Broken loops, open futures: The building and breaking of behavioural insurance

Abstract

Digital looping effects between algorithmic technologies and users are promoted as reshaping various industries by optimizing operations, improving predictions and creating new market opportunities. Insurers are exploring these promises by collecting customer-generated data and testing its use in risk calculations and behavioural interventions. However, these novel insurance technologies have been criticized for enabling totalizing forms of surveillance, control and discrimination, potentially leading to the foreclosure of future actions. This study tests the argument that emerging insurance technologies ‘narrow the future’ by analysing Finnish life insurers’ efforts to build a digital feedback loop into their behavioural policies. It centralizes breakages in these new data practices as the locus of analysis, showing how the feedback loop dissolves at various points or is never established due to shortcomings in the new technologies, regulatory barriers and aspects inherent to insurance logic itself, thereby undermining the policies’ aims; yet, the insurers’ experimentations cannot be simply framed as failures because they produce knowledge that can inform future practices. The present study illustrates the importance of examining how versions of dominant technological visions are reworked in local, field-specific practices. It shows that instead of producing ‘guaranteed outcomes’, these novel insurance operations raise new questions and uncertainties that can have harmful effects beyond the totalizing scenarios. Focusing on breakages challenges techno-deterministic perspectives, keeping the future open while enabling a more precise critique of the harms associated with these visions and their often-imperfect implementation.