Numbers are staples of political life (Rose 1991). Every day, we witness experts mobilise the persuasive power of numeric infrastructures to predict, anticipate and make the future amenable to intervention. Once primarily the province of states, numeric practices are now marshalled by myriad public and private actors who bring digital technologies of sensing, managing and analysing into our most intimate domains (Ruppert et al. 2017). As algorithms, indicators and smart devices become the harbingers of new visions of social life, democratic governance, and inequality redress, they expand the reach and effects of numeric politics and complicate extant understandings of subjectivity (Kitchin 2021).
This special issue brings together insights from the social studies of quantification and the anthropology of data to rethink number politics after datafication. The articles in this volume chart numerical developments in machine-enabled welfare systems, census data quality indicators, nation-wide social credit infrastructures, environmental monitoring technologies and pandemic-related calculative devices to probe the everyday affects, ethics and futurities conjured by emerging forms of data. Working at the edges of social worlds that increasingly resist rationalist prediction, we show how these processes and practices of datafication refigure political ecosystems, experiences and activisms whose power has long been thought to hinge on numbers’ ability to perform equivalence and order.
The authors in this volume move beyond extant concerns about the governing and stabilising powers of numbers by asking how contemporary data politics emerges from the everyday – and often invisible – ethical and affective operations whereby data is produced and put to circulate. Instead of assuming that data is political due to its inherent rationalist and modernist qualities, our ethnographic gaze wanders in space and time to capture alternative and unruly digital data modulations that crystallise when novel forms of data production and circulation meet the human infrastructure forging, sustaining and contesting numbers. Just as people move in and out of hegemonic systems that never fully capture their becomings (Biehl and Locke 2017), so too does digital data travel in and out of political spaces through the affective and ethical labour that people invest in it.
This special issue builds on a long-running and multi-disciplinary critique of processes of quantification and datafication. Sociologists and historians of science have already analysed how numeric tools, models and measuring methods have been devised and used to invest political decisions with objectivity, commensurability and trustworthiness. By contrast, recent anthropological work asks questions about the ‘multiplicity and particularity’ of quantified data (Douglas-Jones et al. 2021: 10), foregrounding the ontological destabilisations ushered in by new technologies of data analysis and control (Schüll 2016; Seaver 2022), data affects (Boler and Davis 2018), and data activisms (Milan and Velden 2016). These perspectives still exude fascination with the ‘profligacy of numbers’ (Guyer et al. 2010: 37) but are also animated by an effort to interrogate the social worlds that coalesce around new forms of quantification.
We move these discussions forward in two interrelated ways. First, turning to the negotiated nature of data politics demands a descent into the ordinary (Das 2006). Examining real-time data controversies and practices, the authors showcase how everyday ethics and affects shape data worlds in unruly and non-rational ways. They show how the introduction of big data into critical arenas of state control – such as welfare, demography, finance and the environment – hinges on the everyday ethical work performed by data operators and their morally laden, often contentious, techno-political action. They foreground the circuitous paths, decision crossroads and ethical dilemmas faced by practitioners, planners and users, but they also give us insight into the communities, subjectivities and futurities that data's traction builds. Here, data politics is as much about refiguring the spaces and architectures of quantification through situated practice and technological experimentation as it is about moulding temporal (dis)continuities, legacies and interventions that (re)imagine the future and its governance.
Second, we move beyond the question of what data is (Mennicken and Salais 2021) to ask what competing data politics do – and how they do – as they emerge out of or are woven into the messy and unpredictable realities of institutional and political spaces (Crowder et al. 2019; Knox and Nafus 2018). To paraphrase established tropes of STS scholarship, ethnography allows us to reverse engineer not only a formula, an experiment or a theorem in search of the social, it also allows us to reverse engineer the political fields that emerge out of the interpersonal labour that gives datafication its traction. Here, attention shifts from the ontological qualities of digital technologies to the imaginative and affective realities (Knox 2017; Sellar 2015) that datafication practices conjure. We show that data politics is less about exposing the effects of probability than it is about situating the work of imagination that goes into making data amenable to political work; it is less about documenting how data creates rational control and classification than it is about how data becomes something invested with hopes, fears and resentment. In this Special Issue (SI), then, data's effects are reframed and relocated through the threads of ethnography, with the causes of these effects re-understood not as floating above or separate from the everyday but deeply embedded within it.
In the remainder of this introduction, we show how our approach to data politics weaves together anthropological discussions about data and broader interdisciplinary theoretical developments on quantification and datafication. By asking what the political is at critical disciplinary junctions, we draw relevant lessons for anthropology to peer beyond politics and intervene in the new inflections of our data moment.
Bringing Numbers Back In: Quantification in Action
It took anthropology almost a century to bring numbers back into the analyses of social life. In the early-twentieth-century division of academic labour, sociologists came to occupy themselves with the secular, rational and economic apparatuses of modern societies, while ethnographers became scientists of the exotic other and the everyday (de Certeau 1984; Hann and Hart 2011). Writing against economics – and, arguably, also against numbers (Polanyi 2001) – anthropologists have only extraneously enquired into old and new informational forms (Douglas-Jones et al. 2021), from the colonial bureaucracies of enumeration before their mathematisation (Appadurai 1993; Cohn 1996; Scott 1998), to the numeric underpinnings of states (Mitchell 2014), corporations and regulatory practices (Riles 2018; Roitman 2018), to the perils of big data (Boellstorff and Maurer 2015).
Anthropology has, therefore, contributed relatively little to the theoretical foundations of quantification processes, politics, tools and practices. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, the first studies tracking the constitution of a number-driven sphere of governance emerged from philosophers, historians of science and statisticians themselves. Ian Hacking famously coined the expression ‘avalanche of printed numbers’ to name the ‘fetishism for numbering’ that brought ‘statistical enthusiasm’ into nineteenth-century biopolitics and changed not only governmental response to poverty and vagrancy but also ‘our feeling about the sort of world in which we live’ (1982: 281–282). Conversely, Theodore Porter (1995) placed numbers’ political qualities – to produce equivalence, expunge intimate knowledge and engender rationalist and universalist accounts of reality – in their ability to work as ‘technologies of distance’. Alain Desrosières, in turn, documented how ‘large numbers’ shape various domains of political intervention through practices of categorisation and convention.
Running across these early pieces on quantification – and their scholarly lineages – is the notion that numbers acquire political currency once they bring chance into calculable, predictable and thus ‘tamable’ terrains (Hacking 1990). Yet more often than not, numbers open up more complications than they can resolve, creating governance effects not through stability and universality but through messy procedures and unpredictable encounters whose actions are often rendered invisible (Mitchell 2002). Too often and too readily, quantification studies assume numbers to, indeed, quantify – without fully considering the political work performed through unruly and affective data practices (Diaz-Bone 2016; Salais 2016; Thévenot 2001).
A more recent surge in the reflexive study of numbers has brought a renewed interest in the politics behind numeric governance (Alonso and Starr 1987; Berman and Hirschman 2018; Bruno et al. 2016; Camargo and Daniel 2021; Diaz-Bone and Didier 2016; Espeland and Stevens 2008; Mennicken and Espeland 2019; Mennicken and Salais 2021). Yet politics can take on quite distinct meanings in a field ‘still very far from having general claims or a common theoretical language’ (Berman and Hirschman 2018: 258). In conversation with this scholarship, anthropologists have begun to make significant traction in grasping emergent forms of quantification (see Appel 2017; Holmes 2013; Neiburg and Guyer 2017). Still, the questions asked fourteen years ago, by anthropologists studying economic phenomena, about the ‘emotional states’ and ‘cognitive maneuvers’ (Guyer et al. 2010: 37) conjured through the ubiquity of numeric infrastructure continue to await more robust ethnographic theorising.
Research in contexts where big data and artificial intelligence are fundamentally reshuffling the means and meanings of identity, ethics and affects has shown that numbers have grown wild. Or – to paraphrase Bruno Latour (1993) – perhaps they were never (that) taming in the first place. With anthropology calling awareness to datafied systems on edge and numbers out of control, what new figurations of the political are underway? By attending to the emotive, unstable and imaginative qualities of number regimes and politics, we argue that anthropology is well positioned to make substantial contributions in a terrain already pollinated by other social sciences. Through attention to alternative forms of engagement, trust and citizenship, practices of production and circulation, and the affective futurities that numbers enable, anthropology can bring ‘vernacular understandings of uncertainty, risk, and forecasting as practices of everyday life’ into contact with ‘the massive new technologies that have emerged to manage risk in its aggregate and catastrophic forms’ (Appadurai 2013: 298).
In what follows, we map how established and emerging trends in the study of quantification have characterised the interface between numbers and politics and how anthropological approaches to digital technologies might extend this work in the face of novel datafication systems. Without being exhaustive, we identify points of conversation with the anthropological work on data – and, conversely – probe what an ethnographic approach to contemporary data politics might bring to the study of quantification in action.
Data Politics as Governance
The political and the numeric intersect in the commonplace critique that numbers have become critical in shaping governance through their ‘seductive’ power to yield quantities, classifications and commensuration (Merry 2011; Miller 2001) – so much so that ‘governing by numbers’ is now one of the most run-of-the-mill paper titles on Google Scholar. Through their formal parsimony, numbers are thought to bring disparate scales into a common, measurable framework (Espeland and Stevens 1998) amenable to policymaking and economic regulation in areas such as poverty, education and social reform (Miller and Rose 1990).
Alice O'Connor (2001) shows how the American welfare reforms of the 1990s were only possible because experts and practitioners began conceiving poverty as a detached object of technocratic intervention. Yet rather than entirely expunging moral definitions of poverty, such ‘statistical representations generated by the state’ (Gupta 2012: 58) can feed policy instruments that reward the ‘deserving poor’ and stymie the ‘undeserving poor’, just as novel metrics of the impact of relief and welfare and econometric measurements of moral hazard open new spaces for quantification (Katz 2013). Elizabeth Berman (2022) tells a similar story about the gradual penetration of an ‘economic style of reasoning’ – marked by liberal understandings of efficiency and parsimony – into the design of American public policies for poverty alleviation, healthcare, antitrust, transportation and the environment between the 1960s and 1980s.
Here, quantification attaches itself to governance through economisation (Çalişkan and Callon 2009): a morally laden process that valorises certain forms of knowledge as economically valuable and as engines of economic growth (Berman 2012; see also Neyland et al. 2019). The economisation of quantification has also shaped new administration practices through performance indicators and benchmarks (Merry et al. 2015; Rottenburg et al. 2015) and new development guidelines and social impact evaluations in the Global South (Mosse 2005; Rottenburg 2009). Twenty years after Marilyn Strathern's (2000) influential volume on ‘audit cultures’, many scholars now agree that the policy reforms based on New Public Management standards failed to deliver their intended improvements, yet financial accounting principles like ratings and rankings remain unassailed, generating far-flung ramifications and ‘dysfunctional consequences’ (Shore and Wright 2015). Perhaps numbers never were really reasonable, then, but invested with such agential qualities, as they pierce into politics in often profound and transformative ways.
Data Politics as Cognitive Infrastructure
To further grasp how numbers persistently shape governance despite evidence of their shortcomings, quantification scholars have interrogated the ‘cognitive infrastructures’ (Hirschman and Berman 2014) sustaining the technocratic decision-making of governments and corporations. The policy instruments these infrastructures enact (Shore et al. 2011) conjure imaginaries that eschew perspective (Daston and Galison 2021) and lend numbers the ability to subsist through political and economic change – travelling, reterritorialising and stabilising new meaning (Howlett and Morgan 2010). By looking at practices of modelling and measuring, historians of science have mapped how the development of governing tools was linked, for example, to disciplinary breakthroughs in economics and statistics that tied numbers to particular philosophies of how the world works (Morgan 2012; Morgan and Morrison 1999).
More recently, sociologists of science have joined them in unveiling the technical and social mechanisms of standards, measures and classifications, and the commitments they entail. Daniel Hirschman (2016) examined how ‘the economy’ was brought into being through the development of national income statistics like the Gross Domestic Product, whose parsing of the social field makes visible patterns of economic growth while invisibilising income and wealth inequalities. Here, disciplinary breakthroughs – such as the invention of representative sampling to estimate the national population (Didier 2020) or quasi-experimental methods in microeconometrics (Kopper 2020) – craft ‘knowledge infrastructures’ (Hirschman 2021) that shape the representational frameworks used to ‘read’ economic and social phenomena. As with the discovery of the Gini Coefficient in the early twentieth century (Schneider 2021), new methods to represent, stylise and measure (and thereby objectify) ‘reality’ craft novel political fields and problematics through scientific practices, conventions and data accruals (Pinto and Paidipaty 2020).
Alongside quantification tools, recent scholarship has focussed on the roles of experts, their institutional networks, and the intellectual traditions they embody (Fourcade 2009; Heredia 2014; Lebaron 2001). Economists have come to embrace the very promises of quantification and standardisation (Fourcade et al. 2015), just as their presence spread into the higher ranks of the state, the media, multinational corporations and development think tanks (Klüger 2017; Maesse et al. 2021). They have steered governmentality logics by acting as ‘public intellectuals’ (Mata and Medema 2013), performing economic models (Mackenzie et al. 2007) and circulating transnationally through projects of academic co-operation and neoliberal restructuring in the Global South (Biglaiser 2002; Edwards 2023). Foregrounding the cognitive infrastructures of data politics, then, opens up questions about the tools and experts behind quantification, their knowledge regimes, and, as we shall now see, their everyday practices.
Data Politics as Material Practice
Questions about whether and how numeric infrastructures yield political effects have led to a major conceptual shift from what quantification is to how quantification works – by enacting realities and construing subjects (Hirschman and Berman 2014). Here, quantification is not reducible to a technopolitical process that builds a universal language and a common measure. Numbers are examined as any other anthropological problem: in their everyday complexities and contingencies, their multiplicity and controversies, with dynamic, unpredictable, uneven and often unwieldy effects. Influenced by developments in actor-network theory, these scholars have shown numbers to be vibrant sites of inscription and translation (Callon et al. 1986; Latour and Woolgar 1979; Law 1991; Mol 2002), and their claims of universality to rest on specific assemblages of material and human infrastructure (Pickering and Guzik 2008).
Here, number politics is about revealing the situated and contingent underpinnings of expert and lay modes of knowing and intervening in the world, their sensorial re-creation of reality through visualisation (Law and Ruppert 2016), and their participation in the constitution of the very social worlds that methods purport to only describe (Law 2002, 2004; Knox and Nafus 2018; Ruppert et al. 2013). Thus, rather than merely flesh out the politics undergirding numbers and their conventions, these scholars also attend to the generativity and materiality of more complex forms of data as they enact new subjects and power relations (Ruppert et al. 2017; Bigo et al. 2019) through ‘data practices’ that entail collecting, storing, retrieving, analysing and stylising evidence (Ruppert and Scheel 2021).
From Quantification to Datafication
We have come a long way, then, from those early days when numbers seemed out of reach for anthropology. Through frameworks of numerical governance, data imaginaries and practices of quantification, we have become well equipped to study how enumeration becomes constitutive of political relations and how it unfolds through everyday effects. However, as data practices ramify more and more into everyday life – with the advent of social media and digital systems of data collection, visualisation and analysis – it remains to be seen whether the approaches that anthropologists have taken to study quantification to date are still fit for purpose for understanding contemporary forms of datafication and its political effects.
We are at a moment when numbers are being rematerialised due to the appearance of new kinds of digital and computational devices. Data – which used to be manually collected by experts through surveys, censuses and questionnaires – are now collected as a matter of course by sensors, cookies and by citizen-consumers themselves as they log in, comment, share, buy and review objects and services using digital devices. Sometimes called ‘big data’, this new ecology of data, deeply entangled in everyday social life, raises novel questions about how contemporary configurations of numbering and quantification are manifesting today and what their social and cultural effects might be beyond governing, imagining and doing.
When the term ‘big data’ first appeared, there were concerted efforts by scholars in critical data studies to try and understand what big data was and its implications (Gitelman 2013; Manovich 2011; Ruppert et al. 2017; Savage and Burrows 2007). A key early piece in this respect was danah boyd and Kate Crawford's (2012) ‘Critical Questions for Big Data’, which outlined six provocations that challenged the enthusiastic embrace of big data in government and commerce, as well as its more dystopian critics. In some ways, these provocations echoed those that had been made of prior practices of data collection and analysis, namely, that data is not neutral, that it is never objective, that ‘raw data is an oxymoron’ (Gitelman 2013), and that data can operate as a tool of social distinction and division. But it also raised an additional, and interestingly anthropological proposal – that big data ‘changes the very definition of knowledge’ (Boyd and Crawford 2012: 665).
Making a comparison with how the Fordist assembly line remade the very definition of work and labour, boyd and Crawford (2012) suggest that computational production processes that generate diverse kinds of data are similarly reconfiguring what counts as knowledge. This is not just a change in ‘cognitive infrastructures’ or the epistemologies that emerge through data practices, but a transformation in the very definition of knowledge itself. Knowledge, when read through big data, artificial intelligence and machine learning, is repositioned from something that is the product of human thought and practice, to a phenomenon that is the outcome of networked systems which operate by aggregating, cross-referencing and searching distributed data sets often without any structured human oversight.
A good example of what boyd and Crawford mean by this might be the recent appearance of the chatbot ChatGPT. ChatGPT is a large language model that analyses data sets of text to generate answers to user-generated questions. Unsurprisingly, as a tool that promises to generate automated text that could be used by anyone wanting to write something – be they marketeers, letter writers, journalists or students – ChatGPT has prompted a wave of concern over the status, meaning and politics of the written material it is producing.1 This includes questions of duplicity, authorship and the regimes of veridiction upon which the truths that it annunciates are stabilised and supported. On the surface, the chatbot seems to be capable of creating cultural artefacts like songs, essays or articles, yet as it does so, it raises difficult questions about what art, knowledge or opinion actually are and the role that technology and humans play in the production of these knowledge objects.
If, as we have shown, anthropologists have developed approaches for studying the place of systems of enumeration that sustain and support systems of knowledge and relations of power through the production of regimes of truth, then in many ways we should be well placed to analyse systems like ChatGPT. We could pay attention to the forms of governance they imply, the numerical infrastructures that sustain such systems, and the practices that shape how they are developed and used. At the same time, novel data systems also bring their own challenges. One challenge is their opacity. Although ChatGPT is a project of OpenAI, many digital systems are developed behind strict walls of corporate secrecy that make access to the everyday sites of their production difficult to achieve. They are also not singular, with digital systems requiring complex networks of people, institutions, systems and software to function effectively. The complexity and interactive qualities of machine learning also pose a challenge to social analysis, as the operations that generate particular effects (e.g. the output of a search) are not directly programmed by particular individuals but are generated by systems which seek to ‘learn’ from the input of users so as to make themselves more effective and efficient over time. Finally, it can be hard to carve out a space for anthropological reflection, when data and its political effects have become a matter of core public concern.
The analysis of data politics is no longer a niche issue; instead, it is a crowded space of deliberation and debate. These deliberations and debates have often focussed on philosophical and legal questions about the ethical implications of new forms of data, their exclusionary logics and their implications for an ongoing politics of rights and obligations in the face of digital systems of accumulation and dispossession (König 2021; Park and Humphry 2019). Such concerns have located contemporary data politics in the political effects emerging from the design of technology rather than in the specificities, contingencies and everyday practices of data development and use.
Despite the challenges of investigating these data-infused forms of quantification, then, we suggest that anthropology still has much to offer to the study of contemporary data politics – by bringing back into view questions of specificity, groundedeness and the everyday. As the field of digital anthropology evinces – through in-depth ethnographies of the everyday practices of digital technology use – even abstract, black-boxed, autonomous technologies are modulated and configured in specific ways in their everyday use (Douglas-Jones et al. 2021; Issar 2023). Anthropological studies of people's engagement with smartphones, social media sites, apps and platforms have consistently shown that even the opaquest algorithms or surveilled systems are incorporated into everyday life in unexpected and creative ways (Geismar and Knox 2020; Miller et al. 2016; Miller et al. 2021). Here, what we observe is a playful, diagnostic and relational approach to digital systems that is often obscured by analyses seeking to define the politics of new forms of data analytics in the abstract. Looking closer, we see how knowledge-transforming, distributed and opaque systems are re-infolded into the question of what lived politics looks like. This, we argue, offers an opening for an anthropology of the politics of quantification after datafication. In the next sections, we will show how anthropological studies are beginning to do this work of tracing the entanglement of digital infrastructures with everyday life in three political contexts.
The State and Bureaucracy
With the institution of the state so closely tied to the historical development of statistical knowledge, it is perhaps not surprising that the state has remained an important player in the development of new forms of digital data collection, analysis and control. A recent study on India's Aadhar system of biometric identification, for example, has shed light on the way that biometric technologies have served to reconstitute Indian citizens as discretely identifiable individuals (Nair 2021). Vijayanka Nair (2021) shows how the production of citizens as ‘data selves’ transforms politics, in this case sitting in tension with other forms of Indian selfhood that have conventionally been explained as enacted through ideas about belonging to social collectives. Ursula Rao and Nair (2019) also show how the demand to become a biometric citizen in India has encouraged people to work on their bodies in new ways, crafting biometric bodies that are either capable or indeed incapable of being read by state-installed biometric devices such as fingerprint recognition systems.
If the state's use of biometric data has been shown in this case to create new forms of individual subjectification, the affordances of digital data have also raised questions about how they are reconfiguring the idea of the social collective that also sustains state work. Evelyn Ruppert and Stephan Scheel (2021) investigate how the affordances of new forms of data introduced alongside the ten-year population census have prompted a re-evaluation of the definition of the population, fundamentally reshaping entrenched understandings of what a state is and who/what it is composed of. In their study of European statisticians and the work of these experts to constitute national and European ideas of the population, complex data sets revealed the inherent and dynamic mobility of people within and across European borders in ways that risked destabilising the idea of a coherent national population. Along these lines, Moisés Kopper and Ulisses Corrêa Duarte (in this issue) also demonstrate how the introduction of new digital infrastructures in the Brazilian population census defied entrenched understandings of data collection and, ultimately, what stands as reality. These studies build on existing work on governance by numbers, showing how states are constituting new digital and political subjectivities through their own attempts to grapple with the possibilities and challenges of digital systems of surveillance and control.
Political Organisation and Its Transformation
While states have been investing in their own digital infrastructures, technology firms have also been drawn into governmental processes and practice, raising novel questions about the effects of digital technologies not just on political practice but also on the institutional landscape of politics. Despite still having a key part to play in digital politics, the state is now accompanied by a new suite of institutional and technological actors that have entered onto the stage as significant players in political life and effectively extended the practice of governmentality from states to technology companies and digital infrastructures. This has resulted from the dismantling of a particular twentieth-century idea of the centralised welfare state, on the one hand, and the rise of platform capitalism and the corporate generation, use and analysis of big data, on the other.
Since the 1980s, there has been a broad shift in the provision of welfare and state functions in governments around the world (Morgen and Maskovsky 2003). Sometimes termed the ‘neoliberalisation’ or marketisation of state processes, labelled with the banner of ‘new public management’ and manifested in public–private partnerships and consortium arrangements, this shift has laid the groundwork for the creation of partnerships between states and technology companies in a huge range of spheres – from education to health-care, border management to welfare services (Adams 2016; Amoore 2020; Velkova 2021; see also Cearns and Knox [in this issue]). As a result, global consultancy and IT firms have quietly become leading players in governance processes, creating algorithms and building IT systems that are now central to citizens’ everyday experiences of interacting with the state. Virginia Eubanks’ (2019) recent study of the use of algorithms in US welfare demonstrates the sociological importance of this move. Her work compellingly exposes the inequalities that become built into such systems and the way that they end up perpetuating a racialised and classed politics of exclusion and disempowerment.
Nonetheless, still relatively little is known about the everyday practices through which such systems become designed and implemented, and what this means for the places and relations through which digital governance work is now taking place. Beyond their role as suppliers and consultants to states, big tech companies are also arguably taking on novel governmental functions themselves as they become the custodians of the data through which governance happens. Shoshana Zuboff's (2019) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism charts how data went from being a side effect of digital industries that used a financial model based on advertising to create revenue, to becoming the core rationale for companies like Google, whose capacity to create, organise, analyse and (re)present data created an entirely new business model. As such companies become ever more adept at harvesting and analysing data on all aspects of people's lives, this has produced novel social and political responsibilities that large technology companies are now required to account for. These range from the role of big technology companies in influencing the outcome of elections, the responsibility of tech companies to limit people's access to harmful content and addictive forms of platform design, and the question of where acceptable boundaries over the ownership of new forms of data lie.
As several of our contributors show, the appearance of these powerful data industries opens important questions about where politics is taking shape today (see Cearns and Knox; Jiang and Douglas-Jones; Heatherington [all three in this issue]). For political anthropology, it suggests that we might need to extend our sites of analysis, looking not only at the study of bureaucracies, but also at the practices of corporations, consultancies and digital systems designers – a direction in which data studies have already begun to forge a promising path (Chong 2018; Irani 2019; Seaver 2019).
Political Participation: The Public and the Crowd
Finally, the appearance of digital data is not only affecting the practice of bureaucratic work and corporations that have driven an economy around data, but it is also opening up novel dimensions of civic and public life. The use of data by states and corporations is paralleled by the appearance of data as a medium for the making of social collectives, which have an equally important role to play in contemporary political life. This is illustrated in the rise of social media and the circulation of discourse online, which serve to create a highly emotive, temporally unstable and geographically distributed public sphere constituted by an entanglement of people and algorithms. Cori Hayden's (2021) analysis of crowd politics, and the ideas of connection and contagion, evinces how data-driven platforms are creating affective collectives that are not easily classified within existing concepts, such as the public. Counter to the work on biometrics described above, the viral, crowd-like qualities of social media seem to enact a dissolution of the individual as an agent of politics (see also Irani et al. 2012). Others, meanwhile, have recognised the affective possibilities of digital data as an evidentiary form, where bottom-up generated digital data and its counter-descriptions of social-material life are being used to push back against corporate or state uses of data, to create counter-political forms of intervention and articulation (Milan and Velden 2016).
A particularly compelling case of the way that data constitutes social collectives and the contestation through which this takes place is, again, population censuses. Data practices make certain populations salient while obfuscating others through their powers of producing equivalence, encoding behaviour and flattening differences via new classifications. With the vast amounts of data collection, standardisation and circulation that censuses marshal (Loveman 2005) and the social, technical, political and utopian visions they carve (Ventresca 1995), censuses are at once tools of knowledge, administration, government and citizenship (Anderson 2015). Yet censuses have been shown to also emerge out of negotiated practices between societal actors and the state (Emigh et al. 2015), (re)producing contentious categories like ethnicity and race (Loveman 2014; Perlmann and Waters 2002) and serving as contested arenas for new forms of democratic participation, digital representation, and nation-building (Kopper 2023).
Whereas the ‘practice turn’ in quantification centred on new forms of distributed agency between humans and non-humans, the number politics of contested data activisms is one of distributed responsibility. Top-down statistics tend to yield ‘a-democratic’ political regimes that dispel collective deliberation and citizen participation (Salais 2021). Yet the current data moment has intensified the need to think about ‘hybrid forums’ in technical-democratic arenas (Callon et al. 2001); pluralised quantifying worlds, tools and practices (Mennicken and Salais 2021); and mundane practices of method assemblage (Knox and Nafus 2018) in a world where numeric data is being generated constantly by digital citizens (Ruppert et al. 2017) and dislodging scientific canons of truthiness (Graan et al. 2020).
Under the term ‘statactivism’, French quantification scholars began examining the use of ‘numbers, measurements, and indicators as a means of denunciation and criticism’ (Bruno et al. 2014: 199). Such a perspective, simultaneously academic and activist and built on shared conventions of measurement, has unveiled biases in computerised policing (Didier 2018), police brutality (Hirata et al. 2021) and consumer price indexes (Lury and Gross 2014). Simultaneously, media scholars have looked into the alternative epistemologies and notions of justice and citizenship that crystallise through these subversive everyday data practices (Dencik et al. 2022; Milan 2016; Milan and Velden 2016). We can see the value of this move in recent work on environmental and medical activism, where data on chemical exposures, air quality and the experience and aetiology of disease have been used to reveal the vested interests and obfuscations of institutions that have either not produced relevant data, covered it up or created counter-data to generate uncertainty and controversy where there would otherwise be consensus (Oreskes and Conway 2011; see also Fortun et al. 2021; Liboiron 2021).
It becomes clear, then, that data can be mobilised to both sustain and destabilise the long-running promise of numbering work. Because data is inherently unstable – and different data can beget different political outcomes – data can help create the identification of a stable ground or truth as much as it can lay the grounds for its destruction. This focus on how data is mobilised in activism and counter-political settings and how the specific affordances of data are interpreted and understood within a space of political tension thus brings us back to the enduring question of how knowledge and power are related within these unfolding data ecologies – and, ultimately, to the contributions in this special issue, which seek to extend and deepen this field of enquiry through in-depth ethnographic attention to the interplay between data and politics in a range of domains and geographical contexts.
The Special Issue
The contributions collected here come from scholars working on the politics of quantification and datafication in and beyond anthropology. They interrogate the technopolitics, affects, and legacies of numbers after datafication. Looking beyond the use of numbers as conduits of governmental legibility and biopolitical rationality, they theorise the ambivalent social and political fields gelled together by novel data practices and infrastructures.
In the opening article, Jennifer Cearns and Hannah Knox unpack the effects of machine-driven public service delivery in a poverty-stricken UK neighbourhood. The authors showcase how predictive algorithms were envisaged by data scientists, developers and social workers as central in ‘modernising the relationship between state and citizen’, providing cost-effective solutions to long-standing welfare issues under financial restructuring. Yet despite such consensus on the affordances of data, they document competing ethical visions crystallising around the degree to which data should inform interventions. This pushes the authors away from broad critiques of data as inherently discriminatory and closer to contextual understandings of how the human and datafied infrastructure of algorithms are interwoven in local political decision-making arenas.
Moisés Kopper and Ulisses Corrêa Duarte examine how algorithmic infrastructures are reshaping the political landscapes of empirical census data collection in Brazil. They evince how ethical debacles around the implementation of a fraud-detecting system of ‘indicators’ embody the promises and perils of datafication by mediating the relationship between government statistics and data-abiding citizens. Like Cearns and Knox, the authors identify competing understandings of the functioning of indicators and the capacity of computer-assisted tools to predict reality in the work of data experts and field operators. Linking these human–machine interactions to broader political-economic transformations, their ethnography shows that the quantified information upon which governance instruments and national futurities are based is, in fact, crafted through everyday ‘inconsistencies, frictions and polyvalences’ in number politics.
Qiuyu Jiang and Rachel Douglas-Jones discuss the moral and political ramifications following China's incorporation of blood donation into its social credit system. This initiative is imagined as a score rating scale that rewards citizens with points also used to measure their trustworthiness and, increasingly, participation in local governance. As the authors chart the range of online responses to the government's announcement – identifying emic understandings of ‘what should fall in or out of the basket of credit’ – they show how quantification practices gain traction as they become moral. Here, the politics of quantifying blood donations is inextricable from the morally laden biopolitical operations that shape (unequal) citizens through credit assigning and withholding. Against the rationalising gravitas of numbers, they show quantification practices to be fiercely anticipated, affectively sensed and morally charged.
Alexandre de Paiva Rio Camargo and Eugênia Motta examine the building of a quantification tool designed to produce legal responsibility over COVID-19 deaths in Brazil's pandemic necropolitics. As activists gather around the hearings of a Parliamentary Committee of Enquiry to debate what constitutes the legal framework for ‘avoidable deaths’, they enact new spaces for democratic action and political solidarity. Yet these hearings are also spaces for collective healing and societal arenas where the value of life must be translated into a standard matrix. Here, too, the authors show that quantification does not primarily operate as a universal measure of equivalence but as an affectively charged assemblage rooted in everyday moral and legal disputes. Ultimately, it is the very allurement of numbers and the expectations of universality they conjure that bring together lawmakers, activists and grieving citizens.
Tracey Heatherington investigates the ways information infrastructures have refashioned how we come to apprehend nature and biodiversity conservation – from new developments in ‘green infrastructures’ to genetic databases. By recalibrating the anthropological gaze to capture the often invisible and situated value systems that shape ‘the global aesthetic of knowledge production’, the author invites us to denaturalise the scales, spaces and practices whereby numbers and politics intersect, the moral injunctions these intersections mobilise and the enduring democratic and economic effects they marshal. Thinking through the apt metaphor of an ‘infinite mirror’, she shows how the abstractions of quantification distort, refract and refigure reality from multiple angles through iterative cycles of abstraction and immanence. Thus, far from overwriting human agency, datafication underscores the distributive practices whereby ‘human intentions and institutional mandates . . . are embodied within fluidly changing information systems’.
In the closing article, Stefania Milan takes the discussion on number politics after datafication into the realm of infrastructure. She shows that a critical site of politics-making in the age of big data resides in the immanent and inertial power of data infrastructures (both state and non-state) in shaping the social through regulatory and market-driven algorithmic policies, what she terms ‘governance by data infrastructure’. Her provocation is also an invitation for anthropologists and critical scholars of data to more explicitly reflect on the location, positionality and new methodological insights that our situated interventions on number politics might open.
Through cross-pollinating interdisciplinary conversations, the articles open new theoretical and methodological grounds for anthropology to conceptualise the political fields that data engages and summons; the imaginaries of modernity, democracy and futurity that numbers avow; and the affective realities that draw people – from experts to data operators to lay citizens – to numbers. Yet they also investigate what happens when numbers fail, conventions break down, political-economic systems sustaining data fall apart, algorithms are contested and subjects negotiate their participation in numeric regimes to uphold hopes for democratic change. Stepping into the everyday terrains that practices of quantification and datafication weave together, anthropology has much to contribute to the study of old and new forms of number politics after datafication, their material-semiotic affordances, the cultural contexts in which they travel, the competing conventions and forms of trust they uphold and the potential for political-institutional–human change they bear.
Acknowledgements
This article is part of a project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon Europe research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 101076030). This special issue is the result of the international symposium ‘Quantified Futures: Exploring the Politics, Economies, and Infrastructures of Informational Governance’ that took place at the Laboratoire d'Anthropologie des Mondes Contemporains, Université Libre de Bruxelles, in September 2022, with funding from the Marie Skłodowska Curie grant agreement no. 801505 and the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS). We thank all participants in the event for their insights and academic exchanges.
Note
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