Gregory Bateson was notoriously cautious about making causal claims and wary of established forms of historiography, that is, predicting future effects on the grounds of past causes. In a discussion of the culture of the Iatmul (a tribe in New Guinea) he says that it, ‘like all other cultures is really an elaborate reticulum of interlocking cause and effect. The order in which such a description is arranged is necessarily arbitrary and artificial. … Throughout this analysis I shall confine myself to synchronic explanations of the phenomena, that is to say, to explanations which invoke only such other phenomena as are now present in Iatmul culture. …’ (2004: 547; our emphasis). In this paper, Sophie Day and I discuss contemporary manifestations of the synchronic in ‘big’ data through two very different cases, the use of data analytics in UK NHS breast cancer services and emerging hashtag collectivities such as #metoo. We suggest that – in practices – these ‚personalised‘ distributions of uncertainty do not merely privatise risk (although they may do so) but recompose relations of correspondence between the individual and the collective.