Identify and Sort: How Digital Power Changed World Politics
Josef Teboho Ansorge
Abstract
The advent of information technology ushered in new forms of political power. Machines play crucial roles in how states see, understand, and act, and scrutiny of these processes lies at the heart of this book. It frames debates about IT in world politics, explaining how industrial sorting systems employed by political actors are renegotiating the social contract between individuals and the state. The text takes the reader on a global expedition that tracks the historical antecedents of digital power, from Aztec and Inca rituals, to medieval filing systems, to a grandiose 1930s design for a Ger ... More
The advent of information technology ushered in new forms of political power. Machines play crucial roles in how states see, understand, and act, and scrutiny of these processes lies at the heart of this book. It frames debates about IT in world politics, explaining how industrial sorting systems employed by political actors are renegotiating the social contract between individuals and the state. The text takes the reader on a global expedition that tracks the historical antecedents of digital power, from Aztec and Inca rituals, to medieval filing systems, to a grandiose 1930s design for a German registry, to the databases used in US presidential campaigns and how IT is deployed in war and post-conflict reconstruction. Databases are also deployed virtually to record and act upon people who have no publicly visible identification or group consciousness; modern wars and election campaigns are fought on this individualized terrain. The uneven distribution of these technical capacities engenders inequality of access, while rights discourses and legal frameworks forged in an era of mass group discrimination, subjugation, and public resistance lag behind these micro-targeting practices.
Keywords:
information technology,
machines,
world politics,
sorting systems,
digital power,
databases,
post-conflict reconstruction
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2016 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780190245542 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2016 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190245542.001.0001 |
