The Data Dilemma and its Relevance in Human Science.
Power is an ambiguous concept. In physics power is defined as the transfer of energy or the potential to transfer energy (Dowding 2012; Halliday et al., 2011). Often, the sun is given as an example — “The sun has enough power to…”. Power is also often described as the force of gravity on a rock or the waterfall when generating hydroelectric energy. Social and political power is thought of in a similar way. The power to stop someone from doing something. For example, the police have the power to stop a speeding car. In the political social sciences, power is a term often described as the ability to influence the behaviour (or conduct) of others. Something that can be understood as elite rule over powerless populations (Lukes, 2004). The English term “power” comprises the two German words “Herrschaft” and “Macht”, which can best be translated as “authority” and “compulsion” (Weber et al., 2013). China and its culture have traditionally been connected to philosophy power in Mandarin is best translated as 政 politics, 治 rule, 势 potential, 力 force. The concept of power varies not only in its translation, but also in the way certain countries exercise power. To visualize this thought, it can be imagined like the following:
Power exists when A exercises power over B meaning A affects B in a manner contrary to B’s interests’ (ibid.). Influence exists when A can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do. In each situation, A participates in decisions and thereby adversely affects B (Bachrach & Morton, 1962; Stone, 2006). In fact, power is being exercised when A is involved in the decision-making that affects B. However, power is also exercised when A devotes his energy to the creation or strengthening of social and political values and institutional practices that may or may not limit the scope of the political process to the public discussion of only comparatively harmless issues. This shows that power is much more than the princely right of the sword (Coleman & Grove, 2009). It is the power to prevent people, to whatever degree, from having grievances by shaping their perceptions, cognitions and preferences in such a way that they accept their role in the existing order of things. When taking a look at the policy of the United States of America on extraordinary rendition (i.e., the state-sponsored abduction and/or extrajudicial transfer of a person from one country to another) certain forces of violence and torture are exercised on the human body here that are unimaginable in other societies.
This shows that power in a society can either be tyranny, if power is exercised over people so that they have no liberty, or because its members have limited power to do anything they want to do. Therefore, this research focuses on the “power over someone or something” in a neutral way. That means how power can be productive and suppressive at the same time like the waterfall on a rock rather than “the power to”, for example stopping someone doing something. Power and knowledge become not only but also useful in disciplinary institutions such as schools, psychiatric hospitals, and prisons. Institutions that disseminate knowledge by expanding this knowledge it enables power systems, monitor and ultimately nurture the psyche of the population, so the concept of power should be taken quite seriously. Literally, institutions that create and produce knowledge also have great power (Escobar, 1984; Hook, 2007). Knowledge is power essentially means that you have to gain the knowledge of the dominant discourse within a social group to understand the dynamics of the group and to fit into that social group. In an attempt to understand the root of this idea in relations to the power theory, Foucault’s terminology of “technology” is derived from the French synonym “technique” — which in this case means that it does not translate to machines in the sense of technical technology in a sense of a tools, but describes methods and procedures for controlling human beings.
Technologies of government are the actual mechanism through which authorities whether public or private, seek to shape the conduct and thoughts of others to achieve the desired objectives. It refers to the way people are instructed to govern themselves through the conduct of the people. This in other words means a phenomenon namely the set of mechanism through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy of a general strategy of power. The origins of this strategy go back to the era of Enlightenment starting in the 17th century. Social contract theorists e.g., Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau all discussed the justifications for and limits of government of why and when rulers should have power over us. Hobbes for example argued that the sovereign, the king or the queen, had power because if no one ruled anarchy would ray but the type of power these thinkers conceptualized was juridical power. It describes the power of law over the population i.e., banning of certain actions and the threat of violence if those rules are not followed. These enlightenment philosophers were referring to a new type of power which was emerging. The power not of ruling but of governing — of managing grain prices of maximizing profits of foreign trade through mercantilism. To govern has its roots in the Latin ‘ad regendum’ which can best be translated as directing, governing, delimiting, blaming, dominating, governing, guiding, and/or administering. Then slowly of poor relief education health care the disciplining of delinquency the practices of psychiatry of encouraging certain types of medical knowledge of planning and executing epidemic control. In all of these cases a certain type of power is exercised using certain methods by certain groups of people over others and importantly all of this was not the exercising of juridical power not simply the power of the law but the power to produce subjects. The objective of Foucault studies is to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects. Objectification transform human beings into obedient subjects. Power does not necessarily have an effect on people physically necessarily but rather on possible future actions and choices.
Power in this way is an action upon an action. For example, it encourages the teacher to have the power to mark tests, assign grades which employers used to judge potential candidates. The teacher does not hold a gun over the student’s head but the student knows that the power that they do have has an effect on their own future choices and possible actions. Sommetimes institutions like the government police or the military exert their power by physical repressive for example to force and control a crowd with tear gas executions or military occupations. Power, knowledge and the subjectification exists throughout society, and it occurs in innumerable micro-situations dealing with a range of issues, with the cumulative effect of these micro-situations giving rise to a regime of power. The ways in which individuals and institutions exert power on other people and how power affects them is due to its omnipresence, which is arguably one of the most difficult concepts to understand in the social sciences (Clegg & Haugaard, 2009). The concept of power is therefore of central importance in the debate on understanding society (Korpi, 1985) and has many faces that have shaped the contemporary notions of power in social sciences.
Before the advent of the internet, algorithms and big data, studies of governmentality focused on the governing practices of and by the offline individual. In pre-internet governmentality, categories and objectifying measures were typically defined by experts, professionals or scientists, for instance in profiling employees or criminals (Bernard, 2019; Townley, 1998). The advancement of information technological also influenced the development of the concept of power, which is affected by the increasing presence of information technology throughout human life compared to manual and analog collected data such as the census of the population or paper documents for example birth certificates (Koopman, 2019a). A more modern approach are social security numbers, which are created and are assigned by the government. The power behind the computer monitor and behind the methods of intercepting, scanning, and sorting data is even more anonymous and elusive. Ongoing digitization in terms of information accumulation bring about two distinct differences. First, data accumulation occurs without direct conversation with the subject, the individual. Second, the subject may not even know how this information is used, by whom it is used, and whether and where clusters of this data are formed.
It fuses an extreme visibility with extreme distance (Pinchevski, 2016). It is difficult to find out, for example, whether it is government bodies or commercial companies that are investing in the processing of data; nobody does in fact know if, when, and how the government is surveilling. It can be said that the information power is completely anonymous because of the aforementioned difficulty. Power appears to be increasingly dispersed (Jensen et al., 2014; Tatham & Bauer, 2014) and unobtrusive as related technology becomes more flexible and ever smaller, opaque, and unseen all at once. Power and knowledge are now no longer just present. Rather, it occurs through systematic accumulation, categorization, and interpretation of a large amount of available data, the footprints in cyberspace, often referred to as big data (Kumar et al., 2014; Mauro, et al., 2014; Riahi, Y., & Riahi, S., 2018; Taylor-Sakyi, 2016). These are the individual aspirations, dispositions, or wishes that are derived from the behaviour of the crowd (Amoore, 2011; Bandura & Locke, 2003). The individual profile, composed of behavioral patterns, is the result of consulting a vast number of behaviours, or more specifically, seeking and scanning a vast number of digital traces that individual actions and decisions leave behind in cyberspace (Lipson, 2013; Rai, 2012; Reigeluth, 2014) to understand the population better. Similar to the traditional concepts and ingredients of power, it is in the interest of authority to preserve sovereignty and focus on the individual by applying techniques to understand the society.
Scholars from with different backgrounds are increasingly investigating how modes of power are shifting in consequence of the digitally-mediated communications revolution. Power in that sense developed from brutal force from constraining the body in terms of disciplinary society to constraining the soul in terms of post-industrial digital society of today. The power behind the computer monitor and behind the methods of intercepting, scanning and sorting data is even more anonymous and elusive. Man and machine swtich roles. It is difficult to find out, for example, whether it is government bodies or commercial companies that are investing in the processing of data; we do in fact not know if and when they are watching. It can be said that the information power is completely anonymous because of the aforementioned. The human freedom and our dignity becomes abolished by a machanic apparatus to which the subject unwittingly becomes enslaved from a “threat of visibility” to a “threat of invisibility” (Cooper 2019).
Therefore, the question how power is mutating becomes an important one. Power appears to be increasingly dispersed and unobtrusive as related technology becomes more flexible and ever smaller, opaque and unseen all at once (Jensen et al., 2014; Tatham & Bauer, 2014). Power is now no longer just present. Rather, it occurs through systematic accumulation, categorisation and interpretation of a large amount of available data, the footprints in cyberspace, often referred to as Big Data (Kumar, et al., 2014; Mauro et al., 2014; Riahi, Y., & Riahi, S., 2018; Taylor-Sakyi, 2016). These are the individual aspirations, dispositions or wishes that are derived from the behaviour of the crowd (Amoore, 2011; Bandura & Locke, 2003).
The individual profile, composed of behavioural patterns, is the result of consulting a vast number of behaviours, or more specifically, seeking and scanning a vast number of digital traces that individual actions and decisions leave behind in cyberspace (Lipson, 2003; Rai, 2012; Reigeluth, 2014). Power becomes increasingly defined by the algorithm in where Algorithmic governmentality becomes a form of governance dependent on the data. This bears a shepherdic signature insofar as it disregards and impedes our species free will, liberty and autonomy. Algorithmic governance destabilizes the liberty and autonomy of the human subject. An identifiable, highly transparent population increasingly contained by a secretive governance that functions across private-public/domestic/foreign divisions is the negation of liberal governance. Algorithmic governmentality, is characterized by the enormous speed of the data collected. Speed shapes the conditions of human reflexity as shown in studies of cognitive assemblages (Hayles, 2016a, 2016b). In High-Frequency Trading (HFT) for instance, algorithms execute innumerable trades before the human trader even notice and can respond (Beverungen and Lange, 2018). In a situation where everything is reduced to procedures driven by algorithms and machines at high speed, there is a new form of subjection. Lazzarato (2014) and Deleuze and Guattari (1987) pinpointed this phenomenon as “machinic enslavement”. Similar to the traditional concepts and ingredients of power, it is in the interest of authority to preserve sovereignty and focus on the individual by applying techniques within the means of psycho-politics. The essence of power moves as a compilation of political intelligence, which is political because it discards the population as the subject of data before any exchange of communication occurs (Koopman, 2019b). Subjects today discussed under labels like surveillance capitalism or the network society is nothing new; their foundations were laid a century ago.
For example, study of populations already leads to a massive quantity of data that are seldom effective in controlling or altering the populations studied in the ways intended. The scale and efficiency of data collection is only possible due to digitalization. The result is that social actors can now use more data, can use it in targeted ways and in almost real-time. The difference to info-power as such is that in this case the massive amount of data can be digitally collected, clustered, analysed and visualized helping to objectify and understand the subject, the citizen, better through millions of data traces. To reiterate, this often happens to an unknowing subject. The computer networks that manipulate and transmit information become more powerful each year (Asaolu, 2006). This progress has continued at a pace that information has become the key international “currency”; it has become too valuable for free dissemination.
This essay argues that a new politics is underway: politics of privacy versus the identifiability of populations, on the one hand, and transparency versus government secrecy, on the other. An imbalance regarding how transparency and (in)visibility are distributed amongst humans and machines. Byung-Chul Han, contends that the culture of social media creates a world in which ‘Everything must become visible’ (Han 2017). Collecting all the data of the internet user represents the importance of contemporary surveillance studies. Governments have analysed huge amounts of global signal data from fibre optic cables and directly from the servers of major Internet service providers and telecommunications companies. One reason so much is at stake in information policy is that more than just information is at stake (Becerril, 2018; Enders, 2018; Kadriu, 2013; Schüritz et al, 2017). The outcome in terms of power and surveillance of this concept is the gradual, slight, imperceptible change in your own behavior and perception. The aforementioned perfectly supports the theory of the Panopticon but in the digital world (Manokha, 2018; Mathew, 2019; Seele, 2016). The inmate does not even know if they are being watched. It is to psychologically figure out how to manipulate the user as fast as possible. Technology as a governmental tool has the ability to create mass chaos, incivility, and distrust in each other (Baskerville, & Smithson, 1995; Brey, 2018). Studies have shown that it leads to loneliness (Yavichet et al., 2019), alienation, polarization (Lee, 2016), election hacking (Alcott & Gentzkow, 2017; Garrett, 2019), populism (Gerbaudo, 2018) and distraction. In psychology, this is defined as positive intermittent reinforcement. It is an unconscious habit which is implanted in users so that the users are programmed without realizing it at a deeper level (emotions, gamification (Sailer et al., 2017). This is a totally new dimension of power and influence.
The advancements in information technology dramatically changes the concept of governmentality. It is important for the state to understand the impact of evolved information technologies i.e., internet and blockchain technology, as the grounds for neoliberalism is understood as a specific political reason and an assembly of techniques that bear on the conduct of individuals in private and social realms and carve out public policies for the state in accordance with the aim of the ‘economization’ of all aspects of life (Denbow, 2018; Gürkan, 2018). Governmentality refers to set of institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections or even tactics which permit the exercise of power over a population. Therefore, fiscal policies and discourses are also the components of the broader neoliberal-framed policies and tools that disseminate certain norms and habits of thought all over the society.
Public finance is a strategic instrument of the state (Oates, 1968; Vargas & Restrepo, 2019), as part of the ‘politics of truth’ (Foucault, 2001c; Thompson, 1974). In this context, public finance has become a strategic tool and an instrument not only as the essential part of austerity policies after the 2008 crisis to stabilize the dynamics of financial accumulation and the securing profits but also for imposing and spreading neoliberal norms, disciplinary power, and individualization over the society at large to socialize the debt and debt burden. Public finance as the concrete political relation between the state and society is seen to be one of the essential dispositifs in the constitution and dissemination of neoliberalism throughout its entire stages over the past forty years. It is urgent to develop multidisciplinary insights and perspectives that explain the relationship between neoliberalism, public finance and financialization with their range of effects on the state, society and individuals. The emphasis of Dardot and Laval (2013) on the links between the state finance, financialization, and neoliberal subjectivity is of great importance to recognize the biopolitical function of public finance in the age of neoliberal governmentality. In this sense, the state by employing its fiscal mechanism as neoliberal technology plays a strategic role in the manufacturing of neoliberal subjectivities (Lemoine, 2020; Türken et al., 2016). Just as technology, money and payment system have been interlinked from the earliest days of human civilization whereas technology has reshaped money and payment systems to an extent and at a speed never before seen (Arner, 2020; Bank für Internationalen Zahlungsausgleich & Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures, 2016).
Currency is the fundamental economic technology that makes promises credible among actors within and across societies. This has been the defining feature that unifies highly different types of currencies that have emerged through human history. Ranging from shells to various metals, and eventually to today’s paper currencies, money has taken a wide variety of physical forms. Each of the forms of money have evolved to meet changing human needs surrounding the core functions of currencies. In this respect, currencies are not only instruments that facilitate economic activity but also currency is a technology of money that make commitments between actors credible. In 1988, Foreign Affairs published an article entitled “Technology and Sovereignty” that foreshadowed the radical overhaul of the international monetary and financial system by technological innovation (Wrinston, 1988). Monetary hegemony refers primarily to the exercise of hegemony in the monetary sphere (Cohen, 1977; Kindleberger, 1973; Norrlof, 2014). Even in this context, hegemony is a multifaceted phenomenon that has various aspects roughly corresponding to the fundamental functions of money: a currency is hegemonic when it is used simultaneously and internationally as a unit of account, as a means of settlement, and as a reserve asset. It is possible to frame payments systems in both branches of the discipline. In particular, the ability to trace the global payments network allows the government to collect information that can be used in various fields of defensive economics (Farrell & Newman, 2019a, 2019b). Furthermore, the analysis of big data acquired from the payments system allows the identification of strategic economic objectives and to trace with extreme precision the methods of supplying goods and commodities.
Cryptocurrencies, e.g., Bitcoin a peer-to-peer electronic cash system (Nakamoto, 2008), is a system in which the storage and transfer of funds is performed not through a network protected by a centralized banking system, but over the internet by a decentralized ledger technology or blockchain, that relies on cryptography to ensure privacy and security (European Union & Agency for Network and Information Security, 2016; Zhang et al., 2019). The truly ground breaking potential of cryptocurrencies is to combine the advantages of two forms of money that have remained hitherto separate: electronic money and cash. Over the years Bitcoin technology evolved due to its wider adoption so that even governments developed interest in this technology and potentially replace their financial systems that are based on cash money to digital money due to several advantages such as data traceability. An attribute which is the main point of concern and ultimately the success of surveillance capitalism.
A concept developed by scholar Shoshana Zuboff. “Google knows far more about its population than they know about themselves” (Zuboff 2015). Zuboff underscores how the process of not only rendering human lives transparent to high-tech firms but also of rendering the latter opaque to the former unfolds without the consent of the digital herd. Populations become now targets of data extraction. Han stated that populations bare themselves of their free will whereas the digital society of control makes intensive use of freedom only possible to voluntary self-illumination. The perceived freedom turns out to be a form of control. Just like the internet developed ways of payments have transformed dramatically with the development of technology. Payment methods changed from cash payments to card payments, and then electronic payments appeared (Dennehy & Sammon, 2015). The next logical development is the adoption of state-issued cryptocurrencies. While digital currencies constitute a familiar intersection of economics and politics, political economy scholarship has not yet rigorously engaged with the full ecosystem of digital currencies power is expected to increase when issuing CBDC (Engert & Fung, 2017; Larue, et al, 2020). This is because CBDCs will be stored in digital wallets with apps that can be downloaded by end users from digital payment services sites that are sponsored by banks or other authorized intermediaries. Presumably, the digital wallet apps would have to conform to technical standards and specifications laid down by the sovereign government. Digital currencies differ from physical currencies due to the loss of the anonymity of holding and transacting in bank notes and coins (Boshkov, 2019; Frei & Huang, 2020; Rose, 2015).
The movement of digital currencies in and out of digital wallets will leave electronic footprints that can be traced, monitored, and even controlled, either indirectly through banks or directly by the issuing institution. For example, money can have an expiration defined by code of the issuer because authorities are opting to drive consumption in an economy.
Digital currencies can be customized for other purposes (Elsden et al., 2019; Weber & Staples, 2021; Westermeier, 2020). The ability to monitor digital currency transactions, probably in real time, will greatly help authorities deal with crimes like financial fraud, money laundering, and financing terrorism, as well as improve the overall efficacy of monetary policy operations. However, it is also obvious that the availability of digital personal financial data will significantly strengthen any social credit monitoring system, which is used to monitor and control the behavior of the population (Bach et al., 2006; Wong & Dobson, 2019). My concluding argument is therefore that the shepherdic apparatus subjacent operating in the digital sphere may involve new ways of algorithmic governmentality.
These observations beg an important question. How does the adoption of algorithmic driven digital technology shape power techniques in the future? I argue that answer to the question in an analysis of (1) how algorithmic technology form part of techniques in governing practices (2) how the space of algorithmic anthropometry plays a role. This is a conceptual article in which illustrations of the use of these technologies are considered rich empirical reference points for understand the variety of ways in which people experience them. This research does not attempt a full-blown empirical analysis, however, but instead wish to create a critical opening that future and more exhaustive empirical research can delve more systematically into.
The Releance of Data in Human Science
The history of data collection dates back to ancient civilizations, where data was recorded on various forms of media such as clay tablets, parchment, and papyrus. These early forms of data collection were used primarily for record-keeping purposes, such as tracking trade and taxes. The evolution of data collection gained momentum during the Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries, as new technologies allowed for the efficient collection and analysis of data. The invention of the punched card in the early 19th century marked a significant milestone in the development of data collection. The punched card was used to store data on mechanical tabulating machines, which were used to perform calculations and generate reports.
In the eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries in which a range of technologies were developed for the organization, transformation, display, storage and dissemination of information (Headrick, 2000). Historian Gérard Noiriel has investigated a project in 1820 by the French ministry of justice surveying the enactment of 1792 law requiring public officials to keep registers of vital events (birth, marriages and deaths) for all inhabitants (Noiriel, 2002)
He concludes there was ‘there was nowhere that the registers were being correctly maintained’ (ibid.) political scientist James Scott notes about another such project in 1791, the revolutionary state in France required all prefectures to furnish the ‘name, age birthplace, residence, profession and other means of subsistence of all citizens living in its territory’ only three of 36’000 communes replied. Schemes of information identity in these earlier centuries tended more towards future vision than present actualities. Ian Hacking describes a 1685 proposal by G.W. Leibniz for fity-six category evaluation of state and its population. Who are you, with whom I have to deal? (Bentham, 1838).
This query poses innumerable problems in the past. Proper names of individuals are upon so irregular footing leading to common problems as two persons sharing a single name. It is a governmental task to administer the registration of unique names. Several initiatives tried to overcome such problem such as an attempt known among English sailors, of printing their family and Christian names upon their wrists, in well-formed and indelible characters (Bentham, 1838).
The proposal was that of identification tattoos, which should have become universal (Bentham, 1838). Identification is important for the state, e.g., essential for the work of the police. Every citizen must be readily identifiable wherever necessary, as this or that particular person (Fichte et al., 2000). In 1878 a lawyer in England noted that the country had no laws in governing names (Caplan & Torpey, 2001). In many countries the situation on the ground was even worse than that on the books.
The German idealist Fichte suggested that every citizen must always carry an identity card with him issued by the nearest authority and containing a precise description of his person applying to everyone, regardless of class or rank. The universal identity registration at the fine-grained level of individuality could be imagined at the end of the eighteenth century, and even debated over the course of the nineteenth but they would not be operationalized in anything approaching a universal fashion until the first decade of the twentieth. Our data today is a part of who we are. Our names may not be inked onto our flesh, but we are for pragmatic purposes tattooed by an informational identity that we also regularly carry on our persons in the form of identity cards. Our now flourishing projects of information as a technical machinery for manufacturing identity have a deep legacy in modernity. They are realization of old dreams. Perhaps there is such great interest in these matters because they represent three great promises of our contemporary information milieu. One is the promise of complete surveillance and inescapable data capture, another is that of the computability of the deepest interiorities of human mental and emotional life and third is the utopic dream of a society that would transcend divisive racial and ethnic differences.
The list of databases we populate is long, growing and familiar: search engine and web browsing histories, social media registers, marketing and advertising profiles, predictive police analytics and lists of terror suspects. Then there are the ever-multiplying legacy systems of health records, education records, financial records, insurance profiles and our government records, all supplemented by our birth and death certificates. The most important use of creating data through registration of births and death are (i) Knowledge of the movement of population (demographic uses); (ii) protection of the lives and health of the people (sanitary uses); and (iii) protection of the rights of the individual and of the community (legal use) (Wilbur, 1897). Each of these reasons can be conceptualized in terms of how birth registration makes persons legible (J. C. Scott, 2020).
Data is an important aspect of the state, as an example in 1912 the United States did not know how many babies were born every year (Ethel M. Watters, 1924).
We were formatted into data of uncountably many kinds: birth certificates, psychological assessments, education records, financial profiles, the production of a sizable racialized data apparatus and so much other informational accoutrement that we have for so long now simply taken for granted. These century-old formats remain with us today. They persist in the latest information technologies that, new as they are, depend on older techniques for their deepest infrastructure. We have recently been formatted once again. That is why the history of our data in combination with political science matters so much today. We are not as easily separated from this data as we like to think. Our data does not simply show who we were before information systems were created. Rather, our data is an essential part of who we are. Data are active participants in our development. The formats that structure the data help to tell us who we are. We are subjects to vast amounts of personal data that others attach to us and that we in turn regularly reattach to ourselves. These data points have become important to who we are. More precisely, they are important to who we have become.
To understand their importance, consider the following hypothetical scenario of a kind of nightmare that could only come to pass in a milieu such as ours. What would it be like to permanently lose access to all your data all at once? Beyond just simple informational identity theft or misplaced data, envision a scenario of permanent personal data deletion. What would you do if you somehow became permanently detached from all your personal data? What could you do if you somehow became permanently unrepresentable by all data system? No driver license, no passport, no bank account number, no medical insurance card, no health records and at the bottom of them all, no registered certificate of birth? What would you make yourself? What could others make of you? What would the bureaucracy be able to do when you petition it with your plight, given the fact that no bureaucracy can address a subject as other than their information? The bureaucrats like your family members, could surely recall your visage and your voice but they would have no way of addressing you from one day to the next, of recording you in their databases, of numbering or naming you, and so no way at all to deal with you on anything approaching a consistent basis. You could not even receive special support through special court orders because, completely unrepresentable as information, you would have no way of being registered into a court, for that would require rendering you into the data from which you been detached. This nightmarish scenario helps us recognize that the loss of one’s informational selfhood would entirely debilitate our sense of self today, even if it would leave intact other aspects of who we are. Our information is today so deeply woven into who we are that were we to be deprived of it, we could no longer be the persons we once so effortlessly were. Ian Hacking’s writing of the nineteenth century, describes practices and institutions that “brought new kind of man into being, the man whose essence was plotted by thousand numbers” (Hacking, 1990). Vismann emphasizes the confessional vectors of Foucault’s genealogy of sexuality, then Hacking emphasizes its statistical vectors (Foucault, 1990)
The story told by all three of these philosopher-historians concerns the formation in the nineteen century of what Foucault’s work describes as biopolitical and disciplinary subjectivity. If the confessing and statistical subjects were key figures of the nineteenth century, then the early twentieth century gave rise to then — new subjects of information that continue to be presented to us today as still new. A decisive wight was tipped in those first decades of the twentieth century. Information began to precede the person. It became possible of information to draw up persons as if out of nowhere. We became coddled from cradle to coffin by so many check boxes on so many scraps of paper. We inauguration of a lifelong paper trail that would outlive even the eventualities of our death certificates. We can see that what gets formatted by data technologies is not just data, but also subjects of data, or informational persons. My arguments in this research contribute to a growing scholarly conversation about documentary identification and registration (Breckenridge et al., 2012).
Other data points on their first sight do not appear to be important information. For instance, length or weight appear more innocent but even those that appear innocent are not therefore neutral. These forms tethered their infantile subjects to the formats they exhibit. They made the persons or babies become accessible in terms of just those formats. These seemingly trivial details are in reality anything but inconsequential. Debates today over storage capacity are conducted in the lingua franca of “gigabytes and terabytes” rather than “inches thick,” and yet the square footage of server farms is just as important a feature of systems design today as was linear footage of shelving capacity for birth registration one hundred years ago. From one information system to the next, and across each, we are inscribed, processed, and reproduced as subjects of data or what is called information persons. The extent to which we informational persons are so widely formatted into our data suggests the high stakes of our datafication and its concomitant politics of information. Information culture can go back to earlier moments in a way that shows how social media, mass surveillance and their informational underpinnings are anything but radically novel inventions of the past two or three decades.
Data collection is a vital aspect of modern society as it provides a means to quantify, evaluate, and understand complex phenomena. Accurate data collection is crucial in guiding decision-making processes in both the public and private sector. In particular, the ability to collect and analyze data has a profound impact on the fields of medicine, psychology, economics, and social sciences. In the field of medicine, data collection and analysis are crucial in developing treatments and cures for various diseases. For example, data from clinical trials can provide valuable information about the efficacy and safety of new drugs and medical devices.
In psychology, data collection is used to study human behavior and the underlying cognitive processes. By collecting data through experiments, researchers can gain insights into human emotions, perceptions, and motivations. Data collection also plays a critical role in economics. For instance, data on consumer spending, inflation, and employment can be used to evaluate the state of the economy and make informed decisions on monetary and fiscal policy. In the social sciences, data collection is used to study human societies and to understand patterns and relationships in areas such as demographics, culture, and social behavior. In conclusion, the collection of data is an essential component of scientific inquiry and has a significant impact on society as a whole. Through data collection, researchers and policymakers can gain a deeper understanding of complex phenomena and use this information to make informed decisions that improve people’s lives.
Furthermore, data collection helps to monitor and assess the progress of society in terms of sustainable development and social progress. For example, data on poverty, education, health, and human rights can be collected and analyzed to track progress towards meeting the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. This data can also be used to identify areas that need improvement and to allocate resources more effectively. In addition, data collection plays a key role in enhancing transparency and accountability. By collecting and making data publicly available, organizations and governments can demonstrate their commitment to transparency and accountability. This can lead to increased trust from the public and stakeholders, which can in turn enhance the effectiveness of policies and programs. Finally, data collection is also important for scientific innovation. Accurate and reliable data can be used to develop new theories and to test existing ones. By collecting data from various sources and using innovative methods of analysis, researchers can gain new insights and develop new solutions to complex problems.
In conclusion, data collection is a critical aspect of modern society, providing a foundation for scientific inquiry, decision-making, and progress. Whether in the fields of medicine, psychology, economics, or social sciences, data collection is essential for understanding complex phenomena and making informed decisions that benefit society. In recent decades, the widespread availability of digital technologies has further transformed data collection. The widespread use of the Internet, mobile devices, and cloud computing has enabled the collection of data from a diverse range of sources, such as social media, online surveys, and sensors. This has led to the development of big data, which refers to the collection and analysis of large and complex data sets.
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Power is an ambiguous concept. In physics power is defined as the transfer of energy or the potential to transfer energy (Dowding 2012; Halliday et al., 2011). Often, the sun is given as an example — “The sun has enough power to…”. Power is also often described as the force of gravity on a rock or the waterfall when generating hydroelectric energy. Social and political power is thought of in a similar way. The power to stop someone from doing something. For example, the police have the power to stop a speeding car. In the political social sciences, power is a term often described as the ability to influence the behaviour (or conduct) of others. Something that can be understood as elite rule over powerless populations (Lukes, 2004). The English term “power” comprises the two German words “Herrschaft” and “Macht”, which can best be translated as “authority” and “compulsion” (Weber et al., 2013). China and its culture have traditionally been connected to philosophy power in Mandarin is best translated as 政 politics, 治 rule, 势 potential, 力 force. The concept of power varies not only in its translation, but also in the way certain countries exercise power. To visualize this thought, it can be imagined like the following:
Power exists when A exercises power over B meaning A affects B in a manner contrary to B’s interests’ (ibid.). Influence exists when A can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do. In each situation, A participates in decisions and thereby adversely affects B (Bachrach & Morton, 1962; Stone, 2006). In fact, power is being exercised when A is involved in the decision-making that affects B. However, power is also exercised when A devotes his energy to the creation or strengthening of social and political values and institutional practices that may or may not limit the scope of the political process to the public discussion of only comparatively harmless issues. This shows that power is much more than the princely right of the sword (Coleman & Grove, 2009). It is the power to prevent people, to whatever degree, from having grievances by shaping their perceptions, cognitions and preferences in such a way that they accept their role in the existing order of things. When taking a look at the policy of the United States of America on extraordinary rendition (i.e., the state-sponsored abduction and/or extrajudicial transfer of a person from one country to another) certain forces of violence and torture are exercised on the human body here that are unimaginable in other societies.
This shows that power in a society can either be tyranny, if power is exercised over people so that they have no liberty, or because its members have limited power to do anything they want to do. Therefore, this research focuses on the “power over someone or something” in a neutral way. That means how power can be productive and suppressive at the same time like the waterfall on a rock rather than “the power to”, for example stopping someone doing something. Power and knowledge become not only but also useful in disciplinary institutions such as schools, psychiatric hospitals, and prisons. Institutions that disseminate knowledge by expanding this knowledge it enables power systems, monitor and ultimately nurture the psyche of the population, so the concept of power should be taken quite seriously. Literally, institutions that create and produce knowledge also have great power (Escobar, 1984; Hook, 2007). Knowledge is power essentially means that you have to gain the knowledge of the dominant discourse within a social group to understand the dynamics of the group and to fit into that social group. In an attempt to understand the root of this idea in relations to the power theory, Foucault’s terminology of “technology” is derived from the French synonym “technique” — which in this case means that it does not translate to machines in the sense of technical technology in a sense of a tools, but describes methods and procedures for controlling human beings.
Technologies of government are the actual mechanism through which authorities whether public or private, seek to shape the conduct and thoughts of others to achieve the desired objectives. It refers to the way people are instructed to govern themselves through the conduct of the people. This in other words means a phenomenon namely the set of mechanism through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy of a general strategy of power. The origins of this strategy go back to the era of Enlightenment starting in the 17th century. Social contract theorists e.g., Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau all discussed the justifications for and limits of government of why and when rulers should have power over us. Hobbes for example argued that the sovereign, the king or the queen, had power because if no one ruled anarchy would ray but the type of power these thinkers conceptualized was juridical power. It describes the power of law over the population i.e., banning of certain actions and the threat of violence if those rules are not followed. These enlightenment philosophers were referring to a new type of power which was emerging. The power not of ruling but of governing — of managing grain prices of maximizing profits of foreign trade through mercantilism. To govern has its roots in the Latin ‘ad regendum’ which can best be translated as directing, governing, delimiting, blaming, dominating, governing, guiding, and/or administering. Then slowly of poor relief education health care the disciplining of delinquency the practices of psychiatry of encouraging certain types of medical knowledge of planning and executing epidemic control. In all of these cases a certain type of power is exercised using certain methods by certain groups of people over others and importantly all of this was not the exercising of juridical power not simply the power of the law but the power to produce subjects. The objective of Foucault studies is to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects. Objectification transform human beings into obedient subjects. Power does not necessarily have an effect on people physically necessarily but rather on possible future actions and choices.
Power in this way is an action upon an action. For example, it encourages the teacher to have the power to mark tests, assign grades which employers used to judge potential candidates. The teacher does not hold a gun over the student’s head but the student knows that the power that they do have has an effect on their own future choices and possible actions. Sommetimes institutions like the government police or the military exert their power by physical repressive for example to force and control a crowd with tear gas executions or military occupations. Power, knowledge and the subjectification exists throughout society, and it occurs in innumerable micro-situations dealing with a range of issues, with the cumulative effect of these micro-situations giving rise to a regime of power. The ways in which individuals and institutions exert power on other people and how power affects them is due to its omnipresence, which is arguably one of the most difficult concepts to understand in the social sciences (Clegg & Haugaard, 2009). The concept of power is therefore of central importance in the debate on understanding society (Korpi, 1985) and has many faces that have shaped the contemporary notions of power in social sciences.
Before the advent of the internet, algorithms and big data, studies of governmentality focused on the governing practices of and by the offline individual. In pre-internet governmentality, categories and objectifying measures were typically defined by experts, professionals or scientists, for instance in profiling employees or criminals (Bernard, 2019; Townley, 1998). The advancement of information technological also influenced the development of the concept of power, which is affected by the increasing presence of information technology throughout human life compared to manual and analog collected data such as the census of the population or paper documents for example birth certificates (Koopman, 2019a). A more modern approach are social security numbers, which are created and are assigned by the government. The power behind the computer monitor and behind the methods of intercepting, scanning, and sorting data is even more anonymous and elusive. Ongoing digitization in terms of information accumulation bring about two distinct differences. First, data accumulation occurs without direct conversation with the subject, the individual. Second, the subject may not even know how this information is used, by whom it is used, and whether and where clusters of this data are formed.
It fuses an extreme visibility with extreme distance (Pinchevski, 2016). It is difficult to find out, for example, whether it is government bodies or commercial companies that are investing in the processing of data; nobody does in fact know if, when, and how the government is surveilling. It can be said that the information power is completely anonymous because of the aforementioned difficulty. Power appears to be increasingly dispersed (Jensen et al., 2014; Tatham & Bauer, 2014) and unobtrusive as related technology becomes more flexible and ever smaller, opaque, and unseen all at once. Power and knowledge are now no longer just present. Rather, it occurs through systematic accumulation, categorization, and interpretation of a large amount of available data, the footprints in cyberspace, often referred to as big data (Kumar et al., 2014; Mauro, et al., 2014; Riahi, Y., & Riahi, S., 2018; Taylor-Sakyi, 2016). These are the individual aspirations, dispositions, or wishes that are derived from the behaviour of the crowd (Amoore, 2011; Bandura & Locke, 2003). The individual profile, composed of behavioral patterns, is the result of consulting a vast number of behaviours, or more specifically, seeking and scanning a vast number of digital traces that individual actions and decisions leave behind in cyberspace (Lipson, 2013; Rai, 2012; Reigeluth, 2014) to understand the population better. Similar to the traditional concepts and ingredients of power, it is in the interest of authority to preserve sovereignty and focus on the individual by applying techniques to understand the society.
Scholars from with different backgrounds are increasingly investigating how modes of power are shifting in consequence of the digitally-mediated communications revolution. Power in that sense developed from brutal force from constraining the body in terms of disciplinary society to constraining the soul in terms of post-industrial digital society of today. The power behind the computer monitor and behind the methods of intercepting, scanning and sorting data is even more anonymous and elusive. Man and machine swtich roles. It is difficult to find out, for example, whether it is government bodies or commercial companies that are investing in the processing of data; we do in fact not know if and when they are watching. It can be said that the information power is completely anonymous because of the aforementioned. The human freedom and our dignity becomes abolished by a machanic apparatus to which the subject unwittingly becomes enslaved from a “threat of visibility” to a “threat of invisibility” (Cooper 2019).
Therefore, the question how power is mutating becomes an important one. Power appears to be increasingly dispersed and unobtrusive as related technology becomes more flexible and ever smaller, opaque and unseen all at once (Jensen et al., 2014; Tatham & Bauer, 2014). Power is now no longer just present. Rather, it occurs through systematic accumulation, categorisation and interpretation of a large amount of available data, the footprints in cyberspace, often referred to as Big Data (Kumar, et al., 2014; Mauro et al., 2014; Riahi, Y., & Riahi, S., 2018; Taylor-Sakyi, 2016). These are the individual aspirations, dispositions or wishes that are derived from the behaviour of the crowd (Amoore, 2011; Bandura & Locke, 2003).
The individual profile, composed of behavioural patterns, is the result of consulting a vast number of behaviours, or more specifically, seeking and scanning a vast number of digital traces that individual actions and decisions leave behind in cyberspace (Lipson, 2003; Rai, 2012; Reigeluth, 2014). Power becomes increasingly defined by the algorithm in where Algorithmic governmentality becomes a form of governance dependent on the data. This bears a shepherdic signature insofar as it disregards and impedes our species free will, liberty and autonomy. Algorithmic governance destabilizes the liberty and autonomy of the human subject. An identifiable, highly transparent population increasingly contained by a secretive governance that functions across private-public/domestic/foreign divisions is the negation of liberal governance. Algorithmic governmentality, is characterized by the enormous speed of the data collected. Speed shapes the conditions of human reflexity as shown in studies of cognitive assemblages (Hayles, 2016a, 2016b). In High-Frequency Trading (HFT) for instance, algorithms execute innumerable trades before the human trader even notice and can respond (Beverungen and Lange, 2018). In a situation where everything is reduced to procedures driven by algorithms and machines at high speed, there is a new form of subjection. Lazzarato (2014) and Deleuze and Guattari (1987) pinpointed this phenomenon as “machinic enslavement”. Similar to the traditional concepts and ingredients of power, it is in the interest of authority to preserve sovereignty and focus on the individual by applying techniques within the means of psycho-politics. The essence of power moves as a compilation of political intelligence, which is political because it discards the population as the subject of data before any exchange of communication occurs (Koopman, 2019b). Subjects today discussed under labels like surveillance capitalism or the network society is nothing new; their foundations were laid a century ago.
For example, study of populations already leads to a massive quantity of data that are seldom effective in controlling or altering the populations studied in the ways intended. The scale and efficiency of data collection is only possible due to digitalization. The result is that social actors can now use more data, can use it in targeted ways and in almost real-time. The difference to info-power as such is that in this case the massive amount of data can be digitally collected, clustered, analysed and visualized helping to objectify and understand the subject, the citizen, better through millions of data traces. To reiterate, this often happens to an unknowing subject. The computer networks that manipulate and transmit information become more powerful each year (Asaolu, 2006). This progress has continued at a pace that information has become the key international “currency”; it has become too valuable for free dissemination.
This essay argues that a new politics is underway: politics of privacy versus the identifiability of populations, on the one hand, and transparency versus government secrecy, on the other. An imbalance regarding how transparency and (in)visibility are distributed amongst humans and machines. Byung-Chul Han, contends that the culture of social media creates a world in which ‘Everything must become visible’ (Han 2017). Collecting all the data of the internet user represents the importance of contemporary surveillance studies. Governments have analysed huge amounts of global signal data from fibre optic cables and directly from the servers of major Internet service providers and telecommunications companies. One reason so much is at stake in information policy is that more than just information is at stake (Becerril, 2018; Enders, 2018; Kadriu, 2013; Schüritz et al, 2017). The outcome in terms of power and surveillance of this concept is the gradual, slight, imperceptible change in your own behavior and perception. The aforementioned perfectly supports the theory of the Panopticon but in the digital world (Manokha, 2018; Mathew, 2019; Seele, 2016). The inmate does not even know if they are being watched. It is to psychologically figure out how to manipulate the user as fast as possible. Technology as a governmental tool has the ability to create mass chaos, incivility, and distrust in each other (Baskerville, & Smithson, 1995; Brey, 2018). Studies have shown that it leads to loneliness (Yavichet et al., 2019), alienation, polarization (Lee, 2016), election hacking (Alcott & Gentzkow, 2017; Garrett, 2019), populism (Gerbaudo, 2018) and distraction. In psychology, this is defined as positive intermittent reinforcement. It is an unconscious habit which is implanted in users so that the users are programmed without realizing it at a deeper level (emotions, gamification (Sailer et al., 2017). This is a totally new dimension of power and influence.
The advancements in information technology dramatically changes the concept of governmentality. It is important for the state to understand the impact of evolved information technologies i.e., internet and blockchain technology, as the grounds for neoliberalism is understood as a specific political reason and an assembly of techniques that bear on the conduct of individuals in private and social realms and carve out public policies for the state in accordance with the aim of the ‘economization’ of all aspects of life (Denbow, 2018; Gürkan, 2018). Governmentality refers to set of institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections or even tactics which permit the exercise of power over a population. Therefore, fiscal policies and discourses are also the components of the broader neoliberal-framed policies and tools that disseminate certain norms and habits of thought all over the society.
Public finance is a strategic instrument of the state (Oates, 1968; Vargas & Restrepo, 2019), as part of the ‘politics of truth’ (Foucault, 2001c; Thompson, 1974). In this context, public finance has become a strategic tool and an instrument not only as the essential part of austerity policies after the 2008 crisis to stabilize the dynamics of financial accumulation and the securing profits but also for imposing and spreading neoliberal norms, disciplinary power, and individualization over the society at large to socialize the debt and debt burden. Public finance as the concrete political relation between the state and society is seen to be one of the essential dispositifs in the constitution and dissemination of neoliberalism throughout its entire stages over the past forty years. It is urgent to develop multidisciplinary insights and perspectives that explain the relationship between neoliberalism, public finance and financialization with their range of effects on the state, society and individuals. The emphasis of Dardot and Laval (2013) on the links between the state finance, financialization, and neoliberal subjectivity is of great importance to recognize the biopolitical function of public finance in the age of neoliberal governmentality. In this sense, the state by employing its fiscal mechanism as neoliberal technology plays a strategic role in the manufacturing of neoliberal subjectivities (Lemoine, 2020; Türken et al., 2016). Just as technology, money and payment system have been interlinked from the earliest days of human civilization whereas technology has reshaped money and payment systems to an extent and at a speed never before seen (Arner, 2020; Bank für Internationalen Zahlungsausgleich & Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures, 2016).
Currency is the fundamental economic technology that makes promises credible among actors within and across societies. This has been the defining feature that unifies highly different types of currencies that have emerged through human history. Ranging from shells to various metals, and eventually to today’s paper currencies, money has taken a wide variety of physical forms. Each of the forms of money have evolved to meet changing human needs surrounding the core functions of currencies. In this respect, currencies are not only instruments that facilitate economic activity but also currency is a technology of money that make commitments between actors credible. In 1988, Foreign Affairs published an article entitled “Technology and Sovereignty” that foreshadowed the radical overhaul of the international monetary and financial system by technological innovation (Wrinston, 1988). Monetary hegemony refers primarily to the exercise of hegemony in the monetary sphere (Cohen, 1977; Kindleberger, 1973; Norrlof, 2014). Even in this context, hegemony is a multifaceted phenomenon that has various aspects roughly corresponding to the fundamental functions of money: a currency is hegemonic when it is used simultaneously and internationally as a unit of account, as a means of settlement, and as a reserve asset. It is possible to frame payments systems in both branches of the discipline. In particular, the ability to trace the global payments network allows the government to collect information that can be used in various fields of defensive economics (Farrell & Newman, 2019a, 2019b). Furthermore, the analysis of big data acquired from the payments system allows the identification of strategic economic objectives and to trace with extreme precision the methods of supplying goods and commodities.
Cryptocurrencies, e.g., Bitcoin a peer-to-peer electronic cash system (Nakamoto, 2008), is a system in which the storage and transfer of funds is performed not through a network protected by a centralized banking system, but over the internet by a decentralized ledger technology or blockchain, that relies on cryptography to ensure privacy and security (European Union & Agency for Network and Information Security, 2016; Zhang et al., 2019). The truly ground breaking potential of cryptocurrencies is to combine the advantages of two forms of money that have remained hitherto separate: electronic money and cash. Over the years Bitcoin technology evolved due to its wider adoption so that even governments developed interest in this technology and potentially replace their financial systems that are based on cash money to digital money due to several advantages such as data traceability. An attribute which is the main point of concern and ultimately the success of surveillance capitalism.
A concept developed by scholar Shoshana Zuboff. “Google knows far more about its population than they know about themselves” (Zuboff 2015). Zuboff underscores how the process of not only rendering human lives transparent to high-tech firms but also of rendering the latter opaque to the former unfolds without the consent of the digital herd. Populations become now targets of data extraction. Han stated that populations bare themselves of their free will whereas the digital society of control makes intensive use of freedom only possible to voluntary self-illumination. The perceived freedom turns out to be a form of control. Just like the internet developed ways of payments have transformed dramatically with the development of technology. Payment methods changed from cash payments to card payments, and then electronic payments appeared (Dennehy & Sammon, 2015). The next logical development is the adoption of state-issued cryptocurrencies. While digital currencies constitute a familiar intersection of economics and politics, political economy scholarship has not yet rigorously engaged with the full ecosystem of digital currencies power is expected to increase when issuing CBDC (Engert & Fung, 2017; Larue, et al, 2020). This is because CBDCs will be stored in digital wallets with apps that can be downloaded by end users from digital payment services sites that are sponsored by banks or other authorized intermediaries. Presumably, the digital wallet apps would have to conform to technical standards and specifications laid down by the sovereign government. Digital currencies differ from physical currencies due to the loss of the anonymity of holding and transacting in bank notes and coins (Boshkov, 2019; Frei & Huang, 2020; Rose, 2015).
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/WBN68ECfIJ0" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>The movement of digital currencies in and out of digital wallets will leave electronic footprints that can be traced, monitored, and even controlled, either indirectly through banks or directly by the issuing institution. For example, money can have an expiration defined by code of the issuer because authorities are opting to drive consumption in an economy.
Digital currencies can be customized for other purposes (Elsden et al., 2019; Weber & Staples, 2021; Westermeier, 2020). The ability to monitor digital currency transactions, probably in real time, will greatly help authorities deal with crimes like financial fraud, money laundering, and financing terrorism, as well as improve the overall efficacy of monetary policy operations. However, it is also obvious that the availability of digital personal financial data will significantly strengthen any social credit monitoring system, which is used to monitor and control the behavior of the population (Bach et al., 2006; Wong & Dobson, 2019). My concluding argument is therefore that the shepherdic apparatus subjacent operating in the digital sphere may involve new ways of algorithmic governmentality.
These observations beg an important question. How does the adoption of algorithmic driven digital technology shape power techniques in the future? I argue that answer to the question in an analysis of (1) how algorithmic technology form part of techniques in governing practices (2) how the space of algorithmic anthropometry plays a role. This is a conceptual article in which illustrations of the use of these technologies are considered rich empirical reference points for understand the variety of ways in which people experience them. This research does not attempt a full-blown empirical analysis, however, but instead wish to create a critical opening that future and more exhaustive empirical research can delve more systematically into.
The Releance of Data in Human Science
The history of data collection dates back to ancient civilizations, where data was recorded on various forms of media such as clay tablets, parchment, and papyrus. These early forms of data collection were used primarily for record-keeping purposes, such as tracking trade and taxes. The evolution of data collection gained momentum during the Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries, as new technologies allowed for the efficient collection and analysis of data. The invention of the punched card in the early 19th century marked a significant milestone in the development of data collection. The punched card was used to store data on mechanical tabulating machines, which were used to perform calculations and generate reports.
In the eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries in which a range of technologies were developed for the organization, transformation, display, storage and dissemination of information (Headrick, 2000). Historian Gérard Noiriel has investigated a project in 1820 by the French ministry of justice surveying the enactment of 1792 law requiring public officials to keep registers of vital events (birth, marriages and deaths) for all inhabitants (Noiriel, 2002)
He concludes there was ‘there was nowhere that the registers were being correctly maintained’ (ibid.) political scientist James Scott notes about another such project in 1791, the revolutionary state in France required all prefectures to furnish the ‘name, age birthplace, residence, profession and other means of subsistence of all citizens living in its territory’ only three of 36’000 communes replied. Schemes of information identity in these earlier centuries tended more towards future vision than present actualities. Ian Hacking describes a 1685 proposal by G.W. Leibniz for fity-six category evaluation of state and its population. Who are you, with whom I have to deal? (Bentham, 1838).
This query poses innumerable problems in the past. Proper names of individuals are upon so irregular footing leading to common problems as two persons sharing a single name. It is a governmental task to administer the registration of unique names. Several initiatives tried to overcome such problem such as an attempt known among English sailors, of printing their family and Christian names upon their wrists, in well-formed and indelible characters (Bentham, 1838).
The proposal was that of identification tattoos, which should have become universal (Bentham, 1838). Identification is important for the state, e.g., essential for the work of the police. Every citizen must be readily identifiable wherever necessary, as this or that particular person (Fichte et al., 2000). In 1878 a lawyer in England noted that the country had no laws in governing names (Caplan & Torpey, 2001). In many countries the situation on the ground was even worse than that on the books.
The German idealist Fichte suggested that every citizen must always carry an identity card with him issued by the nearest authority and containing a precise description of his person applying to everyone, regardless of class or rank. The universal identity registration at the fine-grained level of individuality could be imagined at the end of the eighteenth century, and even debated over the course of the nineteenth but they would not be operationalized in anything approaching a universal fashion until the first decade of the twentieth. Our data today is a part of who we are. Our names may not be inked onto our flesh, but we are for pragmatic purposes tattooed by an informational identity that we also regularly carry on our persons in the form of identity cards. Our now flourishing projects of information as a technical machinery for manufacturing identity have a deep legacy in modernity. They are realization of old dreams. Perhaps there is such great interest in these matters because they represent three great promises of our contemporary information milieu. One is the promise of complete surveillance and inescapable data capture, another is that of the computability of the deepest interiorities of human mental and emotional life and third is the utopic dream of a society that would transcend divisive racial and ethnic differences.
The list of databases we populate is long, growing and familiar: search engine and web browsing histories, social media registers, marketing and advertising profiles, predictive police analytics and lists of terror suspects. Then there are the ever-multiplying legacy systems of health records, education records, financial records, insurance profiles and our government records, all supplemented by our birth and death certificates. The most important use of creating data through registration of births and death are (i) Knowledge of the movement of population (demographic uses); (ii) protection of the lives and health of the people (sanitary uses); and (iii) protection of the rights of the individual and of the community (legal use) (Wilbur, 1897). Each of these reasons can be conceptualized in terms of how birth registration makes persons legible (J. C. Scott, 2020).
Data is an important aspect of the state, as an example in 1912 the United States did not know how many babies were born every year (Ethel M. Watters, 1924).
We were formatted into data of uncountably many kinds: birth certificates, psychological assessments, education records, financial profiles, the production of a sizable racialized data apparatus and so much other informational accoutrement that we have for so long now simply taken for granted. These century-old formats remain with us today. They persist in the latest information technologies that, new as they are, depend on older techniques for their deepest infrastructure. We have recently been formatted once again. That is why the history of our data in combination with political science matters so much today. We are not as easily separated from this data as we like to think. Our data does not simply show who we were before information systems were created. Rather, our data is an essential part of who we are. Data are active participants in our development. The formats that structure the data help to tell us who we are. We are subjects to vast amounts of personal data that others attach to us and that we in turn regularly reattach to ourselves. These data points have become important to who we are. More precisely, they are important to who we have become.
To understand their importance, consider the following hypothetical scenario of a kind of nightmare that could only come to pass in a milieu such as ours. What would it be like to permanently lose access to all your data all at once? Beyond just simple informational identity theft or misplaced data, envision a scenario of permanent personal data deletion. What would you do if you somehow became permanently detached from all your personal data? What could you do if you somehow became permanently unrepresentable by all data system? No driver license, no passport, no bank account number, no medical insurance card, no health records and at the bottom of them all, no registered certificate of birth? What would you make yourself? What could others make of you? What would the bureaucracy be able to do when you petition it with your plight, given the fact that no bureaucracy can address a subject as other than their information? The bureaucrats like your family members, could surely recall your visage and your voice but they would have no way of addressing you from one day to the next, of recording you in their databases, of numbering or naming you, and so no way at all to deal with you on anything approaching a consistent basis. You could not even receive special support through special court orders because, completely unrepresentable as information, you would have no way of being registered into a court, for that would require rendering you into the data from which you been detached. This nightmarish scenario helps us recognize that the loss of one’s informational selfhood would entirely debilitate our sense of self today, even if it would leave intact other aspects of who we are. Our information is today so deeply woven into who we are that were we to be deprived of it, we could no longer be the persons we once so effortlessly were. Ian Hacking’s writing of the nineteenth century, describes practices and institutions that “brought new kind of man into being, the man whose essence was plotted by thousand numbers” (Hacking, 1990). Vismann emphasizes the confessional vectors of Foucault’s genealogy of sexuality, then Hacking emphasizes its statistical vectors (Foucault, 1990)
The story told by all three of these philosopher-historians concerns the formation in the nineteen century of what Foucault’s work describes as biopolitical and disciplinary subjectivity. If the confessing and statistical subjects were key figures of the nineteenth century, then the early twentieth century gave rise to then — new subjects of information that continue to be presented to us today as still new. A decisive wight was tipped in those first decades of the twentieth century. Information began to precede the person. It became possible of information to draw up persons as if out of nowhere. We became coddled from cradle to coffin by so many check boxes on so many scraps of paper. We inauguration of a lifelong paper trail that would outlive even the eventualities of our death certificates. We can see that what gets formatted by data technologies is not just data, but also subjects of data, or informational persons. My arguments in this research contribute to a growing scholarly conversation about documentary identification and registration (Breckenridge et al., 2012).
Other data points on their first sight do not appear to be important information. For instance, length or weight appear more innocent but even those that appear innocent are not therefore neutral. These forms tethered their infantile subjects to the formats they exhibit. They made the persons or babies become accessible in terms of just those formats. These seemingly trivial details are in reality anything but inconsequential. Debates today over storage capacity are conducted in the lingua franca of “gigabytes and terabytes” rather than “inches thick,” and yet the square footage of server farms is just as important a feature of systems design today as was linear footage of shelving capacity for birth registration one hundred years ago. From one information system to the next, and across each, we are inscribed, processed, and reproduced as subjects of data or what is called information persons. The extent to which we informational persons are so widely formatted into our data suggests the high stakes of our datafication and its concomitant politics of information. Information culture can go back to earlier moments in a way that shows how social media, mass surveillance and their informational underpinnings are anything but radically novel inventions of the past two or three decades.
Data collection is a vital aspect of modern society as it provides a means to quantify, evaluate, and understand complex phenomena. Accurate data collection is crucial in guiding decision-making processes in both the public and private sector. In particular, the ability to collect and analyze data has a profound impact on the fields of medicine, psychology, economics, and social sciences. In the field of medicine, data collection and analysis are crucial in developing treatments and cures for various diseases. For example, data from clinical trials can provide valuable information about the efficacy and safety of new drugs and medical devices.
In psychology, data collection is used to study human behavior and the underlying cognitive processes. By collecting data through experiments, researchers can gain insights into human emotions, perceptions, and motivations. Data collection also plays a critical role in economics. For instance, data on consumer spending, inflation, and employment can be used to evaluate the state of the economy and make informed decisions on monetary and fiscal policy. In the social sciences, data collection is used to study human societies and to understand patterns and relationships in areas such as demographics, culture, and social behavior. In conclusion, the collection of data is an essential component of scientific inquiry and has a significant impact on society as a whole. Through data collection, researchers and policymakers can gain a deeper understanding of complex phenomena and use this information to make informed decisions that improve people’s lives.
Furthermore, data collection helps to monitor and assess the progress of society in terms of sustainable development and social progress. For example, data on poverty, education, health, and human rights can be collected and analyzed to track progress towards meeting the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. This data can also be used to identify areas that need improvement and to allocate resources more effectively. In addition, data collection plays a key role in enhancing transparency and accountability. By collecting and making data publicly available, organizations and governments can demonstrate their commitment to transparency and accountability. This can lead to increased trust from the public and stakeholders, which can in turn enhance the effectiveness of policies and programs. Finally, data collection is also important for scientific innovation. Accurate and reliable data can be used to develop new theories and to test existing ones. By collecting data from various sources and using innovative methods of analysis, researchers can gain new insights and develop new solutions to complex problems.
In conclusion, data collection is a critical aspect of modern society, providing a foundation for scientific inquiry, decision-making, and progress. Whether in the fields of medicine, psychology, economics, or social sciences, data collection is essential for understanding complex phenomena and making informed decisions that benefit society. In recent decades, the widespread availability of digital technologies has further transformed data collection. The widespread use of the Internet, mobile devices, and cloud computing has enabled the collection of data from a diverse range of sources, such as social media, online surveys, and sensors. This has led to the development of big data, which refers to the collection and analysis of large and complex data sets.
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