Paper short abstract:

Increasingly our engagement with the state is mediated through digital infrastructures. By expanding the field of bureaucratic anthropology to the digital, this paper will explore how digital bureaucratic tools (databases, permits, online archives...) were crucial in spatialising the Flemish state.

Paper long abstract:

The digitisation of our institutional environment is often heralded as the prime antidote against politicisation. Government controlled open-access databases, online portals to apply for forms and submit paperwork or taxes, and the collection and processing of big data about society, are embraced by politicians and bureaucrats as prime drivers for democratization and cost-effective government. Because of the unique affordances of contemporary multimedia technology (e.g. so-called accountability/openness of social media), those digital infrastructures on which we rely are often conceived as 'neutral' or 'objective' mediums in our engagement with the state. Key Science and Technology studies (STS) Scholars have, however, problematised this 'black boxing' of technology in both academia and policy, and have underscored how digital tools are cultural constructs dramatically imposing regimes of truth.

By connecting STS perspectives on technology with the growing literature ethnographically exploring bureaucracy and paperwork, this paper will explore how digital infrastructures shape certain subjectivities and normalise specific political hierarchies and standardisations. Using ethnographic data collected at the Flemish Heritage Agency, this paper will trace how a digital permitting and auditing system connected to a standardised heritage database and archive not only spatialized the Flemish state (part of Belgium) but also normalised cultural assumptions encoded by database developers and bureaucrats in those information infrastructures. In this study both users and producers of digital governmental infrastructures were studied.