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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.