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On Datapolitik
By: Davide Panagia

This as-of-yet-to-be-written essay will examine the phenomenon I call

“datapolitik” as an important new area of political science researcc.
Datapolitik mimics the power dynamics of the more familiar realpolitik. But
unlike realpolitik, datapolitik’s power is the soft(ware) power of
programming that captures, tracks, and propagates the enduring ephemeral
reality we call information. Above and beyond providing a conceptual layout
for an underappreciated category of political power (one whose archeology
dates back to early-modern technologies for information management), its
features, and its dispositifs, this paper works to shift our social scientific
analytics and conceptual focus away from traditional modes of critical
communication and information studies by first and foremost defining the
study of datapolitik negatively (i.e., what it can’t be) so as to turn to four key
areas of analysis: the cynegetic power of tracking; dataveillance;
datapresence; and contagion. The sound-bite for the analysis of datapolitik is
the following: “transformation, not transmission.” Whereas much political
analysis of communication and information studies remains within a
radiophonic/televisual conception of influence – that is, influence defined as
the transmission of information from one source/subject to another –
datapolitik exists in an entirely alternate ecology of intermedial relations that
enact transformations of experiences.
I begin with negative definitions of what datapolitik is not simply
because we are not in a position – and might never be in the position – to
understand what datapolitik is. When dealing with the programming of
information technology, the speed of changes, alterations, and permutations
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are so fast and so decentralizing that we are forced to confront an uncanny

world of exponential growth. This is the Malthusian world of the
mathematical sublime that structures the force of aesthetic attraction of
datapolitik. As the capacities of information technology increases –
capacities which include data algorithms, storage technology, bio-cellular
reprogramming, and nanotech-genetic alteration, just to name a few sectors
of mutual encumbrance – what can be done exceeds our capacity to
understanding what is doing. Immanuel Kant, in his description of the
mathematical sublime, refers to this phenomenon as the clash between
apprehension and comprehension.
To begin: the fact of datapolitik requires that we not rely on our
inherited intuitions about surveillance: whether Orwellian/totalitarian, or
Foucaultian/Benthamite. Datapolitik is not a regime of surveillance in that
way, nor is it a configuration of power relations that easily maps onto the
scopophilic – as both the Orwellian and Foucaultian models do. There is
literally nothing to “see” here. Not because datapolitik is ‘invisible’ but
because it is not a domain of politics available to sight. Datapolitik involves
algorithms and programming platforms, not visual technologies of the gaze.
Equally relevant: datapolitik has nothing to do with our entrenched views
about privacy, reliant as they are on the security of walls, barriers,
boundaries, and motes. This, because as Wendy Chun has cogently argued,
there is an ephemerality to datapolitik whose presence is at once enduring
and fleeting. But mostly, datapolitik is not about selves, or people, or
persons, or the demos, or identities, or bodies, or organisms. Datapolitik, I
want to suggest, is the new real of everyday politics: it is what wins
presidential elections in the United States, it is what ensures economic
growth on Wall Street, it is what enables the writing of academic research
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papers and essays (i.e., software). In short, we are surrounded an embedded

in code and data; indeed, more than anything else, in the regime of
datapolitik humans are data emitting entities.
All of my pronouncements may seem alarming. Terrifying even. This
is the stuff of dystopic science fiction novels, TV shows, and films. And no
doubt there is some truth to this. Yet this is also our everyday, and it can
only be alarming and terrifying because we tend not to appreciate all of the
moments in the day when we rely on data as both the agent and container of
ourselves. The moment we do appreciate the immense role that datapolitik
plays in our lives, we are forced to admit how much its imagined harm is
less than its actual benefits. And this discrepancy between perceived and
actual harm is a very real challenge for a critical analysis of datapolitik. That
is, one of the greatest political and policy challenges of datapolitik is that it
does not count as a harm or a tort to our lives. Datapolitik is neither a harm
nor a threat to our existence just like being captured by a tourist’s passing
snapshot is not a threat or a harm to our existence.
A further trouble in the critical analysis of datapolitik: It doesn’t have
a history; though it does have a media archeology. Indeed, and unlike
realpolitik, datapolitik can’t be studied by looking at national policies and
major historical events like wars, treaties, and other sources of power
struggles in the world arena. Simply put, datapolitik is not purposive in that
way. Though datapolitik may be used to achieve ends (in the same way that
a hammer may be used to achieve a variety of ends from construction to
murder), the achievement of ends is not its purpose. Datapolitik is a
cynegetic sentinel power that exists to track and gather data. Hence, the
study of datapolitik requires a media archeology that looks to the ways and
means by which data is remediated – at the very least from the early modern
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period to the present. Mary Poovey’s media archeology of the modern fact is
a good starting point, as is Ann Blair’s study into the practices of
information management in the early modern period. For datapolitik the
tracking, capture and organization of information – that is, the algorithm of
the search-engine – is its zeitgeist.
So allow me to rehearse the four categories for the analysis of
datapolitik I wish to briefly elaborate today: 1. Tracking and capture; 2.
Dataveillance; 3. Datapresence; 4. Contagion:
1. Tracking and Capture: Algorithms track and capture data, whether
that data is voice conversations (as in the case of the StingRay machine),
face recognition information (like Facebook’s “DeepFace” software), and so
forth. The classic formulation of the model of capture stands in contrast to
the concept of surveillance as articulated in Philip E. Agre’s foundational
essay “Surveillance and Capture” (Information Society, 1994). There Agre
asserts that “Whereas the surveillance model originates in the classical
political sphere of state action, the capture model has deep roots in the
practical application of computer systems.” More than metaphorical
similarities, then, tracking and capture are practices of non-state predation
that, as Gregoire Chamayou has recently shown, belong to a philosophical
history of the manhunt (recall here the figure of the sentinel in the first
Matrix movie). These are cynegetic powers of predation that a media
archeology of information gathering technology shows to be connected to
the emergence of the informational subject in the early modern period
(humans as bearers and shedders of information that must be tracked,
organized, categorized, and stored). This is also connected to the rise of
police power as a power of pursuit of “bodies in movement, bodies that
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escape and that it must catch, bodies that pass by and that it must intercept.”
(Manhunt, 90).
2. Dataveillance: As already noted datapolitik has little to do with our
Orwellian and/or Benthamite notions of surveillance – it is not
“observational”, as Gary T. Marx has rightly noted (Marx, 2002, 11). Hence
the idea of dataveillance that must be understood within a media archeology
of the cynegetic powers of the police. The notion of data surveillance, or
“dataveillance”, was first formulated in 1988 by Roger A. Clarke. Clarke’s
point is simple: facilitative mechanisms and technologies have been in place
for some time that enable “the systematic use of personal data systems in the
investigation or monitoring of the actions or communications of one or more
persons.” (Clarke, 1988, 499) Importantly, Clarke affirms that “rather than
individuals themselves, what is monitored is the data that purport to relate to
them. As a result there is a significant likelihood of wrong identification.”
(Clarke, 1988, 406) Though this may have been accurate in 1988, today
identification is paradoxically much more likely to be correct, and even
more likely to be irrelevant. (see datapresence below) Rita Raley emphasizes
this by noting that even in Clarke’s account, “dataveillance operations do not
require a centralized system.” (Raley, 124) The non-necessity of a
centralized system suggests something further: dataveillance is not merely
governed by the cynegetic powers of predation, it also enables a shift from
data as a concrete object to data as a speculative ephemerality. “Data as
speculation” Raley notes “means amassing data so as to produce patterns, as
opposed to having an idea from which one needs to collect supporting data.
Raw data is the material for informational patterns still to come, its value is
unknown or uncertain until it is converted into currency of information.”
(Raley, 123) Finally, and briefly, a thorough attention to dataveillance
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requires a concrete engagement with technical objects as autonomous actants

in the cynegetic powers of predation – a participation of objects, if you will
– including technologies of detection and data storage.
3. Datapresence: this notion refers to the transformation of humans from
identity-bearing subjects to data-emitting subjects. There is datapolitik
because we acknowledge ourselves as informational subjects whether we
like to admit to it or not. Indeed, most of our daily activities are data-
generative. Crucially, what this means is that “meaning” (as a marker of
humanness) has lost practical relevance. Software code is indifferent to
content, which means that datapolitik is indifferent to identities. It doesn’t
matter who or what we are, the thick or thin content of our selves, and so
forth. These traditional philosophical categories for humanities and social
science research are being supplanted by what – in sympathy with Mattew
Fuller – I want to call our “data-flecks”, the data dandruff that we shed on a
second-by-second basis and that constitutes our bit-ness (i.e., think here of
GPS coordinates on our smartphones: they are constantly shedding data, and
if they’re on, we’re traceable). In short, “the electronic file has conquered
self-aware consciousness.” (Critical Art Ensemble, 95: “The Mythology of
Terrorism on the Net”).
4. Contagion: Contagion, not persuasion, is the principal mode of
influence for datapolitik. It is a force of transformation adequate to the
transformational powers of media. Ask yourself – why a culture of zombies
today? Why are we so immersed and surrounded by the figure of the zombie
as cultural archetype of our era? Several answers con come to mind. The
easiest and least convincing is the old scientific Marxist answer: we are all
“living-dead” subjects of capital. A more probable answer is that we are
living in a time where contagion and swarming are THE forces of influence
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and affectivity. [CLIP] Not cause and effect, not linear causality: swarming
and contagion. The zombie is viral, it is fractal, and it swarms: datapolitik is
at once highly controlled and algorithmic, and it is rhizomatic. (see Haggerty
and Ericson, 2000, “The surveillant assemblage”) Its tools are those of the
war machine: Trojan horses, malware, and other viral algorithms that spread,
contaminate, and affect influence through contagion – just like the zombie.
The analysis of datapolitik today requires an appreciation of the
intermediality of minds, bodies, objects, and algorithms – that is, the
intermezzos of hardware and software – that assemble data, subjects, and
objects. Such intermedial relations register a shift in the understanding of
media from transmission to transformation: media create environments that
transform the nature of experience as such. The challenge of datapolitik is
to create concepts that engage the media ecology of this enduring mode of
existence.