Silicon Leviathan – a police order

This is a study in datafication. While its focus is on the datafication of the state, the study is committed to foregrounding the perceptual ordering at play. If datafication has come to prevail, I suggest, this prevalence cannot be understood in its own terms. The datafication of the state needs to be taken seriously, just not at face value. Leaning on Jacques Rancière's concept of police order, I propose to unpack the way the decentring of the state-centred bureaucracy entails the displacement of political agency. Under datafication, I argue, the teleological claim to depoliticize politics is inseparable from the constant policing of agential hybridity qua technopolitically frictionless boundary-crossing. Technopolitics denotes the unfolding of this very claim to depoliticized agency.