Paper short abstract:

This paper explores a new social accounting technology in England: the fracking-related Traffic Light System. It considers a notion of power that guides some social analyses of accountability, and whether additional notions of power might provide further analytic purchase over today's world.

Paper long abstract:

Recent decades have witnessed the rise of a large human sciences scholarship on audit and accountability. One abiding concern in this scholarship has been to show how pernicious neoliberal accounting technologies can be, given their proclivity to oppress and repress, coerce and discipline. New social technologies of accounting, many have shown, forge neoliberal subjects, reorder social worlds, and produce perverse outcomes – not least, by failing to achieve their own ambitions of fostering accountability. By attending to new modes of accountability, some social analysts have thus sought to uncover the workings of power in today’s world, and to denounce the novel social technologies that enable them.

Less remarked upon in these analyses is the notion of power they sometimes presuppose. This is a power the powerful hold and the powerless resist; one that is illegitimate, morally dubious, and destined to do bad things to good people. In this paper, we wish to ask to what extent such conceptions of power hinder our ability to understand certain contemporary accounting technologies. We dwell in particular on one new social accounting technology in England: the fracking-related Traffic Light System (TLS). This is a public, open-access monitoring system created by the UK government so that anybody – scientists, activists, journalists, even anthropologists – can monitor fracking-induced earthquakes in real time. The operation of this particular social accounting technology invites an image of power as distributed not concentrated, exercised not possessed, reversible not fixed, morally capricious not certain.