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- Convenors:
-
Alena Thiel
(IT University Copenhagen)
Baki Cakici (IT University of Copenhagen)
Bidisha Chaudhuri (University of Amsterdam)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract:
The panel invites critical examination of the forces that condition digital public infrastructure projects in various parts of the world, and how they unleash new forms of (digital) statehood.
Long Abstract:
Digital Public Good/Digital Public Infrastructures have become the new buzzword in development discourse as well as Technology Policy circles in developing and developed countries alike. While infrastructures have been a well-studied concept in STS, the notion of public good, its digital materiality and its relation to infrastructure are relatively new topics of interest within the STS community. The concept of public good has long been a prerogative of liberal economics that underline its non-exclusionary and non-rivalrous nature and as a result often push the responsibility of provisioning such goods to the realm of the state. At the same time, anthropologists have made serious attempts to re-appropriate the term public good by emphasizing its ethical undertone, indicating a common and shared goal desirable for a collective (Bear and Mathur 2015). We propose that a serious engagement with the notion of the public good can offer critical analytical insights into the working of the digital state. The panel welcomes contributions that discuss how contemporary digital public infrastructure projects are significantly shaping the future of statehood and specifically, how techno-imaginaries rooted in the notion of the digital public good condition these processes. How do imaginaries of progress and care inscribed in model systems catalyse the expansion of digital infrastructural platforms in realms of statehood? What expressions of the public good allow digital entrepreneurs to expand into realms of the state? Papers in this panel may focus on the substantive nature as well as ethical significance of material changes in practices of governance brought about by various manifestations of the public good in digital public infrastructure projects, including but not limited to ID systems and the ongoing platformization of the state and its service provision in digital public finance, health, and welfare.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Santtu Räisänen (Centre for Consumer Society Research, University of Helsinki)
Short abstract:
In a ministerial AI project to reform the Finnish welfare state towards "human centricity", the citizen is reimagined as a new kind of responsibilized, entrepreneurial and actively datafied subject, drawing on both paternalistic citizen-consumerism as well as cybernetic social engineering.
Long abstract:
The digital welfare state project is being advanced in various parts of the world through programmes of governmental innovation, ones whose reforms of encumbent societal institutions are justified on notions of digital public good. In Finland, the concept of a "digital human centric government" was mobilized as the raison d'etre of a large scale state-led AI innovation programme. In my paper, I approach how this notion of human-centricity in the programme imposes new understandings regarding the meaning and values of citizenship in the digital welfare state.
I find, that in the turn towards the human-centric in Finnish digital welfare reform, the human is a flexible signifier which arises out of technical metaphor to stand for certain fantasies regarding welfare citizenship, market society and the state. Through a close reading of user representations in the governmental AI Programme, I identify three dominant articulations of the human: the machinic, the inadequate and the entrepreneurial. These articulations disambiguate the human-in-the-centre as a chimaeral fantasy of neoliberal-cybernetic paternalism, and evince the role of the engineerial imagination in the work of doing technopolitical interventions to refigure citizenship and the state.
Benedict Lang (European New School of Digital Studies, Europa Universität Viadrina)
Short abstract:
By using the concept of öffentliche Daseinsvorsorge, this paper will surface reconfigurations of the normative self-understanding of municipalities as representatives of statehood resulting from the discourse on smart cities as digital public infrastructures in Germany.
Long abstract:
Large scale funding schemes like the German “Modellprojekte Smart City” alongside significant endeavours of various actors – include public and private sector, startups and civil society – on different levels are dedicated to the development of smart cities in order to create liveable cities. Sensors, algorithms and data are discursively positioned as central elements of digital public infrastructures connected to promises of a better future and to increasing the public good.
In Germany, öffentliche Daseinsvorsorge has long been an integral concept for the self-understanding of municipalities: Governmental power is legitimized through the provision of basic human needs for the citizens who cannot self-sustain their lives anymore as a result of urbanisation and the industrial revolution (Forsthoff 1938).
The discourse on smart cities and the development of smart city projects and strategies, however, are contributing to a reconfiguration of what I call solution infrastructures within municipalities. These solution infrastructures describe the material and immaterial procedures, activities, tools and attitudes that are used for tackling (wicked) problems that the municipalities are facing. Mobilizing the concept of öffentliche Daseinsvorsorge as a lense for critical analysis, this talk will surface the changes of the normative self-understanding of the municipalities as representations of statehood that result from the push of smart city agendas.
The paper will be based on fieldwork (observations, interviews, document analysis) examining the activities of the “Modellprojekte Smart City” funding scheme of the German federal government. It contains preliminary results of my PhD research project
Emily Chua (National University of Singapore)
Long abstract:
Bracing for a global shift to blockchain-based currencies, Singapore’s central bank, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), is developing regulatory frameworks for “digital payment tokens” – commonly known as cryptocurrencies – and experimenting with the issuance of digital Singapore dollars. While these initiatives explicitly aim to protect money as a public good, and are conducted in an open and consultative manner, the interlocutors MAS engages and collaborates with are commercial and retail banks, digital platform companies including crypto-trading platforms, digital payment companies, and fintech startups – all private industry stakeholders. The high level of technical knowledge and expertise that it takes to participate in (or even understand) these debates and experiments keeps ordinary citizens out. MAS discussions of digital currencies, meanwhile, refer to the citizen as a “consumer,” “customer,” “client” and “end-user.” The future form of the national currency that all citizens must use is thus being worked out in conversations they do not have a voice in; and in which state authorities represent them, not as members of a democracy, but as paying users of a service whose interests and demands are presumed known. My analysis of how money is being remade in Singapore brings concepts from the anthropology of money into conversation with the emergent “social studies of central banking” (Coombs 2022). I examine disjunctures between the “epistemic cultures” (Knorr-Cetina, 2009) of the experts involved and the “narratives” (Holmes 2014) they perform to publics that, in their construction, are indistinguishable from markets for money as a service.
Mila Samdub (Yale Law School)
Short abstract:
This paper tracks the genesis of Digital Public Infrastructures in India since 2009. Reading tech industry sources, it shows that DPIs have been protectionist platforms that enable domestic tech capital to engage in "predatory inclusion" while augmenting the power of an authoritarian state.
Long abstract:
At the 2023 G20 meeting in New Delhi, global leaders committed to Digital Public Infrastructures (DPIs), a class of public-private software infrastructures touted as a panacea for development in the global South. This major soft(ware) power project of the Indian government under Narendra Modi forms the archetype of an “Indian model” of networked digitality.
Bridging political economy and STS, this paper tracks how between 2009 and 2018 the Aadhaar biometric identity project was rearticulated – both discursively and materially – as the basis of this all-encompassing market infrastructure to solve social and economic problems. While the conventional wisdom around DPIs centres the state, a close reading of tech industry sources reveals that this was a move designed to incubate a domestic software products industry in a tech sector that had been dominated by enterprise services exports. DPIs were a way for domestic tech capital beset by economic, technological and moral crises to create new sites for extraction shielded from global competition.
Over the last decade, DPIs have enabled new articulations between state, capital and society. In creating a shared platform for domestic tech capital and the state, DPIs have shaped the current alignment between Indian tech and the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. Far from being an intervention that has resulted in development fuelled by free market innovation, in India DPIs have been protectionist tools that have enabled domestic tech capital to engage in a form of "predatory inclusion" while augmenting the power of an authoritarian state.
Sandra Baernreuther (University of Lucerne) Smriti Sharma (University of Lucerne, Switzerland) Sreya Dutta Chowdhury (Universität Leipzig)
Long abstract:
In recent years, the Indian state has promoted the digitalization of healthcare services. On August 15, 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, India launched the National Digital Health Mission as part of its Universal Health Coverage program. Now renamed the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM), it is conceived as an open, modular ecosystem, facilitating the participation of both public and private actors. In the ABDM, the government provides health building blocks, which have been declared as Digital Public Goods (DPGs). These health building blocks collect and converge basic health system data on doctors, institutions, and patients. In doing so, the ABDM envisages bridging the gap between different stakeholders through a smoother exchange of data. Based on ethnographic research in three different sites and states in India, we follow the creation of the ABDM infrastructure and discuss its implication for healthcare provisioning. Although built on principles of openness and compliance, we examine how these DPGs often lead to inconsistencies and center-state conflicts. We also point to the dangers of conceptualizing digital infrastructure itself (rather than medical services) as public goods.
Burcu Baykurt (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
Short abstract:
How are bureaucratic inefficiencies and social justice concerns made productive in American techno-capitalism? This paper examines tech startups known as “gov-tech” in the U.S. and shows how their practices, structured by data and racial capitalism, change the form and value of public knowledge.
Long abstract:
How are bureaucratic inefficiencies and social justice concerns made productive in American techno-capitalism? This paper focuses on the case of a particular segment of tech startups known as “gov-tech” in the United States (U.S.), which works with public agencies to redesign digital public infrastructures. Through in-depth interviews with data scientists and founders of gov-tech startups, I first discuss the recent history of how these firms have placed themselves among tech giants, public agencies, and community groups as epistemic brokers. On the one hand, gov-tech firms rally political demands such as racial equity, social justice, and good governance to appeal to public agencies. On the other hand, they repurpose public data into new products for the private industry, stake a claim in public revenues, and bind government agencies to their services in order to become lucrative enterprises. Drawing on critical data studies and critical political economy, this paper aims to show how the practices of gov-tech firms, underlined by the incentives of data and racial capitalism, change the form and value of public knowledge from public goods to data assets.