3 - Personalisation, Power and the Datafied Subject

Summary

Drawing upon Foucauldian ideas this chapter explores how the ‘datafication’ of modern life shifts the modes of power acting upon the individual and social body. Through a brief exploration of three banal everyday social practices (driving, health, gambling) it argues that the construction of the data-self marks an emergent algorithmic govermentality centred simultaneously upon intimate knowledge of the individual (subjectivities) and the population. The intersection of technology, data and subjectivation, reproduces a ‘neoliberal subject’ – one closely monitored and policed to freely perform ‘correct’ forms of action or behaviour, and one increasingly governed by the imperatives of private capital. This chapter explores how this nexus between power and knowledge is central to debates about the relocation (or appropriation) of personal and population data from state to non-state institutions, with private corporations increasingly managing the health and wellbeing of individuals and society. It makes an argument for critical engagement with the complex interactions, intersections, effects and unintended consequences of multiple technologies that, through the use of data, make the simultaneous government of individuals and populations their targets of action.