John Cheney-Lippold is a sixty-five-year-old woman. It does not matter that he is in his thirties, identifies as a man or wears a beard in his faculty photo on the University of Michigan website. What is important is that his Google browsing history has marked him as “65+” and “female,” and so this is how he is seen by the invisible eyes of the Internet. This is his digital self, a new personhood generated by the state agencies and marketing companies that track his every action online. Cheney-Lippold is a man until he is a “woman.” He is a United States citizen until some government computer decides he is a “foreigner,” or even a “terrorist.” He is, like all Internet users, made of data; a living person collapsed into an abstracted and malleable subject.

We Are Data investigates the consequences of this human/digital divide in a “world of ubiquitous surveillance” (4). It posits that datafication represents nothing less than a quiet remapping of society at large. “What is race, what is gender, and thus who counts as a citizen of the state,” he claims, “all get rewritten and standardized when histories and context are made numerical” (54). To make this case, Cheney-Lippold draws on a broad series of examples, which range in tone from humorous to horrifying. In one chapter, he leans on a jazz-playing robot to explain the difference between race as a historically situated logic of power and “race” as a machine-recognized demographic. Elsewhere he tells stories about a dying man denied medical care because an algorithm considered him too healthy for an ambulance, or an Afghan wedding party bombed by US drones because of their cell phone signals. The diversity of these anecdotes helps establish the breadth and scale of our datafied world. We Are Data is remarkable for the way in which it handles European Union privacy regulations and bot-analyzed pictures of Santa Claus with equal care, treating both as valid evidence of the same phenomenon. When every click gets recorded, Cheney-Lippold suggests, everything that happens online matters.

What further makes this work successful is the strength of its inspirations, as it draws heavily on the scholarship of Max Weber, Michel Foucault, Erving Goffman and Gilles Deleuze. For instance, Cheney-Lippold spends ample time with the Weberian concept of ideal types, which signify a useful streamlining of reality into ideality. He then offers a welcome new contribution in the form of measurable types: the data sets against which individual citizens are graded for control. He describes these measurable types as “algorithmic caricatures” (10), and says that, like hieroglyphs, they are not “truth of identity but a priestly interpretation” (24). Therefore Cheney-Lippold is deemed “65+” and “female” because the data produced by his Web habits correlate with those measurable types. The truth of his identity becomes subsumed by number crunching, and the “unmanageable array of worldly difference is shaved away to form an operational whole” (55). While it may seem obvious enough that certain websites are coded masculine (maxim.com) or feminine (cosmopolitan.com), We Are Data provides several fascinating charts that demonstrate how even the language we use on the Internet can be gendered according to measurable type. In one such a chart, an algorithm assigns gender to anonymous Twitter users based on phrases like “recipe,” “tweetup” and “lmaooo” (83).

Despite his reliance on Weber and other canonical figures, Cheney-Lippold also takes care to expand upon more recent publications. These include Frank Pasquale's The Black Box Society (2015) and Simone Browne's “Digital Epidermalization: Race, Identity and Biometrics” (Critical Sociology, 36, 1 (2010)), which highlights the role of biometric surveillance in maintaining the authority of the white state over racialized bodies. His incorporation of queer theory through scholars like Judith Butler and J. Halberstam further reminds readers that categorizing people by race, gender and sexuality was a dangerous game long before the invention of the modem. Yet it is here that We Are Data also disappoints its readers with a shallow consideration of non-digital systems of power. Indeed, the book spends so much time thinking about the hazards of this new paradigm that it sometimes forgets how exploitative and controlling the old system has been. For instance, if anybody can be a man or a woman on the Internet, that means that the hard lines of gender have been relaxed. We are presented with a worldview in which “male” and “female” are fleeting labels determined by behavior, rather than through a mix of body parts and cisnormativity. Given the current discourse surrounding gender transition and gender fluidity, is this not a step in the right direction? Cheney-Lippold does play with this idea a bit, even submitting that marketers may have practiced intersectionality before feminists first took up that mantle. Yet he always returns to the belief that datafication is an emergent, troubling event.

“Stable, singular truth of identity, also known as authenticity, is truly a relic of the past,” he writes (6). But what is race if not a fabrication, and one that has been continually redefined to privilege new interpretations of whiteness over new interpretations of brown? We Are Data disparages the technophiles and futurists who believe in a digital salvation, yet at times it falls prey to a similarly myopic fixation on the Internet as agent of transformation. “Race isn't really about our bodies but about datafied interpretations of those bodies,” Cheney-Lippold writes in his conclusion (265). Yes, that may be how “race” operates, but isn't that how race works as well? It has never been about the supposed truth of our bodies. It has always been about power.

Even so, We Are Data is an excellent addition to the growing field of digital studies. Cheney-Lippold takes the subtle, under-the-skin tracking mechanisms of the Internet and makes them visible for all readers. In doing so, he raises meaningful questions about who we are when we go online, and the serious ramifications those identities might have on our offline lives. It is a pleasant, yet altogether disquieting, book to read.