By engaging with Colin Koopman's work on the politics of information, Stephan Paur has a look at the technologically sophisticated ways that human beings are now at the mercy of our datasets. Rather than inhabiting a physical, populated place and taking part in communities, “the informational person” is increasingly outsourced into such things as birth certificates, personality profiles, racialized credit and other extractive ideologies.
These companies, because they’re tech companies, they see data as a resource. They see it as oil. It’s an oil field. They want to be the only ones who pump it. If you’re in control of the information, you have all the power.
–Adam Conover, Writers Guild of America labor organizer (Maron)
1. Introduction
The sovereign power of nation-states looks crude compared to the power of globalized capital, the forms of biopower identified by Michel Foucault, and new forms of power, such as infopower, made possible by our technological infrastructures. In this essay, I engage with recent work by one key theorist of infopower, Colin Koopman. I argue that Koopman’s theory of infopower becomes more supple and penetrating if augmented by insights from recent work on environmental data justice. To that end, I rehearse some of the relevant contributions from literacy studies, Foucauldian theory, environmental justice scholarship, and critical data studies. Next, I explain why extractive ideologies are at the core of infopower.
My guiding assumption throughout is that data and power are always intertwined. Writing in Big Data & Society, Andrew Iliadis and Frederica Russo rightly emphasize that corporate, governmental, and academic entities “own vast quantities of user information and hold lucrative data capital,” enabling them to “influence emotions and culture,” and that “researchers invoke data in the name of scientific objectivity while often ignoring [the fact] that data are never raw [but] always ‘cooked’ ” (1). This essay, then, will treat data not as neutral or innocent, but as always “informed by specific histories, ideologies, and philosophies that tend to remain hidden,” and as “a rhetorical tool that can [either] reify certain assumptions about the world and extend regimes of power,” or that can be used, instead, to further the causes of justice, democracy, and equality, helping to remake the world so that it works better for more people (Iliadis and Russo 2; Currie et al. 1).
2. The Politics of Information
The industrial-era Fordist economy prized standardization and conformity. The so-called “post-industrial” information economy, by contrast, tends to value flexibility and personalization – think targeted advertising or curated news feeds (Seitz and Lindquist 189-90). This sector of the global economy is “based not in the manufacturing of things but in the manufacturing of services – knowledge, ideas, data, information, news” (Brandt, Rise 3). In this economy, literacy becomes a “valued commodity,” with “texts serv[ing] as a chief means of production and a chief output of production, and writing becomes a dominant form of manufacturing” (“Sponsors” 169; Rise 3). Literacy in this context becomes a high-stakes game on a bumpy playing field, with “uneven distributions of opportunity” (“Sponsors” 169).
Digital modes of reading and writing can reinforce or challenge power imbalances. The information economy makes it easier than ever for private enterprise to co-opt the everyday, functional literacy practices of ordinary people for the purposes of capital accumulation while, at the same time, furnishing its subjects with new economic and democratic capacities. But the upsides and downsides are far from symmetrical. As Sun-ha Hong writes, “the promise of better knowledge through data depends on a crucial asymmetry: technological systems become increasingly too massive and too opaque for human scrutiny, even as the liberal subject is asked to become increasingly legible to machines for capture and circulation” (2).
Asymmetrical legibility is, of course, a significant liability for disenfranchised groups, whose “burdens [will be] exacerbated as technologies for tracking, recording, and capturing are rolled out” (Koopman, “Could we live”). The so-called digital divide – the uneven distribution of access to information and communication technologies across groups (rich and poor, e.g.) and places (urban and rural, e.g.) – is only part of the problem. Another part has to do with how some of the people who do have access are more vulnerable than others to the ways in which biases have been inadvertently “baked into the programs” they use (Hewlett-Packard). Systemic biases come into play in everything from facial recognition technology to data-driven calculations of car and health insurance premiums, hiring decisions, law enforcement, immigration proceedings, the processing of housing applications, and, as the environmental justice movement has shown, environmental health and safety hazards like toxic substance exposure (Lohr).
At my own university in Tucson, Arizona, for instance, information management researchers developed a migrant lie-detector, funded by the US Department of Homeland Security, that uses advanced technology to “measure and record thousands of signals from the subject’s voice, body and eyes,” data which is then “routed through a complex analytical algorithm” that color-codes subjects according to their perceived threat level: “Green means the subject is clear to pass, yellow means there are some issues to be investigated, and red means there are serious issues that require deeper investigation” (Tumarkin). The technology itself, dubbed the “Automated Virtual Agent for Truth Assessments in Real-Time” (AVATAR), should, however, raise a giant red flag. “Because Customs and Border Protection agents already use information about how someone speaks or looks as a pretext to search individuals in the 100-mile border zone, or to deny individuals entry to the U.S.,” Ava Kofman writes, “experts fear that vocal emotion detection software could make such biases routine, pervasive, and seemingly ‘objective.’ ”
Post-Fordist, data-driven problems disproportionately affect the most vulnerable groups, even as they ensnare everyone, too, one way or another. Colin Koopman’s work on the politics of information accounts for the technologically sophisticated (and often opaque) ways human beings are increasingly at the mercy of their datasets. By critically examining the new politics of information, Koopman suggests that modern means of data processing make possible new techniques of corporate, bureaucratic, and institutional control. The reach of this new power modality, which Koopman calls “infopower,” is only beginning to be felt. The data we furnish – intentionally, in the filing of things like tax forms or visa applications, or unwittingly, as algorithms interpret our movements and behaviors and deliver personalized content – makes possible a historically specific politics of information. Koopman develops his theory by examining historical precedents for “the informational person” in such things as birth certificates, personality profiles, and racialized credit (How We Became Our Data).
To appreciate the uniqueness of infopower – its difference from other power modalities – a familiarity with Michel Foucault’s influential work is helpful. Despite Foucault’s claim that his work is concerned not with power but with the “history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects,” the production of particular kinds of subjects is, as he acknowledges, always a function of particular kinds of power (“The Subject and Power” 777). Foucault’s two most famous articulations of power are best distinguished by the different scales of subjectivity at which they operate. The first, disciplinary power, works at the scale of individual bodies (anatomo-politics). The second, biopower (or biopolitics), works at the scale of whole populations. Disciplinary power shows up in contexts where docility and compliance are desirable outcomes – schools, factories, offices, prisons, hospitals – and involves conspicuous surveillance and periodic examination (Koopman, “Infopolitics” 108). Biopower, by contrast, shows up in contexts where it’s desirable to monitor and regulate large-scale patterns like birth rates, mortality rates, crime rates, or infection rates. It uses statistical and demographic analysis to “optimize” productivity and reproduction (110). Of course, any one power modality – from sovereign power (which uses violence, or the threat of violence, to exert control) to the more subtle forms of disciplinary power and biopower – works in tandem with others. Indeed, this remains one of Foucault’s lasting contributions: the idea of power as not a possessable quantity, but rather a pervasive, relational quality, “all the more cunning because its basic forms of operation can change in response to our ongoing efforts to free ourselves from its grip” (Koopman, “The Power Thinker”). It’s like a political version of Newton’s Third Law: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Koopman’s theory of infopower adds to our understanding of power as an interactive, adaptable force by accounting for recent technological developments such as the internet. According to Koopman, the practices by which various types of data are collected, organized, and used have significant political consequences. Which is why he wants us to attend to them more closely. “To confront information as a political problem we must confront information itself,” he writes, “at the level of its formats, rather than taking information’s formatting for granted” (How We Became 185).
For Koopman, forms and formats are at the heart of infopower. He traces the emergence of this power modality back about one hundred years, “to an explosive political moment in which data began to explicitly define our subjectivity in such now-quotidian forms as birth certificates, national registration numbers, psychometric inventories like intelligence tests and personality profiles, genetic information thought to determine our fates, and a vast array of financial reporting that can be seen as culminating in contemporary credit scores” (105). These data-driven forms and formats – which also include things like social media profiles, network IP addresses, Green Cards, and academic transcripts – enable what Koopman calls the “fastening” techniques of infopower, a term he intends to have a double resonance. It “connotes both buttoning down and speeding up,” he writes: “information fastens us in that it both ties us to a data point and thereby augments the velocity with which we can be handled as a data point. Think of the way your email address both pins you into a network of communicative obligations but at the same time significantly quickens the pace of discharging those duties” (106). Or, think of this idea of “fastening” in terms of seatbelts and cars, or even, more dramatically, roller coasters. The safety bar locks into place over riders’ laps, and suddenly our bodies become manipulable in all sorts of new ways, as well as newly vulnerable (i.e., subject) to things like whiplash, nausea, and compound g-forces.
Infopower is thus a power modality that operates via fastening techniques that fix their subjects (informational persons), making it possible to handle them in new ways. In a very real sense, “we become the paperwork that makes us . . . we become the data in the clouds that store us” (How We Became Our Data 120).1See also Kate Vieira’s American by Paper: How Documents Matter in Immigrant Literacy and Cornelia Vismann’s Files: Law and Media Technology. Koopman invites us to reflect on how we might feel if we awoke tomorrow to discover that our hard drives, cloud storage, ID cards, diplomas, password logs, work permits, diaries, and all other records of our personal and professional selves had simply disappeared – poof, gone, just like that. Gym membership, citizenship status, Venmo account, food stamp eligibility, education credentials – all vanished without a trace. It would be traumatic. Not only that: it would profoundly inhibit our ability to move through the world in a meaningful way.
Forms and formats both contain us and, in a very real sense, create us, says Koopman – a fact with significant but still poorly understood consequences. “These formats direct so much of what we do and are capable of doing,” Koopman writes, and “there is a politics in this insofar as the formats into which we have been inscribed have become sites for the distribution of political burdens and benefits . . . These politics are not always sinister. But they are often dangerous. For there is so much at stake in them, including who we are and what we can be” ("Infopolitics" 121).
3. Techno-Critical Literacy
In their work on environmental data justice, Lourdes Vera et al. have proposed the concept of “extractive logic” to capture “the act of pulling relations from bodies and lands into data,” an oppressive practice that “ignores the situatedness of data, regarding it as a resource to be pulled out for free, without relations or responsibilities” (1017). One example of this extractive logic at work is when well-meaning researchers parachute into poor or dispossessed communities as part of a mission to document harms, but without consulting with the community itself about how its data should be defined and used (Tuck). Both infopower and extractive ideologies treat data the same way the information economy treats literacy – that is, as “a raw material to be harvested” (Brandt; Vera et al.). An understanding of this fact is necessary for 21st-century info-people to effectively navigate the various economies of literacy they inhabit, and to locate places where anti-exploitative, anti-extractivist pressures can be applied.
The journal Literacy in Composition Studies calls literacy a “fluid and contextual term” that often serves as a shorthand for the knowledge and skills necessary “to navigate systems, cultures, and situations.” Fair enough. Too often, however, the term “literacy” has been used so indiscriminately that it becomes essentially meaningless (Wysocki and Johnson-Eilola). There’s financial literacy, political literacy, ecological literacy, cultural literacy, visual literacy, digital literacy, academic literacy . . . the list goes on. In each case, the pairing suggests not knowledge so much as a certain facility with the handling of particular kinds of information.
That, at least, is the worry of media theorist and historian John Durham Peters. For him, information is “a form of knowledge alienated from human bodily experience,” which means that to treat literacy in information-handling terms (the way E.D. Hirsch treats “cultural literacy”) is to abstract – or, more precisely, extract – literate activity from the situated, embodied social practices in which it’s always tightly bound up. Not only is “literacy” often implicated in an ideology of extraction, but, as Peters argues, “information” is increasingly confused with “knowledge,” despite the fact that they are, in important ways, mutually exclusive. “True knowledge is not to possess information, but to throw it away,” Peters writes. “It is to run up against the borders of one’s own ignorance, to recognize one’s mortality and finitude” (“Information” 16).
In other words, “information literacy” often concerns procedural knowledge more than substantive knowledge. Indeed, the phrase often refers to a kind of meta-literacy – a decontextualized set of search skills and processing skills. Future research could, however, help restore some context by treating “information literacy” not just in procedural terms (informational know-how), but also in theoretical terms (know-why). This latter approach could examine the various power-effects involved in the fact that writers and readers are always generating data about themselves any time they interact with data made available by others. Instead of acquiring decontextualized procedural skills, this approach to information literacy would pursue knowledge about algorithmic infrastructures (especially the industrial economies that make “post-industrial” myths possible), as well as the operations of infopower. It would, in other words, involve becoming more informed about information itself (its “forms and formats,” as Koopman might say), instead of only learning how to navigate the pre-formatted information assumed by “X-literacy” or “Y-literacy” constructions.
4. Conclusion
New ideas about “informational personhood” require us to revise our thinking about how affiliations based on class, race, gender, religion, sexuality, ability, and nationality work. The old hierarchies and uneven distributions of resources persist, in many ways. But the mechanisms by which these hierarchies and distributions are reproduced and/or reconfigured are contingent not only on historical and economic circumstances, but technological ones, too. New technological conditions require new inquiries into the links between mind and matter; economy and ecology; space, time, and power.
I hope this essay has enriched Koopman’s theory of infopower by helping it account for the complex ways in which infopower and extractive ideologies simultaneously depend on and distort the relations between people and places. However tightly “fastened” to manipulable, disembodied data points our informational selves might be (via forms and formats), these virtual selves are never wholly untethered from the biophysical people and places that furnish the information that populates those forms and formats in the first place. To neglect this fact is to tacitly endorse the extractive political and economic logics that insist on constant displacement, rather than belonging, as the norm.
We must remain on guard against the ways in which infopower and extractive ideologies jeopardize our collective tethering. Sometimes, it happens by tethering a person to a place they don’t feel they belong and aren’t committed to. Other times, it happens by changing what it means for a person to belong to a place, any place, in the first place – to be committed to that place, to care about it, to feel invested in its history and future. As Peters warns, ephemeral, decontextualized information is often treated as a “a strategy for detaching ourselves from the claims the past makes on us” (“Information” 20).
Individuals and groups must reclaim the means to define for themselves what active, situated participation, creativity, and flourishing should look like. To defend our definitional capacities requires understanding the nature of the varieties of power that need reconfiguring. Only then will the possibilities for transforming an extractive ideology into a reparative one emerge.
Works Cited and Consulted
“Bias in the machine: how AI fails us and how we can fix it.” Hewlett-Packard, 2019. garage.hp.com/us/en/modern-life/Artificial-intelligence-bias-face-recognition.html
boyd, danah and Kate Crawford. “Critical questions for big data: provocations for a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon.” Information, Communication, & Society vol. 15, no. 5, 2012, pp. 662-679.
Brandt, Deborah. “Sponsors of literacy.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 49, no. 2, 1998, pp. 165-185.
–––––. The Rise of Writing: Redefining Mass Literacy. Cambridge University Press, 2015.
“Could we live without our data? Q&A with Colin Koopman.” Digital Future Society, 2012. digitalfuturesociety.com/qanda/could-we-live-without-our-data-with-colin-koopman/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=colinkoopman&utm_term=QA&utm_content=link
Currie, Morgan, Britt S. Paris, Irene Pasquetto, and Jennifer Pierre. “The conundrum of police officer-involved homicides: Counter-data in Los Angeles County.” Big Data & Society, vol. 3, no. 2, 2016, pp. 1-14.
Di Chiro, Giovanna. “Environmental justice.” Keywords for Environmental Studies. NYU Press, 2016.
Dillon, Lindsey, Rebecca Lave, Becky Mansfield, Sara Wylie, Nicholas Shapiro, Anita Say Chan, and Michelle Murphy. “Situating data in a Trumpian era: the environmental data and governance initiative.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers, vol. 109, no. 2, 2019, pp. 545-555.
Ebenstein, Julia A. “The geography of mass incarceration: prison gerrymandering and the dilution of prisoners’ political representation.” Fordham Urban Law Journal, vol. 45, no. 2, 2018, pp. 323-372.
Environmental Data and Governance Initiative. envirodatagov.org/
Foucault, Michel. “Chapter 11.” In “Society must be defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976, Picador, 2003, pp. 239-263.
–––––. “The subject and power.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 8, no. 4, 1982, pp. 777-795.
Gómez-Barris, Macarena. The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. Duke UP, 2017.
Heilbroner, Robert. “Do machines make history?” Technology and Culture, vol. 8, no. 3, 1967, pp. 335-345.
Iliadis, Andrew, and Federica Russo. “Critical data studies: an introduction.” Big Data & Society, 2016, pp. 1-7.
Hong, Sun-ha. Technologies of Speculation: The Limits of Knowledge in a Data-Driven Society. NYU Press, 2020.
Kofman, Ava. “The dangerous junk science of vocal risk assessment.” The Intercept, Nov. 25, 2018. https://theintercept.com/2018/11/25/voice-risk-analysis-ac-global/
Koopman, Colin. “Infopolitics, biopolitics, anatomopolitics: toward a genealogy of the power of data.” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, vol. 39, no. 1, 2018, pp. 103-128.
–––––. How We Became Our Data: A Genealogy of the Informational Person. University of Chicago Press, 2019.
–––––. “The power thinker.” Aeon, 2017. aeon.co/essays/why-foucaults-work-on-power-is-more-important-than-ever
Lohr, Steve. “Facial recognition is accurate, if you’re a white guy.” The New York Times, 2018. nytimes.com/2018/02/09/technology/facial-recognition-race-artificial-intelligence.html
Lynch, Michael. “Googling is believing: Trumping the informed citizen. The New York Times. https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/03/09/googling-is-believing-trumping-the-informed-citizen/
Maron, Marc. “Episode 1460: Adam Conover.” WTF with Marc Maron, Aug. 10, 2023. https://www.wtfpod.com/podcast/episode-1460-adam-conover
Peters, John Durham. The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. Yale UP, 2015.
–––––. “Writing.” The International Encyclopedia of Media Studies: Media Effects/Media Psychology, edited by Angharad N. Valdivia and Erica Scharrer. Blackwell, 2013, pp. 3-22.
–––––. “Information: Notes Toward a Critical History.” Journal of Communication Inquiry, vol. 12, no. 2, 1988, pp. 9-23.
Seitz, David and Julie Lindquist. The Elements of Literacy. Pearson, 2008.
Tuck, Eve. “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities.” Harvard Educational Review, vol. 79, no. 3, 2009, pp. 409-427.
Tumarkin, Paul. “UA licenses deception-detecting AVATAR to startup.” University of Arizona, Aug. 27, 2018. https://news.arizona.edu/story/ua-licenses-deceptiondetecting-avatar-startup
Vera, Lourdes A., et al. “When data justice and environmental justice meet: formulating a response to extractive logic through environmental data justice.” Information, Communication & Society, vol. 22, no. 7, 2019, pp. 1012-1028.
Vieira, Kate. American by Paper: How Documents Matter in Immigrant Literacy. University of Minnesota Press, 2016.
Vismann, Cornelia. Files: Law and Media Technology. Stanford University Press, 2008.
Welch, Kathleen E. “Electrifying classical rhetoric: Ancient media, modern technology, and contemporary composition.” Journal of Advanced Composition, vol. 10, no. 1, 1990, pp. 22–38.
Wysocki, Anne Frances and Johndan Johnson-Eilola. “Blinded by the letter: Why are we using literacy as a metaphor for everything else?” In Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st-Century Technologies, edited by Gail Hawisher and Cynthia Selfe, USU Press, 1999, pp. 349-368.