Abstract
What is a Google celebrity? According to John Cheney-Lippold, this is a person who Google’s algorithms classify as famous (a known celebrity or a public figure) and who by virtue of this classification does not have the ‘right to be forgotten’. He contests the view that data speak for itself, because ‘the data that Google uses to categorize people and assign status of identity does not speak; it is evaluated and ordered by a powerful corporation in order to avoid legal culpability’ (p. xiii). His book is ‘about how algorithms assemble, and control, our datafied selves and our algorithmic futures. It’s about how algorithms make our data speak as if we were a man, woman, Santa Claus, citizen, Asian, and/or wealthy’ (p. xiii). The main premise the book is built upon is that ‘who we are is what our data is made to say about us’ (p. xii). Cheney-Lippold explores a range of examples in the book. It is split into an Introduction, four substantive chapters and a Conclusion. Chapter 1, ‘Categorization: Making Data Useful’, focuses on the how-to of algorithms – how ‘computers create categories through patterns in data’ (p. 34). Chapter 2, ‘Control: Algorithm is Gonna Get You’, revolves around Gilles Deleuze’s concept of modulation defined as ‘a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point’ (p. 101). Cheney-Lippold argues that the type of control exercised as a result of the accumulation of data is a soft type of control or as he labels it, ‘“control without control” … soft biopolitics… our algorithmic identities can regulate life without our direct participation or realization’ (p. 35). Chapter 3, ‘Subjectivity: Who Do They Think You Are?’, explores how algorithms make people ‘subject in ways unique to online, algorithmic life’. Chapter 4, ‘Privacy: Wanted Dead or Alive’, then asks the question of whether privacy is at all possible in the age of surveillance. He uses the concept of ‘dividual privacy that focuses especially on how the freedom in being “let alone” might translate to a datafied, algorithmic world’ (p. 36). In the Conclusion, Cheney-Lippold argues that ‘the singularity of technological futurism will never arrive… because it’s already kind of here’ (p. 265). All in all, his book offers an intriguing insight into the use of algorithms in the making of our digital selves by fulfilling its aim to explore ‘what identity means in an algorithmic age: how it works, how our lives are controlled by it, and how we can resist it’ (blurb).