Add to Shopping Basket

Abstract

This article speculate on how data appears to come from things. Even when data itself becomes its own subject, data requires a source. But are things themselves data? When we ‘add to shopping basket’ on Amazon and elsewhere we create an event that is not an attribute of the book we buy but a subject of the data that self-creates. The paper argues that data here becomes a thing in the event of becoming itself. It is through this event that data ontologically separates itself from the subject of book and person.