Short abstract:

This work seeks to decode how Algorithmic Capitalism establishes new forms-content for the relationship between State and Market, investigating the manifestations of technobiopower in the global south, based on Brazilian cases of digitalization of public education and security services.

Long abstract:

This article starts from the hypothesis that the current digitalization of space can be understood as a process of reconfiguration of the power relations that constitute modern governmental rationality. For Foucault (2004), the main hallmark of modern governmental reason would reside in the perception of the population as an economic subject. As the author argues (ibid), the systems of classification, categorization and quantification of the population came to be understood as a domain of knowledge of the state, positioning biopolitics as a power device of the modern State by means of governing life. However, technoscientific transformations and the emergence of cybernetics as a technoculture of the 20th century, positioned information as a semiotic-material reality and a way of coding the world (Haraway, 1985), establishing a symbiotic relationship between technique, power and life, designated by Haraway (1997) as technobiopower. In the advancement of this context, the growing agency of digital technologies for the exercise of government based on data extraction emerges as a technobiopower that reconfigures strategies, partnerships and exercises of state power. Primarily, an intrinsic relationship is established between the State and the technology Market, for the exercise of new algorithmic governmentalities (Rouvroy; Berns, 2013) and the commodification of life (Haraway, 1997). In such a context, this work seeks to decode how Algorithmic Capitalism (Mbembe, 2020) establishes new forms-content for the relationship between State and Market, investigating the manifestations of technobiopower in the global south, based on Brazilian cases of digitalization of public education and security services.

Short abstract:

Modern states and their Westphalian notion of sovereignty are in a knotty relationship with the digitally fueled ‘network society’. Analysing German parliament plenary speeches I aim to explore politicians’ interpretations of state sovereignty around topics explicitly connected to digitalisation.

Long abstract:

With the many changes an increasingly digitalised network society (Castells 1987) brings with it, various voices from inside and outside academia have portrayed digital technologies as both an existential threat to its authority and sovereignty as well as a new powerful resource to intensify control mechanisms. Investigating these frictions between digitality and state sovereignty in the Westphalian tradition, I believe parliamentary speeches to be one (of many) important sites for critical engagement. Seeking to identify the various implicit and explicit conceptions on the topic at hand, digital statecraft as a conceptual lens helps shedding light on politicians' attempts to make sense of at times unpredictable developments. In this I am guided somewhat by Fourcade and Gordon (2020), who proposed state politics to be guided by the view of a citizen rather than a state. This additional perspective allows me to particularly highlight the abovementioned conflict of digitality and state sovereignty and the rationales behind the political debate around it. Preliminary analysis does indeed show that politicians' trust of emergent digital ideas and technology is very much dependent on the particular case and their perceived impact on the state as an institution. Technologies that are expected to add positively to the country (through economic growth, international prestige, and other means) are much more positively conceived as those whose use is yet unclear or expected to be actually harmful to the country (e.g. e-government vs. social media). The study thus tangibly illustrates the process of digital statecrafting undertaken in the Bundestag.

Short abstract:

This project will investigate the interoperable digital systems implemented and developed for the Danish court administration and scrutinise the structures and cooperation dynamics as well as the role of the actors involved in the operationalisation, process and execution of justice in DK.

Long abstract:

The development of digital and automated systems in the Danish courts are redefining the way in which the justice system is structured and practiced. Simultaneously, digitalization affects how different institutions share data, both vertically and horizontally. Data submitted or harvested by one institution may later acquire evidential character elsewhere in the justice system, as it is interoperably shared between. Interoperable digital systems challenge existing structures and cooperation dynamics as well as redefine the role of the actors involved in the operationalisation, process and execution of justice. This project aims to problematize collectively imagined forms of social order embedded in the digitalization of Danish courts, not as a phenomenon in isolation but holistically as an interoperable dyad focusing on courts. Drawing on the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff and Kim 2008), the project investigates the implicit understandings and embedded relationships within the justice system. Employing an ethnographic approach, the PhD project will involve document analysis, expert interviews, and fieldwork observations conducted at two different courthouses in Denmark, as well as observations at the Danish Courthouse Agency. I will critically scrutinize how digitalization serves as a steppingstone toward the establishment of an interoperable system that will leverage data from diverse sources to allegedly optimize court processes and reduce human bias. In that sense, I will investigate if and how the pursuit of digital solutionism takes precedence over ethical considerations such as algorithmic bias, transparency, and accountability.

Short abstract:

Through ethnographic study of a digital transformation model used in an audit of the digitalisation efforts of Norwegian police, we show how the model and its aesthetic – boxy steps leading upward – works as a political device for the audited party, and as a methodologial one for their evaluators.

Long abstract:

Digital transformation frameworks are the current idiom for guiding digitalisation practice within key Norwegian state agencies. These frameworks quite literally model digital statecraft, in that they make figurative the steps the state needs to take to create what is often referred to as "better digital services". In this paper, we trace one such digital transformation framework as it makes its way into bureaucracy from the land of consultant knowledge practices, travelling by way of Powerpoint presentations, books, and word of mouth. We follow a team of Norwegian state auditors in their efforts to evaluate the digitalisation efforts of the Norwegian Police Service, and see how for them, the model serves as a methodological tool, enabling them to evaluate the object ‘digitalisation’. For the auditees in the police, we argue, the model becomes a political technology reinforcing them in their effort to carve out political space for their digitalisation work in the encounter with the political interests of their superiors.

The reduction of complexity that is offered by the model and the aesthetic of its definitive, boxy (Schlünder et al 2020) steps leading toward greater digital sophistication helps steady the gaze of practitioners working within an optics of evaluation (auditors), and with an optics of execution (police), giving both a handle on their very different ways of performing digital statecraft. In the paper, we explore the agencies of the model (Bourgoin and Muniesa 2016; Doganova and Eyquem-Renault 2009) and how it can simultaneously model both enquiry (Morgan 2012) and authority.

Short abstract:

Through the analysis of expert inquiries from the 1970s, this research aims to understand how data infrastructures became an object of governance in Norway. By showing the issue-making of the digital before digitalisation, iit highlights a discursive inertia in policy formulations of digitalisation.

Long abstract:

Governance practices and digitalisation must be understood as interwoven. While there is much attention to the current digitalisation of public administrations, my work addresses the historical becoming of an overarching and trans-sectoral data policy in Norway. Drawing on STS literature, I seek to fill a gap in existing research by bringing together the bureaucratic rationality, its expectations of computer technologies and its material properties in a material-semiotic analysis. The aim of is to better understand how computers and data infrastructures became an object of governance for the Norwegian State and the issue-making taking place before the widespread digitalisation of society. This will be done by studying expert documents from the 1970s, mandated by the Government to examine how the State could make use of computer technologies to accomplish political targets. These expert documents are central to the Norwegian, and Nordic, history of so-called knowledge-based politics, and significantly contribute to the process of policy formulation. Written by a committee of appointed issue-experts from public administration and technical research institutes, the documents give valuable insight into the desires and expectations of societal development and the role digital technology was imagined playing in it. Digitalisation is a field draped in novelty, but investigating the history uncovers a discursive inertia and highlights persistent challenges. Critical remarks on coordination, user engagement and agile systems are but some of the issues found in these older documents that keeps resurfacing. Recognising this persistency contribute to formulate questions attuned to the incremental processes of technological- and societal development.