ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses being concerning dataness both in terms of the data subject and of personal data. Private and public organisations collect massive amounts of personal data to piece together pictures of individuals and communities. The object ‘data subject’, as an analogue of the object ‘one to who data relates’ conditioned to give up and give out valuable data, withdraws from attempts to know it by ‘their’ data. Data analytics levels all forms of social life, and for any individual, organisation or institution to thrive, all must comply. People provide algorithms with data as a silversmith is provided with silver. As data sovereigns, ones to whom data relates bring forward into appearance their own ‘pictures’. Neoliberalism has tracked across society in lockstep with the rise of data as a valuable resource in the last forty years of the Information Age and fostered strategies that survey, constantly, that which can be extracted and stored.
