Personalization: a new political arithmetic?

Abstract

Scholarship on the history of political arithmetic highlights its significance for classical liberalism, a political philosophy in which subjects perceive themselves as autonomous individuals in an abstract system called society. This society and its component individuals became intelligible and governable in a deluge of printed numbers, assisted by the development of statistics, the emergence of a common space of measurement, and the calculation of probabilities. Our proposal is that the categories, numbers, and norms of this political arithmetic have changed in a ubiquitous culture of personalization. Today's political arithmetic, we suggest, produces a different kind of society, what Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg calls the 'default social'. We address this new social as a 'vague whole' and propose that it is characterized by a continuous present, the contemporary form of simultaneity or way of being together that Benedict Anderson argued is fundamental to any kind of imagined community. Like the society imagined in the earlier arithmetic, this vague whole is an abstraction that obscures forms of stratification and discrimination.

‘In the picture’: perspectives on living and working with cancer

“…Category-making in cancer medicine, as in many areas of life today, is enabled if not dependent on increasingly intensive, rapid computation of extensive data on behaviours and activities which are typically combined with long-established records of vital statistics and sociodemographic attributes. In cancer medicine, what participants like and resemble is analysed to produce precise classifications which are tested and retested for their predictive utility ( Day, Lury, and Ward in press ). Personalised medicine is understood to focus on synchronised matching of biological markers with disease through analysis of clinical, biological and conversational data.…”