Isolating the Individual: Computerized Name Matching and the Problem of Identity

In the late 1970s, technical innovations seemed to have solved an age-old bureaucratic problem: matching names across disparate lists to identify distinct individuals. Computerization had long held the promise of enumerating and isolating citizens, as an essential aspect of the New Deal liberal state (Igo 2018, Bouk 2018, Gage 2023). During the Carter Administration, the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Joseph Califano was convinced the computer could act as a “policeman” identifying federal employees who were on the welfare rolls though Project Match. Despite the tremendous controversy, state administrators from Massachusetts to Maryland subsequently followed Califano’s lead. How did politicians, policymakers, engineers, and administrators make sense of the fact that the technology did not work? How, for example, did they respond to one audit of a Massachusetts program from 1982 where about 100 of the 160 individuals identified were categorized incorrectly? The archives of debates over those exemplary audits, including Senate hearings and technological evaluations, reveal the recurring stubborn fact of technological unknowability. If the centrality of the individual has been a hallmark of liberalism, and the growing fixation on isolating that atom of society has been a defining marker of neoliberalism’s rise, this paper asks what it means when the individual proved continuously unknowable.