Paper short abstract:

Using insights from technoscience and software studies, I want to show how the underlying logic of data mining algorithms and databases foster the production of possible future targets for data-driven drone warfare.

Paper long abstract:

Targeting individuals has become increasingly institutionalized in the US global war on terror. Based on big data analytics and NoSQl databases, targets are selected and kill lists such as the 'disposition matrix' are produced. I seek here to develop a material perspective focusing on the neglected non-human world of data mining algorithms and databases which increasingly standardize and sort our world. Using insights from technoscience and software studies, I will show how the underlying logic of data mining algorithms and databases foster the production of ever more data and possible future targets for a data-driven killing apparatus. In this process human and non-human decision making processes are intimately intertwined by which the messy targeting process gets even more opaque and less traceable. This is not least a result of a technorationality with an open-ended search heuristics based on automated and systematic tinkering through which narrative and causality is substituted with (cor)relation and recombination - a logic which advances a possibilistic, preemptive culture of technosecurity.