Original Research Article

Big Data & Society

January–June 2017: 1–10
Big Data, urban governance, and the ! The Author(s) 2017
DOI: 10.1177/2053951716682537

ontological politics of hyperindividualism bds.sagepub.com

Robert W Lake

Abstract
Big Data’s calculative ontology relies on and reproduces a form of hyperindividualism in which the ontological unit of
analysis is the discrete data point, the meaning and identity of which inheres in itself, preceding, separate, and inde-
pendent from its context or relation to any other data point. The practice of Big Data governed by an ontology of
hyperindividualism is also constitutive of that ontology, naturalizing and diffusing it through practices of governance and,
from there, throughout myriad dimensions of everyday life. In this paper, I explicate Big Data’s ontology of hyperindi-
vidualism by contrasting it to a coconstitutive ontology that prioritizes relationality, context, and interdependence. I then
situate the ontology of hyperindividualism in its genealogical context, drawing from Patrick Joyce’s history of liberalism
and John Dewey’s pragmatist account of individualism, liberalism, and social action. True to its genealogical provenance,
Big Data’s ontological politics of hyperindividualism reduces governance to the management of atomistic behavior,
undermines the contribution of urban complexity as a resource for governance, erodes the potential for urban dem-
ocracy, and eviscerates the possibility of collective resistance.

Keywords
Urban governance, ontology, epistemology, pragmatism, individualism, democracy

few weeks later reported that ‘‘the number of murders

Introduction
Data politics dominated newspaper headlines in
New York City at the end of 2015. Controversy erupted
when a former Police Commissioner charged that the
city’s method of collecting crime data underreported
actual events. He cited as an example the NYPD’s prac-
tice of recording a ‘‘shooting’’ only if a bullet wounds a
victim. According to the New York Times account:
a shooting . . . is recorded only if someone is hit . . .. If a
bullet tears a person’s clothing but does not wound the
victim, the episode is not included in the Police
Department’s official tally of shootings . . . Gunfire at
a car in which the occupants are wounded by shattered
glass but not by a bullet is not recorded as a shooting.
(Goodman, 2015)
As the official in charge of the police department’s
CompStat (Computer Statistics) program explained:
‘‘‘We need the bullet to cause the injury . . . and we
need blood’’’ (Goodman, 2015). A follow-up article a
recorded by the (police) department is almost always
lower than those counted as homicides by the city’s
medical examiner’’ (Goodman, 2016). The Police
Commissioner defended such practices, saying that ‘‘I
stand by my crime statistics because they are factual,
they are the truth,’’ while a civil liberties advocate
countered that ‘‘the controversy highlights just how
soft and subjective police statistics can be’’
(Goodman, 2015).
Meanwhile, some 100 miles to the south, in the eco-
nomically devastated city of Camden, New Jersey,
police officials reported a large-scale expansion of that
city’s ‘‘ShotSpotter’’ automated gunfire detection
system (Adomaitis, 2015). ShotSpotter is described by
Rutgers University, USA
Corresponding author:
Robert W Lake, Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, Rutgers
University, 33 Livingston Avenue, New Brunswick, NJ 08901-8554, USA.
Email: rlake@ejb.rutgers.edu

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at-sage).
2 Big Data & Society
its corporate provider as ‘‘an acoustic surveillance tech-
nology that incorporates audio sensors to detect, locate
and alert police agencies of gunfire incidents in real
time . . .. The alerts include . . . the precise time and loca-
tion (latitude and longitude) represented on a map and
other situational intelligence’’ (ShotSpotter Fact Sheet,
2016). The expanded ShotSpotter system in Camden
was part of a larger strategy of augmented video sur-
veillance and data collection designed to reassert the
appearance of police control in a city that routinely
tops national rankings in the incidence of violent
crimes (NeighborhoodScout, 2016).
What counts as a ‘‘gunshot’’ in Camden, in many
cases, would not register as a ‘‘shooting’’ in New York
City. Whereas New York construes a ‘‘shooting’’ in the
narrowest possible terms requiring the presence of a
shooter, a bullet, and a victim’s blood, Camden’s city-
wide acoustic surveillance system automatically records
every ‘‘digital alert’’ of an ‘‘actual gun discharge’’ as a
‘‘gunshot crime in progress’’ pinpointed in time and
space (ShotSpotter Fact Sheet, 2016). These differences
between New York City and Camden cannot be sepa-
rated from their political context. The outcome of may-
oral elections in New York City, as well as the city’s
attractiveness for residents, tourists, and investors,
depends on the public perception of safety and security,
exerting downward pressure, in turn, on the practice of
collecting and documenting crime statistics. The
NYPD’s CompStat program tracks weekly crime data
by precinct as a tool for managing organizational per-
sonnel and resources but it is equally a tool for mana-
ging public opinion (Eterno and Silverman, 2010). In a
similar manner but conveying a different message,
Camden’s expanded ShotSpotter detection system
deploying sensors and monitors in every neighborhood
also influences political opinion by establishing a visible
police presence throughout the city.
A related controversy over categories, exclusions,
and measurement erupted over data on New York
City’s homeless population at a time when visible
homelessness, like crime, had become a political liabil-
ity for the city’s mayor. The annual homelessness count
reported by the U.S. Department of Housing and
Urban Development (HUD) in late 2015 found
75,323 homeless individuals in New York City but
that number was quickly challenged by advocates for
the homeless and HUD acknowledged uncertainty in
the ‘‘reliability and consistency’’ of the data (Stewart,
2015a; U.S. Department of Housing and Urban
Development, 2015). The ambiguities in the data were
manifold. Individuals and families who became home-
less through eviction, fire, landlord harassment or other
reasons, and were living doubled-up with friends or
relatives were not considered homeless by HUD’s def-
inition and were excluded from the count and HUD’s
report listed as zero the number of chronically homeless
families in New York City not in homeless shelters.
Although the city’s Human Resources Administration
(HRA) funds 45 emergency and transitional shelters for
women and their children forced to flee their homes due
to domestic violence, HUD also reported as zero the
number of homeless domestic violence (DV) victims in
shelters because the DV shelters operated by HRA were
considered separate from the homeless shelters oper-
ated by the Department of Homeless Services (New
York City Department of Homeless Services, 2016).
Simultaneously, the Mayor’s Office announced an
‘‘unprecedented expansion’’ in the number of shelter
beds for homeless victims of domestic violence to
accommodate ‘‘a 50 percent increase over the current
8,800 individuals served yearly’’ (New York City Office
of the Mayor, 2015; Stewart, 2015b). Further con-
founding HUD’s data, HUD’s count of 1706 homeless
youth almost certainly underestimated a significant
subgroup of the homeless who, advocates said, might
exceed 10,000 (Gibson, 2011) but ‘‘avoid public places
where they could be counted for fear of referral to
Child Protective Services and . . . avoid shelters out of
safety concerns’’ (Navarro, 2015; Stewart, 2015a, 2016).
The selective practices of categorization and meas-
urement illustrated in these examples might easily be
dismissed as the intrusion of political agendas in the
otherwise objective and politically neutral construction
of data as, in the words of the NYPD Commissioner,
‘‘factual’’ and ‘‘the truth.’’ If this were the case, a solu-
tion might lie in the rationalization and depoliticization
of methods of data collection, categorization, and ana-
lysis, bringing actual practices into closer alignment
with normative claims. The ubiquity of Big Data as a
technique of governance, biopolitics, and bureaucratic
control, however, has expanded the scope of the prob-
lem and amplified the challenge of delineating solu-
tions. My argument in this paper is that the challenge
of (and to) Big Data is not confined only to the politi-
cization of its practices but rather is situated in its foun-
dational ontological premises, involving the
evisceration of context through an ontology of hyper-
individualism. An ontology of atomistic individualism
underlies the construction of calculative data in general
(Hacking, 1990, 1991, 2006) but the arrival of Big Data,
involving the algorithmic production, manipulation,
and application of very large datasets, has exacerbated
and expanded the scope of the problem by obscuring
from critical scrutiny its foundational hyperindividual-
ist ontology.
This paper aims at a partial corrective by examining
Big Data’s underlying calculative ontology. By ontol-
ogy I mean ‘‘a set of contentions about the fundamental
character of human being and the world’’ (Bennett,
2001: 160) or simply ‘‘a theory of objects and their ties’’
Lake
(Theory and History of Ontology, 2016). Specifying Big
Data’s ‘‘ontological imaginary’’ (Bennett, 2001: 161)
answers the question starkly posed by Wagner-Pacifici
et al. (2015: 5) who ask, with respect to Big Data: ‘‘Just
what is our basic ‘ontological unit?’’’ or, even more
plainly, ‘‘What is a thing?’’ (see also Beauregard,
2015, 2016). Big Data’s ‘‘onto-story’’ (Bennett, 2001:
161) can be briefly summarized in the premise that
the world is knowable via calculation and measurement
and can be represented as the aggregation of discrete,
independent, empirically observable units. These units
are the ‘‘data points’’ representing, to list only a few
examples, gunshots, homeless people, sociodemo-
graphic characteristics, credit card swipes, Internet
searches, or geo-tagged locational coordinates captured
from smartphones (Goldstein, 2016; Kitchin, 2013,
2014; Wagner-Pacifici et al., 2015; Weber, 1946). This
calculative ontology both relies on and reproduces a
form of atomistic individualism in which the onto-
logical unit of analysis is the discrete data point, the
meaning and identity of which inheres in itself, preced-
ing, separate, and independent from its context or its
relation to any other data point.
By the hyperindividualism of Big Data, I refer to the
practice of disaggregation and reaggregation that pro-
ceeds through a multistep process of interconnected
and interdependent constructions of the world. Big
Data’s ontological imaginary involves (1) the division
and disaggregation of data fields (‘‘variables’’) into
ever-smaller units measured at ever finer-grained
levels of resolution, (2) the practice of counting each
individual observation as an autonomous unit—a
thing-in-itself—extracted from and independent of its
context, and (3) the reaggregation and recontextualiza-
tion of the resultant data ‘‘bits’’ through the automated
algorithmic search for statistical patterns and correl-
ations hidden within the dataset. While an ontology
of atomistic individualism underlies calculative prac-
tices in general, the diffusion of Big Data both relies
on and produces a form of hyperindividualism of an
unprecedented scope and scale. The hyperindividualiza-
tion of Big Data results, first, from the hyperdisaggre-
gation of data fields in what Kitchin (2014: 2) describes
as the production of ‘‘massive, dynamic flows of
diverse, fine-grained, relational data’’ recording and
counting, for example, Internet transactions, selected
words within social media posts, demographic ‘‘vari-
ables,’’ real-time spatiotemporal registers, and so on,
where the identity or meaning of each data point is
self-evidently and inherently given as a thing-in-itself
divorced from its context. That hyperindividualization
permits, second, the reaggregation and intercorrelation
of data observations to construct new observations and
‘‘facts,’’ the meaning of which is based on, imposed by,
and imputed from the discursive categorical labels in
3
the data table rather than from the meaning residing
in the lived experience of the original units of
observation.
Consideration of Big Data’s ontology of hyperindi-
vidualism moves beyond epistemological debates over
definitions, categorizations, data collection methods,
and data accuracy. The interrogation of such matters
derives from an internal critique of Big Data’s onto-
logical framework while adopting and remaining
within its ontological assumptions and focusing on
problems of operationalization and implementation,
that is, on problems of method (Lake, 2014).
Motivating such internal critique is the belief that
better (i.e. more accurate, consistent, objective, or com-
prehensive) methods of data collection, aggregation,
and analysis will produce better knowledge. Beyond
merely addressing internal operational mechanics, how-
ever, internecine conflicts over the ‘‘how’’ of Big Data
have constitutive effects. By performing and naturaliz-
ing Big Data’s ontological assumptions, debates over
what gets counted, through what methods, via what
algorithms (Kwan, 2016), and despite what omissions
and (mis)categorizations reproduce its foundational
premises while deflecting attention away from a critical
assessment of those underlying principles (Zaloom,
2003). The practice of Big Data governed by an ontol-
ogy of hyperindividualism is also constitutive of that
ontology, naturalizing and diffusing it through prac-
tices of governance and, from there, throughout
myriad dimensions of everyday life. The challenge for
governance is that problems inherent in the ontology
underlying a practice cannot be resolved by altering the
practice but must be addressed at the level of founda-
tional ontological assumptions. Changing those onto-
logical assumptions, however, destabilizes the entire
edifice of practice built up on the prior underlying foun-
dation that allowed the politicization of data construc-
tion to proceed in the first place. As Garfinkel
observed, there are often ‘‘‘good’ organizational rea-
sons for ‘bad’ clinical records’’ (Garfinkel, 1967: 186).
Resistance to change on the part of interests invested in
those current practices (e.g. the police or the mayor) all
but guarantees the preservation of the status quo.
My purpose in this paper, accordingly, is to consider
the implications for governance of Big Data’s ontology
of hyperindividualism. Rather than taking Big Data’s
ontological assumptions as the starting point of the
analysis, however, my concern is to sketch a brief
genealogical account of their emergence. A genealogical
narrative understands practices (and their conse-
quences) as situated in the confluence of the circum-
stances from which they emerged (Foucault, 1984;
Hacking, 1991; Nietzsche, 1913). ‘‘History matters,’’
Trevor Barnes (2013: 298) reminds us, but, unlike his-
tory’s search for origins or causes, a genealogical
4 Big Data & Society
approach problematizes the given-ness of Big Data’s
ontological premises by unraveling and exposing their
contingent emergence. Focusing on emergence rather
than origins helps, as Jane Bennett (2001: 11) observes,
to ‘‘counter the teleological tendency of one’s
thoughts.’’ For Colin Koopman:
Genealogical problematization . . . provokes a question
by rendering the inevitable contingent . . ..A genealogy
also shows us how that which we took to be inevitable
was contingently composed. A genealogy does not just
show us that our practices in the present are contingent
rather than necessary, for it also shows how our prac-
tices in the present contingently became what they are.
The history of that which was once presumed inevitable
not only makes us forget the inevitability, it also pro-
vides us with the materials we would need to transfor-
matively work on that which we had taken to be a
necessity. (Koopman, 2011: 545)
In the remainder of this paper, therefore, I explicate Big
Data’s ontology of hyperindividualism as a radical
extension of atomistic liberal individualism and I con-
trast it to a coconstitutive ontology that prioritizes rela-
tionality, context, and interdependence. I then situate the
ontology of hyperindividualism in the longue durée of its
genealogical emergence, drawing primarily from Patrick
Joyce’s (2003) history of 19th-century liberalism and
John Dewey’s (1929, 1935) pragmatist account of indi-
vidualism, liberalism, and social action. In the conclud-
ing section of the paper, I consider the implications for
governance of Big Data’s ontological politics of hyper-
individualism. While Big Data’s hyperindividualist
ontology extends throughout its applications in informa-
tion technology, I focus here on the ways in which that
foundational ontology affects the definition of urban
problems, the dynamics of urban politics, and the prac-
tice of urban governance in the age of Big Data.
Big Data’s ontology of
hyperindividualism
Clarifying Big Data’s ontological imaginary and
answering the deceptively simple question ‘‘What is a
thing?’’ reflects the centrality of what Latour (2005)
calls Dingpolitik or the politics of the thing. As
explained by Ignacio Farias:
Urban politics is . . . not about subjects, subjectivities or
discourses, but about things, complex entangled
objects, socio-material interminglings. This is what
Latour (2005a) calls a Dingpolitik: the understanding
that urban politics can no longer be understood as con-
flict between human or, better, class interests, but
involves conflicts over different ‘cosmograms’, that is,
ways of articulating the elements of the world and their
mutual connections. (Farias, 2011: 371)
Underlying the ‘‘bigness’’ of Big Data’s high volume of
observational units—‘‘terabytes or petabytes of data’’
(Kitchin, 2013: 262)—is the assumption that each one
of those myriad observational units (i.e. each individual
data point) constitutes a discrete thing-in-itself, an
independently observable unit, the ontological identity
of which precedes and thus channels its entry into the
‘‘correct’’ category or field within the dataset. Identity
in this individuated ontology inheres in the observa-
tional unit: the data point is the ‘‘Thing.’’ That identity,
furthermore, remains intact as the individuated obser-
vational unit—the data point—is extracted from its
context in the world and transported to the dataset,
entered in the spreadsheet or visually displayed on a
map. These are the dots on the map captured by
Camden’s ShotSpotter gunshot detection system.
Each dot represents the imprint of a discrete auditory
signal that a certain acoustical frequency defines as a
‘‘gunshot,’’ each individuated point identified by its
unique locational coordinates of latitude and longitude
that fix its position on the gunshot map of Camden.
Like the children’s game of connect-the-dots, the pat-
tern on the map, the shape of the data distribution, or
the parameters of the dataset derive from, and are con-
stituted through, the aggregation and categorization of
the discrete, autonomous, individuated data points.
The identity of the whole is the aggregate of the indi-
vidual identities inhering in the autonomous units of
which it is comprised. E pluribus unum: out of many,
one.
In contrast to Big Data’s individuated ontology of
the data point is a relational ontology in which meaning
devolves from the whole to its constituent parts and the
identity of the individual data point emerges from its
relationship to and membership in the whole. Kitchin
notes the highly relational character of Big Data’s data
in which ‘‘common fields . . . enable the conjoining of
different data sets’’ (2014: 2) through the ability to
overlay; juxtapose; or correlate data layers, fields, or
categories at will. But this relationality is correlative
rather than constitutive, a relationality of juxtaposition
rather than of ontological cocreation and codepend-
ence. These ‘‘relational databases’’ construct an acci-
dental relationality in which the meaning of the data
point is first abstracted and removed from its constitu-
tive contextuality and then recontextualized through
relational juxtaposition with other data points that
have been similarly distanced from their contextually
constructed ontological identity. In Big Data’s correla-
tive, juxtapositional and accidental relationality, each
field, layer, or variable in the dataset can be associated
with any other, it can be contextualized or
Lake
decontextualized, or it can be correlated with one data
layer today and a different one tomorrow—all without
altering the inherent, immutable meaning, value, or
identity of each data point comprising the dataset.
In a coconstitutive ontology, in contrast, the meaning
or identity of the individual data point does not preexist
its context. If in the individuated ontology of Big Data the
whole is the aggregation of its individual parts, in a rela-
tional ontology the individual parts derive their identity
from and through their membership in the whole.
Because the meaning of the individual data point is estab-
lished by its context, it cannot be removed from its con-
text without losing, altering, or obscuring its meaning.
When the ontological meaning of the ‘‘thing’’—the indi-
vidual data point—resides in its relationality within a con-
textual network or assemblage of things, ‘‘everything is
already within the individual’’ observational unit or data
point (Law, 2004: 22). Indeed, ‘‘the notion of assemblage
involves no outside, no exteriority’’ (Farias, 2011: 369)
and ‘‘there is no distinction between individual and envir-
onment. There are no natural, pregiven boundaries . . ..
Everything is connected and contained within everything
else’’ (Law, 2004: 22).
Viewed within a relational ontology, therefore, a dot
on the gunshot map of Camden no longer represents
merely the localized discharge of a firearm marked as
an individuated ‘‘thing.’’ The dot instantiates the rec-
ording of a certain acoustical signal at a designated
electronic frequency but also so much more.
Contained in that dot is a set of political and economic
structures and processes producing a population differ-
entiated by indicators of poverty and inequality; the
operation of urban, suburban, and regional land-use
practices of inclusion and exclusion that situate that
dot here rather than there within a regional landscape;
a portfolio of legal, illegal, and extra-legal provisions
and practices governing the availability, distribution,
and cost of firearms; the design and implementation
of law enforcement and surveillance practices and the
training of personnel in their use; the technological cap-
acity to design, construct, and operate gunshot detec-
tion devices in a chaotic urban environment; a political
decision-making process allocating scarce financial
resources in a cash-strapped city to acquire, install,
and operate the detection system; and more. All this,
as John Law notes, ‘‘is already within the individual’’
gunshot pinpointed at a specific place and time but all
of these layers of meaning fall away and disappear
when the identity of the acoustic signal is reduced to
a ‘‘digital alert . . . of a gunshot crime in progress.’’
As the pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty
concludes:
it does not pay to be essentialist about tables, stars,
electrons, human beings, academic disciplines, social
5
institutions, or anything else . . ..[T]here is nothing to
be known about (objects) except an initially large,
and forever expanding, web of relations to other
objects. Everything that can serve as the term of a rela-
tion can be dissolved into another set of relations, and
so on for ever. There are, so to speak, relations all the
way down, all the way up, and all the way out in every
direction: you never reach something which is not just
one more nexus of relations . . ..There is nothing to be
known about anything save its relations to other things.
(Rorty, 1999: 53–54)
Big Data’s hyperindividuated ontology extracts and
displaces the data point—the ‘‘thing’’—from the cocon-
stitutive, relational ontology of the assemblage.
Camden’s ShotSpotter system strips the gunshot from
its relational context, reduces it to a common acoustical
signal, and categorizes all gunshots as identical
‘‘things.’’ It does this by elevating the single criter-
ion—the register of an electronic signal on a detection
device—and excluding all other contextual characteris-
tics as defining criteria for the data category labeled
‘‘gunshots.’’ Shots that hit their target, shots that
miss, shots fired with intentional malice and shots
from the accidental discharge of a firearm, aggressive
shots and defensive ones, shots from stolen firearms
and shots from legally registered ones, shots emanating
from drug-related violence and shots from law-enforce-
ment actions: these contextual complexities (and
others) make each of these very disparate types of
shots a different category or type of ‘‘thing’’ but these
ontological differences are ignored and obscured in
reducing the disparate meanings of these disparate
events to the singular category of ‘‘gunshot’’ denoted
by a particular auditory signature picked up by an
acoustical detection device.
Meanwhile, a different but equally narrowly con-
strued criterion is constitutive of a ‘‘shooting’’ in
New York City. Here a gunshot that misses its target
is not a shooting, nor is a gunshot that wounds its
target by shattering the glass of a car window. The
NYPD’s narrowly construed definition excludes from
the category all but one of the multitude of contextual
relationalities comprising the multitude of different
‘‘things’’ called gunshots. Gunshots whose identities
correspond to those excluded categories are experi-
enced in the world but do not exist in the dataset con-
stituting the world of Big Data. A contextual, relational
ontology of homelessness fares no better in New York
City. Homeless youth are not counted as homeless and
thus populate the ontological category of ‘‘not home-
less,’’ not because they are in fact not homeless but
because they have learned to evade HUD’s count of
the city’s homeless population. Doubled-up families
are defined and categorized as ‘‘not homeless’’ despite
6 Big Data & Society
having been rendered homeless by fire, eviction, domes-
tic violence, or landlord harassment. The category ‘‘not
homeless’’ contains both homeless and not-homeless
individuals who, nonetheless, are ontologically con-
structed as identical within the decontextualized, hyper-
individuated dataset of homelessness. When the dataset
of homelessness is then algorithmically correlated with
similarly constructed datasets to reveal unexpected stat-
istical patterns and associations, the apparent clarity
enabled by Big Data’s emergent relationality of juxta-
position conceals the incoherence of the data entered
into the analysis.
These practices of data collection, categorization,
and correlation correspond to and reproduce an indi-
viduated ontology in which identity inheres in the dis-
crete, autonomous observational unit irrespective of its
constitutive context. Big Data’s characteristics of high
volume, high velocity, fine-grained resolution, and
comprehensive scope (Kitchin, 2013), coupled with its
increasing pervasiveness throughout more and more
spheres of everyday life, have elevated the individuated
ontology to what may justifiably be considered an
ontology of hyperindividualism. Enabled by techno-
logical developments in data acquisition, storage, data-
base management, and analysis, hyperindividualism
proceeds through the categorization of data fields at
ever more finely grained levels of resolution and ever
more comprehensive levels of coverage. To cite only
two examples, DNA barcoding that allows the defini-
tive categorization of unique biological species
(www.barcodeoflife.org) extends individuation across
all living things while obscuring ecological interdepen-
dencies and coconstitutive ontologies. The Open
Research and Contributor ID system that ‘‘provides a
persistent digital identifier that distinguishes you from
every other researcher’’ (www.orcid.org) institutional-
izes the individuation of knowledge while obscuring the
dense network of influences and interdependencies
within which any process of knowledge production is
situated (Wyly, 2014a).
The genealogy of hyperindividualism
How, then, did an ontology of hyperindividuation
become possible and from where did it emerge? For
Trevor Barnes: ‘‘what is forgotten in the celebration
of big data is history’’ (Barnes, 2013: 297) and Barnes
situates Big Data’s assumptions and practices in the
quantitative revolution in geography and the social sci-
ences in the mid-20th century. Those developments, of
course, were themselves inscribed within a process of
individuation of much longer duration. The making
of individuation has deep roots extending from and
through the Enlightenment ideal of scientific objectivity
(Hacking, 1990, 1999; Harding, 2015; Latour, 1993);
political theory from Rousseau and Montesquieu to
Bentham, Locke, and Mill; development of a psych-
ology of the self (Rose, 1989, 1998); and more. In
Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche describes the process
of ‘‘first making man to a certain extent . . . uniform,
like among his like, regular, and consequently calcul-
able.’’ And, Nietzsche continues:
the actual work of man on himself during the longest
period of the human race, his whole prehistoric work,
finds its meaning, its great justification . . . in this fact:
man, with the help of the morality of customs and of
social strait-waistcoats, we made genuinely calculable
until finally ‘‘at the end of this colossal process, at the
point where the tree finally matures its fruits . . . then do
we find as the ripest fruit on this tree the sovereign
individual’’ (Nietzsche, 1913/2003, Essay II, 2, emphasis
in original).
That sovereign individual, Nietzsche emphatically
insists, was not born but made. As Claire Rasmussen
convincingly demonstrates in her genealogy of the
autonomous subject, ‘‘the ‘individual’ as a form of sub-
jectivity is the product of a particular social imaginary
that institutionalizes the individual through secondary
institutions such as the economy, a system of rights,
and so on’’ (Rasmussen, 2011: 11). Those institutions,
however, do not do their work in the abstract. For
social historian Patrick Joyce, the construction of lib-
eral individualism proceeded through myriad mundane
practices of governance that spurred ‘‘the growth of
privacy and the individuation of the subject’’ through
which ‘‘people became available to be identified as indi-
vidual’’ (Joyce, 2003: 22). The invention of letter writ-
ing in the early 19th century, for example, stimulated
the development of a postal system which, in turn,
required the introduction and proliferation of street
addresses and individual house numbers. These
assigned a unique location and, therefore, a unique,
enumerated identity to each dwelling, each letter
writer, and each recipient. City directories soon fol-
lowed, aggregating information about individual resi-
dents in the first comprehensive urban databases
(Joyce, 2003: 197–198). What Joyce calls ‘‘the hygieni-
sation of the city’’ accelerated ‘‘the individuation of the
self’’ by ‘‘creating spaces around and between bodies,
protecting them from others’ contact and smells’’ and
the resulting privatization ‘‘brought people into a new
encounter with themselves’’ (Joyce, 2003: 73). The
introduction of indoor sanitation literally wrapped the
individual body in a cloak of privacy, physically separ-
ating and thus distinguishing each privatized body from
another and from the generalized body public. Joyce
similarly describes the cultural history of the bed in
the 18th century as contributing to the privatization
Lake
of sleeping linked to emerging ideas of liberal
individualism:
In France the individual bed eventually became integral
to notions of the Rights of Man, finding its way into
political reason in this form: a decision of the
Convention of 1793 in France ordained that state insti-
tutions such as hospitals and asylums should provide
individual beds as a natural extension of the Rights of
Man. (Joyce, 2003: 73)
Even death and burial became individualized and pri-
vatized when communal burial within the walls of the
church was banned in England by an Act of Parliament
of 1842. When churchyards were replaced by ceme-
teries, the communal identity of the churchyard was
replaced by a purchased cemetery plot now delimited
as individual property. Markers identifying individual
gravesites, Joyce observes, extended the memory of the
individual into perpetuity, ‘‘another instance of the
individuation of the human subject, in death now as
in life . . ., a universalism of the individual subject’’
(Joyce, 2003: 91).
Writing in 1929 at a moment of global economic
crisis, John Dewey observed that ‘‘the problem of con-
structing a new individuality consonant with the object-
ive conditions under which we live is the deepest
problem of our times’’ (Dewey, 1929: 56). In a series
of essays titled ‘‘Individualism, Old and New,’’ Dewey
described the ‘‘perversion of the whole idea of individu-
alism’’ (1929: 49) wrought by the reformulation of liber-
alism from the (old) political individualism to the (new)
economic individuation of industrial society. The
Lockean, political liberalism of the early industrial revo-
lution, Dewey wrote, liberated the individual from the
strictures of religious and monarchical rule: ‘‘liquefied
the static property concepts of feudalism,’ and ‘gave a
secular and worldly turn to the career of the individual’’
(1929: 78). The subsequent expansion of the market
economy, however, ‘‘subordinate(d) political to eco-
nomic activity’’ (1935: 18) and replaced political indi-
vidualism with economic individuation ‘‘to such an
extent that individuality is suppressed’’ (1929: 66). If
the old liberalism liberated the political individual from
subservience to despotic rule, the transformation from
political to economic liberalism reduced the individual to
so many units of labor power subservient to the rule of
the market. Commodification and marketization pro-
duced ‘‘a conception of individuality as something
ready-made, already possessed’’ (1935: 46) and thus
available to be bought and sold in the labor market.
Under the new circumstances of mass production and
consumption: ‘‘liberty becomes a well-nigh obsolete
term; we start, go, and stop at the signal of a vast indus-
trial machine’’ (1929: 46). In the process, those aspects of
7
being human that escape the commodification of labor
power—the fully human context of labor—simply dis-
appear from view (Arendt, 1958).
Dewey attributed the loss of individuality to the forces
of ‘‘quantification, mechanization and standardization,’’
which he called ‘‘the marks of the Americanization that is
conquering the world’’ (1929: 52). In an eerily prophetic
statement, Dewey observed that
The marks and signs of this ‘impersonalization’ of the
human soul are quantification of life, with its attendant
disregard of quality; its mechanization and the almost
universal habit of esteeming technique as an end, not as
a means, so that organic and intellectual life is also
‘rationalized’; and, finally, standardization. Differences
and distinctions are ignored and overridden; agreement,
similarity, is the ideal . . ..Homogeneity of thought and
emotion has become an ideal. (1929: 52)
The individuating practices and conceptual transform-
ations traced by Joyce and Dewey served over time to
naturalize an individuated ontology in which meaning
inheres in the unit of empirical observation. As Svend
Brinkmann reminds us, the etymology of the word data
is ‘‘‘the given’ (the root Latin form is dare, which means
‘to give’)’’ (2014: 721). True to its genealogical proven-
ance, Big Data’s individuated ontology encompasses
those ‘‘terabytes or petabytes’’ of empirically observ-
able givens whose inherent meanings make them avail-
able for calculation and categorization. While
categorization constitutes data, as has been widely
recognized (e.g. Hacking, 2006; Porter, 1995;
Schneider and Ingram, 1993; Wilson, 2011), the prac-
tice of calculability relies on the availability of data for
categorization according to their inherently given
meaning.
The radical expansion, intensification, and mystifica-
tion of this process through the practices of Big Data
reproduce an ontology of hyperindividualism. For the
75,323 individuals comprising HUD’s dataset of home-
less individuals in New York City in 2015 (and the tens
of thousands similarly categorized in other jurisdic-
tions), the essentialized identity of homelessness derives
from their inclusion in the dataset rather than from the
contextual dynamics that produce the condition and
experience of homelessness. In the circular logic of
Big Data, the homeless are those who are counted as
homeless. The ontological identity of homelessness that
inheres to those individualized and decontextualized
bodies when the dataset of which they are constituents
is correlated and recontextualized with other datasets,
producing new relationalities, may have little if any-
thing in common with the original context-dependent
meaning of homelessness experience by the individuals
comprising the dataset.
8 Big Data & Society
Hyperindividualism and urban
governance
Big Data’s ontology of hyperindividualism exerts a
debilitating influence on the conceptualization and
practice of urban governance. Understanding the
world as an aggregation of individuated data points
reduces governance to the management of atomistic
behavior, undermines the contribution of urban com-
plexity as a resource for governance, erodes the poten-
tial for urban democracy, and eviscerates the possibility
of collective resistance.
First, as Patrick Joyce observes: ‘‘before populations
can be governed they must be known or identified’’
(2003: 13) and measurement, quantification, statistical
compilation, and mapping have long been used and
understood as techniques of governance (e.g.
Hacking, 1990, 1999, 2006; Mitchell, 2002; Rose,
1991). An optimistic version of this claim is that when
quantification and measurement make problems vis-
ible, governments are provoked to produce a solution
or risk a crisis of governmental legitimacy (Habermas,
1975). While the visibility of a problem may prompt
government action, however, the form of its represen-
tation critically influences the form and substance of
the governmental response. By constituting urban
problems as the aggregation of individual empirical
observations, Big Data’s ontology of hyperindividual-
ism reduces governance to the management of atomistic
behavior or characteristics. A problem represented as a
pattern of dots on a map—a concentration of subprime
loans, poor test scores, low-income households, home-
less individuals, or gunshots, for example—prompts a
response aimed at altering the number or distribution
of dots. A governance strategy that focuses on visible
symptoms deflects attention from underlying causes, at
worst blaming the victim and at best addressing acute
needs of individuals at risk without preventing the con-
tinuing (re)emergence of problems at their source.
Second, Big Data’s relationship to urban complexity
presents a paradoxical challenge to urban governance.
While technological developments in data production,
collection, and management have yielded an exponen-
tial increase in the number and variety of data cate-
gories available for analysis, the decontextualization,
homogenization, and standardization of data within
categories reduce complexity that might otherwise
serve as a resource for governance. The hyperindividu-
alism of Big Data echoes the ascendancy of objectifica-
tion in GIS more than two decades ago, in which
‘‘access to massive databases causes the analyst to
transform those to whom the data refer from subject-
ively differentiated individuals to an objectified ‘other’’’
(Lake, 1993: 408; see also Curry, 1993). The loss of the
subjective viewpoint flattens complexity that could
enrich governance by bringing multiple perspectives
to bear on a problem.
Third, Big Data undermines democracy in the prac-
tice of urban governance. Nikolas Rose describes at
length the ‘‘constitutive interrelationship between
quantification and democratic government’’ (1991:
675) in which democratic participation requires a
public conversant with numbers and able to compre-
hend the world in the statistical form through which it
is presented for public deliberation. The ascendancy of
Big Data, however, renders obsolete the public’s polit-
ical numeracy as the chart and the map are replaced by
the black box of data management software and the
complexity of the visible world is replaced by the
hidden complexity of the algorithm (Wyly, 2014b).
The ontology of hyperindividualism, furthermore,
reduces active political agents to the status of gener-
ators of data, whether through volunteering of data
(Elwood, 2008; Elwood et al., 2012) or as passive tar-
gets of data-scraping technology.
Finally, Big Data’s hyperindividuated ontology evis-
cerates the possibility of collective resistance. The dis-
aggregating, objectifying, and decontextualizing
practices informed by these ontological presuppositions
undermine collective action by inculcating a worldview
comprised of atomistic individuals. These individualis-
tic foundational premises correspond to and reproduce
hegemonic commitments to a prevailing ideology of
individual responsibility and personal culpability.
What Dewey observed in 1923 applies with equal or
greater force today:
When the self is regarded as something complete within
itself, then it is readily argued that only internal mor-
alistic changes are of importance in general reform . . ..
The result is to throw the burden for social improve-
ment upon free-will in its most impossible form.
Moreover, social and economic passivity are encour-
aged. Individuals are led to concentrate in moral intro-
spection upon their own vices and virtues, and to
neglect the character of the environment . . ..And while
saints are engaged in introspection, burly sinners run
the world. (Dewey, 1923: 113)
Conclusion
With Big Data a ubiquitous presence in modern life,
critical reflection urges caution in adopting its tenets
and practices to inform policy-making and urban gov-
ernance. Most discussion of Big Data and governance
proceeds through internal critique; finding inconsisten-
cies, ambiguities, and lacunae in the processes of data
collection, aggregation, and analysis comprising Big
Data’s operating manual. I have argued in this paper
Lake
that Big Data’s challenge to urban governance cannot
sufficiently be addressed at the level of internal critique
and that its ontological presuppositions provide an
unreliable foundation for the practice of urban govern-
ance in a democratic society.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Rachel Weber and Phil Ashton for organizing the
symposium on ‘‘The Crowd, the Cloud, and Urban
Governance’’ at the University of Illinois-Chicago in April
2015, where an earlier version of this article was presented,
and thanks to Rachel, Phil, and Matt Zook for organizing
this special issue on urban governance. Kathe Newman, Juan
Rivero, Elvin Wyly and two anonymous reviewers provided
extremely helpful comments on earlier drafts.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with
respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.
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