Bernard Stiegler, “The Most Precious Good in the Era of Social Technologies,” in Unlike Us Reader: Social Media Monopolies and Their Alternatives, ed. Geert Lovink and Miriam Rasch (Institute of Network Cultures, 2013), 16.
Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (University of Western Ontario, 1980).
Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 297.
Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (University of Minnesota Press), 2007.
Nikolas Rose, “The Death of the Social? Re-Figuring the Territory of Government,” Economy and Society 25, no. 3 (1996): 329.
Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Fontana, 1983), 286.
Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (Columbia University Press, 2019), 40.
Jean Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities ... or the End of the Social (Semiotext(e), 1983).
Octavia E. Butler Parable of the Sower (1993; Hachette Collections, 2019); and Parable of the Talents (1998; Hachette Collections, 2019).
Thomas Erickson, “Social Computing,” in The Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction, 2nd ed. (Interaction Design Foundation, 2011).
Mike Savage and Roger Burrows, “The Coming Crisis of Empirical Sociology,” Sociology 41, no. 5 (2007).
Patricia Ticineto Clough, Karen Gregory, Benjamin Haber, and R. Joshua Scannell, “The Datalogical Turn,” in Non-Representational Methodologies: Re-Envisioning Research, ed. Phillip Vannini (Routledge, 2014).
See Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Wiley, 2019); Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (NYU Press, 2018); and John Cheney-Lippold, We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves (NYU Press, 2017).
See Luciana Parisi, Contagious Architecture: Computation, Aesthetics, Space (MIT Press, 2013).
See Ezekiel Dixon-Román, “Algo-Ritmo: More-Than-Human Performative Acts and the Racializing Assemblages of Algorithmic Architectures,” Cultural Studies—Critical Methodologies 16, no. 5 (2016).
See Friedrich A. Kittler, “The City Is a Medium,” New Literary History 27, no. 4 (1996): 720.
See Michel Foucault, “Spaces of Security: The Example of the Town. Lecture of 11th January 1978,” Political Geography 26, no. 1 (2007).
Ravi Sundaram, “Post-Postcolonial Sensory Infrastructure,” e-flux journal, no. 64 (April 2015) →.
Tony D. Sampson and Jussi Parikka, “The New Logics of Viral Media,” Boundary 2, n.d.
British colonial pathologies produced a proliferation of writing genres. As the historian Miles Ogborn has shown, periodic verification and multiple authentication systems defined early colonial rule. See Miles Ogborn, Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company (University of Chicago Press, 2007).
Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (Routledge, 1993), 222.
Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October, no. 39 (Winter 1986). Also see Baidik Bhattacharya, “Somapolitics: A Biohermeneutic Paradigm in the Era of Empire,” Boundary 2 45, no. 4 (2018).
See Chandak Sengoopta, Imprint of the Raj: How Fingerprinting Was Born in Colonial India (Pan Macmillan, 2003).
See Projit Bihari Mukharji, “Profiling the Profiloscope: Facialization of Race Technologies and the Rise of Biometric Nationalism in Inter-war British India,” History and Technology 31, no. 4 (2015).
Keith Breckenridge, Biometric State: The Global Politics of Identification and Surveillance in South Africa, 1850 to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2014).
The fingerprint was a central part of penal regimes and colonial ethnography. In India, “criminal tribes” were subject to compulsory fingerprinting as part of the penal order. See Radhika Singha, “Settle, Mobilize, Verify: Identification Practices in Colonial India,” Studies in History 16, no. 2 (2000).
Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended (Picador, 2003), 263.
Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 242–43.
For Foucault, the older sovereign right to kill was exercised and normalized under racism.
There is a rich body of literature on Foucault’s work and the non-Western world, following the Collège de France lectures. The themes range from the problem of colonial difference to governmentality, race, and the economies of violence and power. See Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003); Ann Laura Stoler, “A Colonial Reading of Foucault: Bourgeois Bodies and Racial Selves,” in Biopower: Foucault and Beyond (University of Chicago Press, 2015); and South Asian Governmentalities: Michel Foucault and the Question of Postcolonial Orderings, ed. Stephen Legg and Deana Heath (Cambridge University Press, 2018).
As Ritu Birla has argued, in India for example, European liberalism distinguished between two categories of action: public commerce and the private space of indigenous elites, a process aggravated by the revolts of 1857. This was again mapped out, says Birla, into an economy-culture distinction, where colonial legal pluralism went hand in hand with imperatives of enumeration while simultaneously politicizing these distinctions of public/native space. See Ritu Birla, “Law as Economy/Economy as Governmentality: Convention, Corporation, Currency,” in South Asian Governmentalities.
Jean Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, Or, The End of the Social (Semiotext(e). 1993).
Baudrillard, In the Shadow, 35.
Nowhere is this more visible than in the rise of right-wing nationalism, which has attuned its strategies to an atmospheric sensibility of contemporary media. Trumpism in the US, Orban in Hungary, and Bolsanaro in Brazil are all examples of this shift. Narendra Modi in India stands out as the most ambitious in this lineup.
Participation in these infrastructures connects populations to a direct relationship with the Leader: in India, all national welfare schemes have the tag of “Prime Minister” attached to them.
See Tarangini Sriraman and V Nitya, “Bearing Witness to the Covid-19 Lockdown,” The India Forum, October 14, 2020 →.
To enable constant network connection, a series of patchwork hybrids and vernacular quasi-objects have emerged in India. See Sandeep Mertia, “From Computing Clerks to Androids: Two Bits on the Material Lives of Social Data in India,” Impact of Social Sciences Blog, 2016.
See Ravi Sundaram, “Hindu Nationalism’s Crisis Machine,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 10, no. 3 (2020).
Patricia Ticineto Clough, The User Unconscious: On Affect, Media, and Measure (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 30.
Baudrillard, In the Shadow.
Denise Ferreira Da Silva, “Unpayable Debt: Reading Scenes of Value against the Arrow of Time,” in The Documenta 14 Reader, ed. Quinn Latimer and Adam Szymczyk (Prestel Publishing, 2017), 88.
Sundaram, “Post-Postcolonial Sensory Infrastructure.”
Quoted in Sundaram, “Post-Postcolonial Sensory Infrastructure.”