Paper Short Abstract:

This paper examines the generative role of prediction in the new phase of digital state-making currently underway in India and speculate into the future of anthropological knowledge in tandem with the thinking on the new state-form that is born from within blackbox logic.

Paper Abstract:

In this paper I take up the invitation of this panel to examine the generative role of prediction in the new phase of digital state-making currently underway in India. The Indian state's new governance infrastructure relies on speculative investments into future citizenship through predictive behaviour generated through algorithmic control extending into several aspects of economic, social, and political life. his new digital state, I argue, is not a technological improvement or add-on but a new state form that emerges out of and creates new settlements, including those between the state and its citizens.

Anthropology has undoubtedly moved past the difficulties once imagined in studying the state. This paper will revisit some of the past difficulties as well as their transcendence in light of this new state form. Chief among is the tension between the production of regularities as a primary form of state violence (pace James Scott) and the production of new forms of unruliness in and through ever-proliferating datasets and blackbox algorithms. Anthropological knowledge played a crucial role in assisting the state with optics and in turn was made through its entanglement with state-making projects. This paper will speculate into the future of anthropological knowledge in tandem with the thinking on the new state-form that is born from within blackbox logic.