Paper short abstract:

The paper shows how proponents of 'Big Data' imagine the future of the state and politics as based on 'data-driven,' 'intelligent' technologies. I critically engage their imaginary of the 'normal' citizen subject, usually based on historical categories and often highly problematic assumptions.

Paper long abstract:

The paper provides a genealogy of the present in analysing how proponents of 'Big Data' from within Big Tech, such as Alex Pentland (2009; 2012; 2014), Eric Schmidt (2013; 2021), Peter Norvig (2013) and others have imagined politics and the state when based on 'intelligent' and other forms of data-driven technologies from 1999- 2016. I focus on their conceptions of the normal citizen subject, the assumed needs of this subject, as well as, notions of objectivity and neutrality.

These conceptions of normalcy often stand in tension with the promise that future technologies will provide highly individualised welfare and care solutions based on data collected about an individual (Pentland 2012; Schmidt 2013). Analysing the idea of the normal citizen and the needs of subjects in this literature shows, I argue, for whom future technologies and state services are imagined and who remains excluded and cannot fully be 'datafied.' The paper proceeds in three steps: First, I presents some of the solutions proposed by the authors for political and welfare problems. Second, I point to the role of data and quantification in those solutions and the experimental design they propose to test them. I then turn to the categorisations involved and how the authors narrate their practices of data production. Therein, I show how they rely on historical often problematic categorisations and practices of quantification. Third, the presentation shows how these narratives produce an 'other' while assuming that they provide solutions that are both perfectly tailored to an individual while being 'neutral.'