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Introduction
In his historical description of the last two centuries of data analysis, Bouk [2017] distinguishes between three periods. In the first, which lasted roughly until the beginning of the 20th century, modern bureaucracies grasped people through their “data doubles,” used to classify individuals along broad categories such as race, gender, class and region. During the first half of the 20th century, attempts were made to refine the classification so as to create “statistical individuals.” A final step was achieved in the 1970s, “amid economic crisis, technological change, and liberatory politics,” with the creation of individual scores. While one might question, as I do below, that statistical individuation was possible prior to the advent of big data, there is no doubt that individual scores are now the main tool deployed for the understanding of social phenomena. Algorithmic personalization has indeed become a pervasive trend in almost all domains of our lives [Lury and Day 2019].
The shift has sweeping consequences. As Lury and Day [2019: 18] rightly remark, personalization has implications on “how we live together, that is, on forms of sociality.” There is indeed a “political economy” behind personal data [Bouk 2017: 86]. Bouk, for instance, contends that the creation of large aggregates in the 19th century helped construct social imaginaries such as nations [Bouk 2017: 89; see also Hacking 1982]. Beyond imaginaries, the study of the neoliberal credit market in the United States allowed Fourcade and Healy [2013] to further show how the process of assessing credit worthiness created “classification situations,” with discriminatory impact on specific populations. I would rather question here the social implications of personalization, once it has become the new imaginary of the collective, with a specific focus on fairness and insurance.
The focus on insurance and/or fairness might come as a surprise. Yet long before insurance became a common practice, the first probabilists were busy determining the fair price of aleatory contracts, demonstrating the lifelong entanglement of insurance with issues of both fairness and knowledge [Daston 1987]. In addition, insurance is deeply embedded in our daily lives, both reflecting and imposing a changing political rationality and a social imaginary [Ewald 1991: 198]. It entails a form of governance, and it dictates practices and a cultural framework for concepts and...