Afterlives of Data: Life and Debt under Capitalist Surveillance

by Mary F.E. Ebeling

What our health data tell American capitalism about our value—and how that controls our lives. Afterlives of Data  follows the curious and multiple lives that our data live once they escape our control. Mary F. E. Ebeling's ethnographic investigation shows how information about our health and the debt that we carry becomes biopolitical assets owned by healthcare providers, insurers, commercial data brokers, credit reporting companies, and platforms. By delving into the oceans of data built from everyday medical and debt traumas, Ebeling reveals how data about our lives come to affect our bodies and our life chances and to wholly define us . Investigations into secretive data collection and breaches of privacy by the likes of Cambridge Analytica have piqued concerns among many Americans about exactly what is being done with their data. From credit bureaus and consumer data brokers like Equifax and Experian to the secretive military contractor Palantir, this massive industry has little regulatory oversight for health data and works to actively obscure how it profits from our data. In this book, Ebeling traces the health data—medical information extracted from patients' bodies—that are digitized and repackaged into new data commodities that have afterlives in database lakes and oceans, algorithms, and statistical models used to score patients on their creditworthiness and riskiness. Critical and disturbing,  Afterlives of Data examines how Americans' data about their health and their debt are used in the service of marketing and capitalist surveillance.

Genres: Nonfiction

218 pages, Hardcover

Published June 14, 2022

Reviews

[RoaringRatalouille · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this book, Ebeling tries to think about two central societal trends as inextricably intertwined: the debt society and the data-driven surveillance society. The title of "the afterlives of data" hints at another ambition of the book: to lay bare how people's data continue to be effective even after their deaths. In principle, the book's ambition and fundamental idea are very intriguing and original. I will briefly sketch the individual chapters.

The introduction further acquaints the reader with Ebeling's goal to trace life through data and think about data and debt (in the US context) as intertwined.

The first chapter mobilizes some critical theories of data which basically argue that the objectivity that often attends imaginaries of data is misplaced and obscures the labor that goes into its production. Data also articulates our status in a debt-driven society in which one's opportunities in life - especially in the US context - are largely circumscribed by scores such as one's credit score.

The next few chapters cover different notions and concepts that are familiar to people somewhat versed in these topics, including trust in data (ch. 2), data lakes/oceans (ch. 3), alternative data (ch. 4), the politics of data scores (ch. 5), and how data influence visibilities (ch. 6). While these chapters are interesting, they did not strike me as completely original. This is, in my view, where the book's weakness lies: it spends too much time in talking about different aspects of the data-driven society and in so doing somehow neglects its central ambition: to render visible the ways in which data and debt coincide. Moreover, I find the concept of "afterlives" quite fitting for Ebeling's overarching project, but am missing some more conceptual development.

Overall, this book might be interesting to you if you are particularly interested in how the data-driven society intersects with the "debt society" OR if you haven't read many books/articles loosely related to the field of critical data studies. If, however, you do consider yourself somewhat well-versed in these topics, this book won't contain too many new insights. Nonetheless, this is certainly not a bad book; if only for its original ambition and the great survey of relevant literatures in (critical) data studies. Three stars.

[HKR · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very dense but thought provoking and current.