Private Affairs

One of Masutti's central moves is to refuse the neat story in which the state watches for control and companies watch for profit, as if these were separate worlds. The techniques of counting, sorting and filing populations developed together, and they borrowed from each other constantly. The census, the tax roll, the identity document and the commercial file are cousins. Each rests on the same premise: that a population can be made legible, broken into records that can be searched, matched and acted upon.

The twentieth century turned this into infrastructure. Governments built registries to administer welfare, conscription, taxation and public health, and in doing so produced enormous quantities of standardized personal data. Private firms drew on the same statistical and bureaucratic methods to segment customers and manage risk. Insurers, in particular, sit at the hinge between the two worlds, since pricing risk means classifying people — by age, by geography, by behavior — in ways that look a great deal like governing them.

The digital shift, in Masutti's account, did something the credit bureau could only dream of: it made data collection automatic, ambient and cheap. Every search, purchase, click and location became a trace that could be captured at the moment it happened, without a correspondent filing a report. The cost of observing a person collapsed toward zero, and with it the old constraint that had kept the industry modest. When watching costs almost nothing, the temptation is to watch everything.

Crucially, the data was not merely a byproduct to be stored. It became the core of the business model itself. A great deal of the modern web is offered for free precisely because the user is not the customer — the user is the source of the raw material. Advertisers and other decision-makers are the customers, buying access to the profiles that behavior generates. The triangular structure from the credit bureau returns intact, only now the subject of the file feeds it constantly and voluntarily, one interaction at a time.

If the logic of the data economy is to reach ever more predictive information, then health is its natural destination. Nothing anticipates future behavior, cost and vulnerability as reliably as the state of a body. Masutti follows the market's arrival at this frontier, where the traces of illness, medication, fitness and genetic risk become another category to be gathered, priced and exchanged. The wearable that counts steps, the app that tracks a cycle or a mood, the pharmacy loyalty card — each converts a private bodily fact into a record that flows into the same triangular market that began with the credit bureau.

What unsettles him about the health frontier is not novelty but continuity. The same actors are present: insurers who price risk by classifying people, employers who screen, platforms that profile. Health data simply raises the stakes, because a mistaken credit score can be corrected while a body cannot be un-known. When the record of a life includes its medical vulnerabilities, the imbalance built into the market from the start — the subject outside the transaction, the decision-maker inside it — becomes something closer to power over the person's future.

The shopkeeper who bought a file on a stranger in a Midwestern town would not recognize a fitness tracker or an ad exchange. But he would recognize the deal. Someone gathered facts about a person, someone else paid for them, and the person in question was never in the room. Masutti's achievement in Private Affairs is to hold that continuity steady across nearly two centuries, so that the smartphone stops looking like a rupture and starts looking like a culmination. The market did not appear when the technology did. The technology arrived and found a market already waiting for it, complete with its habits, its customers and its exclusions.