Afterlives of Data: Life and Debt under Capitalist Surveillance (Paperback)

Afterlives of Data: Life and Debt under Capitalist Surveillance By Mary F.E. Ebeling Cover Image
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Description


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.

About the Author


Mary F. E. Ebeling is Associate Professor of Sociology and affiliate faculty at the Center for Science, Technology and Society, Drexel University. She is author of Healthcare and Big Data: Digital Specters and Phantom Objects.

Praise For…


"Well-grounded in current real-world issues, this text is both highly informative and approachable for readers thanks to the author's clear explanations and aptly chosen references. . . . Highly recommended."
— CHOICE

"Ebeling’s book sheds light on the point where our health and debt data meet. . . .this book’s valuable insights into how data, power, and ideology fortify each other in today’s data-based society can be extended to many other fields within the social sciences."
— Exertions
Product Details
ISBN: 9780520307735
ISBN-10: 0520307739
Publisher: University of California Press
Publication Date: June 14th, 2022
Pages: 218
Language: English