” coalesced in the early twentieth century out of the endeavor to “objectively” measure the psychological traits of humans. One result of this endeavor was an astonishing book by the primary proponent of “psychometrics,” Gordon Allport, that compiled an exhaustive list of 17,953 English-language trait names—the human psyche formatted into big data.4 “Intelligent” was one of these trait-names, and the early 1900s was the era in which intelligence testing came into vogue as a method of measuring the intellect. Koopman’s radical claim is that, strictly speaking, individuals did not have “personalities” until this attempt to format human psychology came into being, much as Arnold Davidson argued that there had been no perverts until the concept of perversion, and its corresponding mode of being, was formatted in the latter part of the nineteenth century.5

The remarkable third chapter, on the seemingly mundane topic of real estate, shows how racism in the 1930s and 1940s, though officially disavowed, wound up being embedded in the algorithms of redlining, which resulted in severe racial segregation in housing, banking, and education, an Eichmann-like convergence of systemic racism with bureaucratic banality. The chapter is the apotheosis Koopman’s empirical analyses, since it shows that the entire structure of infopower in which the information person exists is inevitably racist. I suspect it will become a standard text in the theory of race.

In each of these chapters, Koopman shows himself to be a worthy successor to Foucault. He does not merely repeat what Foucault said, but does what Foucault did: patient, detailed, and philosophically informed historical research to which these brief summaries can hardly do justice. “The discursive deeds of grand theory,” Koopman writes, “gain their force through the practical elaboration of tiny techniques” (71). Koopman has weaved an extraordinary narrative from the work of the largely unknown technicians who produced the regime of infopower by devoting themselves to the “minutiae of formatting” (161).

In part 2 of his book, Koopman then turns to the necessary question, How should we respond politically to the regime of infopower? to which the fifth chapter (“Redesign”) gives a nuanced and forceful response. Infopower has opened up new possibilities, to be sure, but it has also facilitated “injustices, inequalities, and unfreedoms” (154). One is reminded of Melvin Kranzberg’s dictum that “technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.”6 Koopman persuasively shows the limitations of theories of deliberative democracy based on communicative proceduralism (Habermas, Rawls), since such theories ignore the informatics and formatting processes upon which they rest, and without which deliberation and communication would be impossible (184–87). What we need, Koopman argues, is a more profound politics of formats, a politics that not only addresses the formation of information, but the ways in which formatting occurs and the means by which information is stored, processed, compared, repurposed, distributed, and so on (182). In reflecting on Foucault’s notion of resistance, Gilles Deleuze noted in 1990 that the strikes and sabotage of factory work had given way to hacking and viruses,7 and one wonders what new forms of resistance would emerge in a politics of formats: Alternative types of formats? A jamming of current formats? A struggle against the very activity of formatting? The lawsuits against the current tech giants (Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook) are only the surface manifestation of a formatting politics that is spread deeply into the warp and woof of the social fabric, and we can only hope that Koopman will develop a politics of formats in more detail in a future work.

In the fourth chapter (“Diagnostics”), finally, Koopman attempts to situate his analysis in a broader philosophical context. Koopman’s empirical analyses are largely restricted to the early twentieth century, roughly the period from 1913 to 1937, just as Foucault’s early works were confined to the classical period. He takes pains to show how the regime of infopower must be distinguished from the regimes of biopower, disciplinary power, and sovereign power that Foucault himself analyzed, even if they overlap and intermingle. His discussion raises several issues that, in my mind, point to fertile directions for future research.

First, Koopman seems to have opened the door to a broader understanding of the history (and even prehistory) of infopower. He approvingly cites Lisa Gitelman’s declaration that “new inscriptions signal new subjectivities” (6), and her concept of inscription is perhaps one manner of approaching that history.8 Nietzsche, for instance, had argued that the inscriptions that initially documented our identity were made directly on the body: a circumcised penis, a scarified forehead, or a tattooed body marked one as a Jew, a Nuer, or a Maori (mnemotechnics).9 Are these marks, which are inscribed directly on the surface of the body, any less a form of infopower than marks that are inscribed on a piece of paper? With the invention of writing, inscriptions were externalized and able to be “captured” by states and their bureaucracies. Moreover, teaching the techniques of inscribing marks and interpreting them (literacy) became one of the fundamental purposes of educational institutions, to the point where being “illiterate” implied that one is both uncivilized and unintelligent. Money, or capital, is itself a form of inscription, pieces of data added to or subtracted from the accounts of banks and firms. The practices analyzed by Koopman obviously presuppose these “prior” forms of infopower, and recent books have analyzed how inscription has been further transformed by the advent of digitalization, such as Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction (on the role of automated algorithms)10 and Seth Stephens-Davidowitz’s Everybody Lies (on the human psychology revealed in Google data).11 Koopman himself points to the work in media studies (Kittler) and elsewhere that has started to assess the continuities and discontinuities of this prehistory of infopower, with all its singularities (writing, literacy, printing, computers, etc.).

Second, although Koopman adopts Foucault’s method of genealogy, for instance, one might argue that what Bergson once called the “retrograde movement” of knowledge is also at play.12 It is often said that, in the modern world, there have been three ages of machines—mechanical, energetic, and information machines—and each of these machines has been used as a model for comprehending nature, or objects in nature. In the seventeenth century, the idea of mechanism arose in part from the model of the watch: the world is like a machine with internal mechanisms that explain its functioning. The same happened in the nineteenth century, when the invention of the steam engine led to the development of the science of thermodynamics, and workers came to be seen as human motors with an energetic capacity or “labor power” that could be quantified and optimized (Taylorism, Fordism).13

Today, the computer seems to have become a model for almost everything, from genetics (the genetic “program” or “code”)14 to the mind (our brain is the hardware, and the mind is the software, running different programs in different modules). These are not mere metaphors or analogies. Nature is an organization of matter, and technical artifacts (machines, motors, computers) are ways in which we have learned to organize matter. Since we have a “maker’s knowledge” of our artifacts—a knowledge from the inside, as it were—we use that knowledge to comprehend the organizations found in nature, including human organizations.

Yet once technical models such as mechanism, energetics, and information emerged, it was inevitable that they would be used, in a retrograde movement, to understand the past. In his essay “Kafka and His Precursors,” Jorge Luis Borges catalogues a number of earlier writers whose works exhibit Kafkaesque elements but otherwise have little else in common. But such authors can begin to look Kafkaesque only once we have read Kafka himself. “The fact is that each writer creates his precursors,” Borges concludes, “his work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.”15 The same would seem to be true of information: the advent of informatics has modified our conception of the past. Koopman rightly suggests that the informational “precursors” he analyses were on the cusp of achieving consolidation or stabilization (176–77). But might it be equally the case that their “conditions of appearance” (26) lies in the fact that we retrospectively recognize them as informational precisely because of the later consolidation and stabilization of informatics?

Third, this leads to a last point about historicity and temporality. Koopman rightly rejects an analysis of the relation between infopower and biopower (or any other formation) in terms of simple succession or “temporal eras” (171). Succession is itself a form of temporality that derives from sovereign power, since it measures time in terms of the succession of sovereigns (“in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar”). For Koopman, it is not as if infopower succeeded biopower, disciplinary power, or even sovereign power; rather, infopower inserted itself into these formations. He adopts a suggestion of Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson that replaces succession with “interpenetration and superimposition” (172). But this seems to presume a conception of temporality in which time is not successive but rather coexistent. In Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari proposed the provocative thesis that archaic states such as Babylon and Egypt could not and did not from simpler “primitive” societies; rather, such social formations existed side-by-side in a single field of coexistence, which alone can account for their intermingling and interpenetration.16 Whether or not their solution is adequate, Koopman’s work has renewed the question of how to think of history in terms other than succession.

No doubt these are metaphysical issues of the type of Koopman rightly eschews (10, 236n84). But they point to the fact that, in its focus on the concrete practices of infopower, the implications of Koopman’s outstanding work, like all great works, goes far beyond its stated intentions.

At a time when it seems that everyone is concerned with how our data is used—lamenting the new (and problematic) dynamics introduced to this end by digital technologies—it may seem quaint to turn to the pencil-and-paper past for insight into algorithmic decision-making. Yet, as Colin Koopman argues in How We Became Our Data, it is precisely these often-obscured historical moments that reveal to us how data has shaped our very understanding of who we are. In providing us with the new vocabulary of infopower, and tracing its genesis through certain moments in the history of data collection and processing, Koopman gives us a compelling account of how—and why—we can and should rethink the work that data does to us, rather than focusing solely on what we do with data.

I very much appreciated this book. Koopman’s focus on the early decades of the twentieth century is a welcome corrective to the all-too-common insistence that we understand digital technologies (and their effects) as wholly novel. And Koopman’s genealogical analysis of infopower—in particular, its constituent parts, formatting and fastening—is exceedingly useful for developing a fuller understanding how, exactly, data works on us today. As a result of this investigation, as Koopman argues in the book’s concluding chapters, we are better equipped to deal more explicitly with the politics of information—to “confront,” as Koopman puts it, “information itself as a political problem” (22).

Koopman’s engagement with this political problem largely takes the form of his critique of deliberative democracy for overlooking infopower. Deliberative theory, Koopman argues—especially work in the Habermasian tradition—“ignores information as a site of politics” (187). While these scholars have focused primarily on processes of communication—which presuppose already-formatted information—Koopman instead suggests that a “normative political theory of information” might also investigate the “processes of information design that any and all communication presupposes” (189).

Certainly, Koopman is right that democratic theorists should pay more attention to the critical questions his genealogy introduces: namely, “How is this information [communicated in deliberations] formed? How is it formatted? What burdens are embedded in those formats?” (187). Indeed, similar questions (especially the last) have been lobbied at deliberative democratic theory for years, by thinkers such as Iris Marion Young, Lynn Sanders, and Arthur Lupia and Anne Norton, who all call attention to the restrictiveness of “rational deliberation.”1

But deliberative democracy, while useful, is not the only way to think of democratic politics. Indeed, there is another longstanding—and complementary—tradition that treats democracy not only as a communicative practice, but also as a “way of life” that is built out of social habits, attitudes, and mores.2

Thinking of democracy in this broader sense, I want to suggest here, might help flesh out the political significance of infopower, which Koopman rightly directs us towards. Indeed, I think it is worth considering that there is something distinctively democratic about infopower. And examining deeper relationship between infopower and democracy has implications for not only why we find infopower so compelling, but also how we might resist its negative potentialities.

I. Understanding Infopower

One of the important contributions of this book is Koopman’s novel concept of infopower. Infopower, he argues, “deploys techniques of formatting to do its work of producing and refining informational persons who are subject to the operations of fastening” (12). It is through infopower, in other words, that we become “informational persons”—we become beings who are understood by, and through, our data.

Importantly, Koopman characterizes infopower as a new—and distinct—mode of power. Though he acknowledges that infopower is “layered on the biopolitical, disciplinary, and sovereign powers characteristic of a more familiar moment in modernity” (189), Koopman nevertheless wants to keep these terms conceptually separated. Consider his comparison of sovereign power with infopower. While “a sovereign,” Koopman argues, “garishly expunges, or extinguishes, that which is deemed impermissible . . . a format leaves everything as it was such that a subject that is not formatted according to its terms is not committed to nonexistence but only consigned to either try again or go its own way” (168). Whereas traditional sovereign power operates through “force and brutality” (167) to prohibit certain actions, infopower does not. If someone, or something, fails to fit the format, they do not disappear; they simply become unreadable.

Yet this distinction is perhaps a bit too neat. Consider, for example, the University of Virginia’s trouble in August 2020. The university required students to test negative for the novel coronavirus before returning to campus; yet the website used to order such a test failed to list certain states, like Rhode Island and New Jersey—meaning students from those states were unable to comply, as their information did not fit the format.3 Likewise, until 2016 the Common Application required students to select either “male” or “female” before advancing to the rest of the form; students whose gender identity differed from those two options were excluded from consideration.

These are not examples of a Leviathan handing down mandates; rather they are, or at least appear to be, mere accidents of formatting. But they nevertheless do seem, in important ways, to be acts of “prohibition and permission”—perhaps more subtle and insidious in their restrictiveness, but nonetheless producing real political effects of exclusion and erasure.

And Koopman himself seems open to this interpretation. While he makes clear that infopower is “neither a variant of nor reducible to biopower or discipline” (14), he nevertheless leaves a bit less daylight when it comes to sovereign power. “If the power of information is at all expressive of sovereign power,” he notes, “then it can only be expressive of a decidedly altered shape of sovereignty. It would be a power that dispenses entirely with techniques of violence and logics of prohibition and permission” (168, emphasis mine).

But sovereign power does look decidedly different in a democratic society. In reading Koopman’s description of infopower, I was struck by its parallels with Alexis de Tocqueville’s description of democratic tyranny. In democracies, says Tocqueville, “the master no longer says: ‘Think like me or you die.’ He does say: ‘You are free not to think as I do; you can keep your life and property and all; but from this day you are a stranger among us. . . . You will remain among men, but you will lose your rights to count as one. . . . Go in peace. I have given you a life, but it is a life worse than death.’”4

What Tocqueville reminds us here is that sovereign power in a democracy is of a “decidedly altered shape.” Rather than the “clumsy weapons of chains and hangmen”5 the democratic sovereign exercises power over thought. The power of forbidding here is not explicit, nor is it particularly violent; instead, we all end up censoring—or, in Koopman’s terminology, formatting—ourselves just to fit in and be recognized by society. And if we fail to do so, we are simply “consigned to either try again or go [our] own way.” Might infopower, then, be the newest manifestation of this democratic power—another way to solicit obedience through social pressure rather sovereign fiat?

II. Enacting Infopower

Approaching infopower from this Tocquevillian perspective—rather than Koopman’s Foucauldian one—can, I think, help to uncover additional dimensions to the specifically democratic politics of infopower.

For Koopman, information’s power is found “in its promise of, and success at, effective universalization” (11). Information seems universal because it is everywhere always. The political project that Koopman takes up in the book, then, is to trouble this claim and uncover how historical and contingent forms and formats were mobilized in a way that “made information into such a powerful universal” (10, emphasis mine). By interrogating the genesis of infopower, Koopman argues, we are better equipped to resist it.

This genealogical analysis clearly details how these individual instances helped to consolidate infopower as an organizing force in modern life; it is only in turning to Tocqueville’s writings about democratic subjectivity, however, that we can find an explanation for why we all so willingly went along.

Democracy, Tocqueville reminds us, engenders a love of equality: “The particular and predominating fact peculiar to [democratic] ages,” he says, “is equality of conditions, and the chief passion which stirs men at such times is the love of this same equality.”6 Democratic subjects, in other words, cannot tolerate difference—indeed, their love of equality is such that “they will put up with poverty, servitude, and barbarism, but they will not endure aristocracy.”7

And as a specifically democratic mode of power, infopower is perhaps the most advanced means for equalizing democratic subjects. Consider Koopman’s discussion of social media profiles. These, he argues, “pin us down to prefab formats, categories, and conceptions that we then readily tie ourselves to” such that the “social media profile that is produced on the basis of all this processed information looks more or less the same for us all” (13). The homogeneity enforced by the profile’s format ensures that no one user will, or can, rise above the rest. Formats may “tie us down” (12), in other words, but in so doing they also bind our neighbors—and it is in that equalizing effect that we find infopower’s enduring appeal. While we might prefer equality in freedom, we’ll happily take the restrictions it imposes, provided they apply the same to us all.

What Tocqueville reminds us, then, is that infopower’s universalizability is not simply the result of luck or chance. While the emergence of infopower is, without question, a historical specificity, it is also one motivated in large part by the psychology of democratic subjects. It is, in other words, a specifically democratic problem. Motivated by our love of equality, we keep mobilizing infopower because it makes, as Jaron Lanier puts it, “the pack mentality as efficient as possible.”8

III. Resisting Infopower

What does all of this mean for our prospects of resistance? Koopman’s Foucauldian analysis of infopower leads him to a rather Foucauldian answer: resistance consists in “occupation, contestation, and transformation . . . a politics of critique” (193). And this critique, Koopman suggests in the final section of the book’s final chapter, should be largely aimed at experts and elites working in technocratic spaces like a “design lab . . . a code studio . . . a tech incubator . . . an engineering firm . . . a seminar table around which regularly gather a small team of collaborators . . . somebody’s mom’s garage” (194). These are the “formatters, designers, and developers [who] build the information systems that form the basements beneath our lives” (194); they are, as a result, rightly the focus of a political project aimed at resisting infopower’s potentially restrictive effects.

This approach is no doubt valuable. We should be critical of those who “format our futures” (194), asking incisive questions “about the politics of today’s designs as they are becoming tomorrow’s formats” (195). And Koopman certainly gives us a good list of questions with which to start this work.

But approaching infopower as a specifically democratic mode of power raises additional considerations when thinking of resistance. As a tool of the democratic sovereign, infopower relies on the cooperation of many to be successful. And it is infopower’s capacity to equalize that makes us all the more happy—even eager—to cooperate and oblige. Infopower, in other words, is a power wielded by the masses over ourselves, as evident in Koopman’s examples of those (volunteer women) who deployed birth registration at scale, the people who took self-assessed personality tests, and the real-estate-agent-to-be who turned to accessible manuals to learn racialized appraisal algorithms.

Taken together, these considerations force us to direct our critique beyond the information architects who create formats. Rather, we must also look to those who deploy formats daily, in often-mundane ways, and ask ourselves how we might act collectively to counteract or resist their effects. Approaching infopower as a democratic problem, in other words, directs us to also consider how we are all cooperative and complicit—even when we are not the ones doing the developing.

As members of university departments, for example, we regularly deploy formats to collect, track, and evaluate students, peers, and potential hires, though we likely do not create those formats ourselves. How might we ensure that the equality imposed by these formats is productive rather than destructive? How do we resist the tyrannical consequences of equality while still making collective decision-making possible? And, perhaps most importantly, what are the collective dimensions of this project of resistance? It is, after all, only through collective efforts that we can hope to successfully ‘harness’ infopower in the name of democratic freedom, rather than fall prey to the democratic despotism Tocqueville so feared.

How We Became Our Data gestures toward these questions but it does not provide us with answers. Nor should it; as a democratic problem, infopower requires democratic solutions. But by excavating the roots of infopower, Koopman provides us with a starting point for this collective work: a vocabulary with which to begin addressing the politics of information—together.

In an essay first published in 1977, Michel Foucault justifies his fascination with the archival projects he had undertaken in collaboration with the historian Arlette Farge in the archives at the Bastille. This fascination with the archives is evident throughout Foucault’s oeuvre, and it would be the motivation for texts such as Herculine Barbin, Pierre Riviere, and Disorderly Families.1 Foucault claims that his intention in such texts is to gather together “singular lives, transformed into strange poems through who knows what strange twists of fate—that is what I decided to gather into a kind of herbarium” (EW3:157). One of the main sources of Foucault’s fascination with these lives is that they exist on the margins of the archive.

Christianity demands the avowal of every sin. “The Christian West invented the astonishing constraint, which it imposed on everyone, to tell everything in order to efface everything, to express even the most minor faults in an unbroken, relentless, exhaustive murmur which nothing must elude, but which must not outlive itself even for a moment” (EW3:166). Foucault detects a shift in the seventeenth century in the technology of confession. Although the administrative police report would serve a similar function as confession had, namely to reveal the “quotidian” and make it legible to sovereign power through the form of a lettre de cachet, a petition made by a subject imploring the sovereign to act on the petitioner’s behalf against an individual who has wronged them, often against a family member. “The intervention of a limitless political power in everyday relations thus became not only acceptable and familiar but also deeply condoned—not without becoming, from that very fact, the theme of a generalized fear” (168).2 Ordinary people were compelled to express themselves in these police reports precisely because they wanted sovereign power to intercede on their behalf. This is a moment when ordinary subjects enter discourse and become present to the archive precisely because the presence of sovereign power pervades society in a way that it hadn’t before (recall for example Foucault’s contrast between the spectacular effects of sovereign power and the mundane effects of disciplinary power in Discipline and Punish), but it is not the only such moment. In the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault also traces the origins of such an incitement to speak, this time to refute what he calls “the repressive hypothesis.” On the contrary, Foucault shows that beginning in the seventeenth century there had been an “incitement to discourse”: Sex becomes implicated in the exercise of power in ways that it had not been before.3

I begin here, with this moment when ordinary people became legible to the ancien régime and sovereign power made itself felt in the everyday life of the people because, just as Foucault notes various similarities between the Christian confession and the eighteenth-century lettres de cachet around a self-imposed desire to speak and thereby make oneself legible to power, we can detect a similar sort of demand to make oneself legible in the various formats of data that bears an uncanny resemblance to these older police reports and lettres de cachet. We find ourselves part of yet another “birth, consequently, of an immense possibility for discourse” that takes the form of infopower (EW3:169).

Koopman carefully analyzes infopower in terms of what he calls power’s “layering effects.” That is, infopower is superimposed upon other regimes of power relations, rather than a distinct epoch of power. I believe Foucault is making a similar point with respect to sovereign power and lettres de cachet: here we see sovereign power saturating everyday life, coexisting alongside the grand spectacle of sovereign power (and Koopman correctly points out that Foucault’s ambiguity in his analysis of power relations that gave rise to the confusion that sees power simply in historical and epochal terms).

But there is another reason for beginning here: I wish to make explicit an important dimension of infopower that is only implicit in Koopman’s genealogical reconstruction of infopower in the United States during the first third of the twentieth century. How We Became Our Data does an excellent job of telling how we became subjects of data or infopolitical subjects precisely because it shows how individuals were subject to novel techniques of formatting that only subsequently became technologies of infopower: the birth certificate, the personality test, the mortgage. But there is an ambiguity in the concept “subject” that Foucault analyzes more clearly than he does the spatiotemporal dimensions of power relations: not only are individuals passive subjects composed by concrete practices and conducted through technologies of power relations; individuals also articulate themselves. We are subjects of power in both active and passive senses, and Koopman’s genealogy of infopower shows how these various formatting techniques constitute us as data subjects, but this genealogy of the data subject must be supplemented by an account of how individuals very much want to constitute themselves as data subjects. We are data subjects in both senses.

Let me be clear: showing how we articulate ourselves as data subjects precisely because we want to be subjects of data is not Koopman’s project, and I am not claiming that it should have been.4 A genealogy of the data subject ought to begin where Koopman does, with an account of the formats and technologies that render us subjects of information, and the book does an excellent job of this. Nevertheless, I believe that any account of what we should do about this articulation of the self as a data subject, including possible strategies for resistance, must acknowledge that many of us very much want to be subjects of infopower, and many of us work hard at it every day, measuring our daily accomplishments in terms of “likes” and “retweets.” We want our subjection to data, and technology companies are all too happy to oblige. In sum, we have made a transition, perhaps without even realizing it, from infamy to influencer.

Toward the end of “Lives of Infamous Men,” Foucault makes the following observation about power: “How light power would be, and easy to dismantle no doubt, if all it did was observe, spy, detect, prohibit, and punish; but it incites, provokes, produces. It is not simply an eye and ear: it makes people act and speak.” It is this dimension of incitement that is missing from Koopman’s book. Foucault’s fascination with the lettre de cachet is a literary one. He relates how “for a long time” everyday life was largely invisible unless it somehow related to something “legendary” or “fabulous” (EW3:173). Beginning in the seventeenth century, Foucault claims, everyday events could be recounted on their own terms. “The impossible or the ridiculous ceased to be the condition under which the ordinary could be recounted” (EW3:173). Consequently, people began to relate that which is “infamous,” which Foucault explains simply means the contrary of that which is glorious and heroic; in other words, the mundane and ordinary. We see here, Foucault claims, an ethical demand emerging to “tell the most common of secrets” (EW3:173). “Hence literature belongs to the great system of constraint by which the West obliged the quotidian to enter into discourse” (EW3:174).

Foucault’s “infamous men” are the ancestors of today’s influencers precisely because Facebook, TikTok, and Twitter are among the platforms we use to reveal our quotidian secrets today; put otherwise, they are among the ways that we oblige our everyday selves to enter into infopolitical discourse.

The reason it is important to make individuals’ pervasive desire to become infopolitical subjects explicit is because it complicates the question of how we might contest infopower. Koopman notes that political theories of communication merely assume information as a starting point, and hence do not attend to the politics of information itself (186–87). Koopman cites identity theft as an example. Identity theft is a pervasive problem that can only be fully understood once we have an adequate account of the politics of information. “Addressing the problem of personal information exposure cannot only be a matter of providing for valid discursive exchange, or the free processing of information” (188). Koopman concludes by observing that because information has become a pervasive feature of our lives, at times explicitly so, but more often part of the implicit background of our lives (after all, how often do we think about our Social Security numbers and what this number represents?), it makes no sense to be oppose information altogether. After all, even Ted Kaczynski has a Social Security number. Resistance must be specific and localized. “Resistance can be conducted within the operation of infopower: a resistance to this kind of fastening, a resistance to that kind of canalizing and accelerating, and a resistance that mounts these actions by repurposing and releveraging information for alternative designs. This would be a resistance of occupation, contestation, and transformation” (193).

While Koopman’s list of forms that resistance should take is not intended to be exhaustive, I believe it is also vital to ask why we desire to be subjects of information so that we can develop practices of the self that address this desire. Naturally, there are apps for this; for example, apps that limit your screen time. Or we can consider this in terms of the widespread conspiracies that have become a feature of our present. It is not just that social media facilitates the spread of misinformation. More significantly, social media makes it easier for us to exist in online echo chambers that become one’s virtual reality, and on some level this is precisely what we want. People do not become participants in echo chambers or believers in conspiracies because they want to be misled. Humans need to trust others, and they unfortunately have placed their trust in bad epistemic authorities, and therefore this trust is misplaced. Thi Nguyen helpfully distinguishes between echo chambers and epistemic bubbles.5 Echo chambers are virtual communities in which contrary views have been actively discredited because they are distrusted, whereas epistemic bubbles merely exclude opposing views. Nguyen writes, “In epistemic bubbles, other voices are not heard; in echo chambers, other voices are actively undermined. The way to break an echo chamber is not to wave ‘the facts’ in the faces of its members. It is to attack the echo chamber at its root and repair that broken trust.” Echo chambers are more problematic because epistemic bubbles can be resolved with the introduction of different viewpoints that had previously been omitted. People in echo chambers actively distrust contrary views and want to be part of a likeminded community of believers. Echo chambers function much like cults, and the difficult way out of an echo chamber lies in finding outsiders to trust.

What fascinated Foucault about the literature of infamy that developed in the seventeenth century was that it allowed access to the real, or at least “the last and most tenuous degrees of the real” (EW3:173). Koopman correctly points out that we cannot fully escape the infopolitical world we now inhabit, but perhaps it is still possible to catch glimpses of a reality outside of it in, perhaps at least in its “tenuous degrees.”

Scholarship inspired by the work of Michel Foucault falls roughly into three main categories. First, there are those who approach Foucault as a key figure in the history of philosophy whose writings, biography, and context invite interpretive and reconstructive work intended to understand Foucault and his oeuvre in its own right. The second category comprises scholars who mine Foucault’s work for concepts, such as discipline or biopolitics, which are then applied to a range of phenomena about which Foucault himself had nothing to say. Finally, a fairly small number of scholars take from Foucault not his concepts but his methods in order to engage in the kind of empirico-historical mode of inquiry he modeled, elaborating new concepts along the way.

Colin Koopman’s How We Became Our Data is firmly situated in the third of these camps. As a thoroughly historical—that is, empirical—analysis of how we became the informational persons we are today, Koopman’s study examines the disparate and contingent historical events that gave rise to information as a site for the exercise of power and the formation of new subjects. Pushing against received wisdom that the politics of information is a very recent phenomenon, Koopman shows that it, in fact, predates both our current era of “big data” and the birth of information theory in the mid-twentieth century. Indeed, the “information age,” as well as information theory, find their conditions of possibility in the formation and consolidation of a regime of information in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Koopman’s detailed attention to the technical minutiae of data collection, processing, and output in the context of US birth registration, social security numbers, personality psychology, and redlining enables him to identify and conceptualize a distinct mode of power that is immanent in and circulates through these practices: infopower.

Infopower names a distinctive and contextually specific way of exercising power through an array of technical procedures that format data and fasten us to our data, thereby constituting us as particular kinds of persons who are both effects and targets of infopower. This mode of power is underpinned by a political and epistemic rationality that Koopman calls the “data episteme” and for which information itself is the foundation and goal (160). Consider, for example, that obtaining the social security number that uniquely identifies us requires us to produce other identifying information about us, such as a birth certificate or passport, which in turn rely on our ability to supply certain identification documents. The rationality of the data episteme thus establishes a self-referential regime of information that constitutes a closed circuit through which infopower can flow continuously and without interruption.

Koopman anticipates a potential objection to this diagnosis: namely, that he has not actually isolated a distinct mode of power. The objection, in other words, is that what Koopman calls infopower can be reduced to more familiar notions of power such as the Foucauldian concepts of sovereignty, discipline, and biopolitics or competing conceptualizations of control power (Deleuze), expository power (Harcourt), #datapolitik (Panagia), or datapower (Chamayou), to name just a few. Accordingly, Koopman provides a careful justification of the irreducibility of infopower. This justification, it seems to me, takes two different forms. With regard to Foucault’s concepts of sovereignty, discipline, and biopolitics, Koopman pursues a strategy of analytically distinguishing their subjects, operations, techniques, and rationalities from those of infopower. He argues, for instance, that even though Foucault’s biopolitics of the population relies on statistics and mechanisms of normalizing racism, it is a “politics of life” whose “subjects are living beings construed as populations” and whose “operation is that of regulation, typified by such techniques as public health policy, demographic management, and medical intervention” (164). Or take discipline, which “operates a power of normalization by coaxing bodies . . . to conform to the norm” through “techniques [that] include panoptic surveillance, regular examination, and meticulous training, or dressage” (165–66). Infopower, by contrast, is neither concerned with the life of populations nor with the bodies of individuals but with accounting for subjects in terms of their information, which typically captures immaterial traits. Similarly, infopower does not prohibit and exclude, as sovereign power does, but simply formats data in particular ways. Koopman maintains, however, that to claim that infopower is irreducible to sovereignty and biopower is not to say that they are incompatible. Rather, following Foucault’s emphasis on the coexistence and superimposition of different modes of power, he suggests that infopower is “deposited on, or layered on, the sedimented earlier strata of power” (168), from which it can nevertheless be analytically distinguished.

In response to the potential objection that his concept of infopower adds little to competing concepts such as Deleuze’s notion of control power or Harcourt’s concept of expository power, however, Koopman takes a different—namely, genealogical—approach. In particular, he contrasts his own approach, and the concept of infopower that emerges from it, with a certain avant-gardism that he finds, to different degrees, in Deleuze and Harcourt. Koopman points out that Deleuze’s “tendency to disregard the past” (169) and Harcourt’s lack of attention to the historical conditions of possibility of the digital age of exposure give rise to conceptualizations that may well be useful but must themselves be “properly embedded in a wider history” (171). Instead of drawing analytic distinctions between infopower, control power, and expository power, Koopman thus emphasizes infopower’s genealogical provenance. Infopower is an empirical concept produced by historical inquiry that makes available for critique the very elements that are presupposed, and therefore remain unexamined, in Deleuze’s and Harcourt’s conceptualizations.

But if it is its genealogy that differentiates infopower from control power and expository power, it seems to me that its genealogy is also what distinguishes infopower from the more familiar modes of power theorized by Foucault. As Koopman argues elsewhere, Foucault’s concepts, including biopolitics and discipline, are products of highly contextual empirical inquiry whose applicability to other contexts must be established genealogically rather than assumed axiomatically. To presuppose that Foucault’s concepts apply beyond their contexts of articulation is to “ontologize” or “transcendentalize” what are “empirical concepts yielded by historical inquiry” (574). This is why, I take it, the work undertaken in How We Became Our Data “involves pressing beyond Foucault’s conceptualizations” and instead appropriates Foucault’s method to elaborate new concepts that enable us to understand phenomena about which Foucault’s work is silent (22). I wonder, then, whether Koopman’s analytic, rather than genealogical, distinction between infopower and sovereignty, discipline, and biopolitics risks implicitly ontologizing these concepts by accepting that they indeed apply to a geographical and historical context that Foucault himself did not study. That we live in disciplinary and biopolitical times has become a truism—the kind of obviousness which Foucault urged us to critically investigate. It is precisely this refusal to give in to the allure of the obvious that is at the heart of Koopman’s work and, to my mind, one of its greatest strengths. Instead of relying on familiar concepts, which have become too self-evident to retain their critical edge, his genealogy provides us with an empirical conceptualization of the power that has made us, who inhabit a very specific historical and geographical context, who we are. It is on those who would insist that his account tells us little that Foucault hasn’t already told us to demonstrate, rather than simply assert, that this is indeed the case.