Publication
DATAS: The Data and the Sovereign
Through essays and insights into practice-based research projects that resulted in artworks, the volume explores digital disobedience, algorithmic affect warfare, speculative counter-territories, and the flaws of representation based on corrupted data. The featured artistic projects, ranging from interactive installations through narrative short films to software art, do more than critique power: they attempt to model ethical alternatives to extractive digital empires and technofeudal governance.
The publication is the outcome of the project DATAS: The Data and the Sovereign, which entailed artist residencies, a large-scale international group exhibition at Galerie Rudolfinum in Prague, and an extensive discursive programme.
At the same time, we recognise that access to knowledge should not depend solely on financial means. Even the cost of a book may be beyond the reach of some readers. For this reason, and in agreement with Onomatopee, we have chosen to make most of the publication’s texts freely accessible on this website. We believe that the broad circulation of ideas and critical discussion is especially important in a time when access to information is increasingly shaped by technological interests. While the publication as a whole remains protected by copyright and its contents may not be reproduced or distributed, particularly for commercial purposes, we warmly encourage the use of these texts for learning, study, research, and discussions. The copyright is held by the DATAS Consortium, and the publication is co-published by Onomatopee and the DATAS Consortium.
Foreword
Asia Bazdyrieva
In the 21st century, few problems have travelled as quickly and as ambiguously across disciplines as that of ‘data.’ Once a technical term associated exclusively with scientific observation, ‘data’ has become a philosophical, political and cultural concern at the core of contemporary academic debates, artistic practices and civil life more broadly. In Western humanities, a theoretical corpus was built out of the tension between the critique of power embedded within regimes of production of data and the ever-expanding scientific and technopolitical drive towards an optimised world, governed through new possibilities of making every aspect of human life legible and computable. There is still a tension between the positivist fantasy that data can speak for itself and the troubling recognition that data speaks through infrastructures implemented by state and non-state actors that reshape what can be seen, known and acted upon.Here, the question of agency comes to the fore. While it has been central to the project of European humanity ever since the formalisation of its teleology through science and law, the way it has been reactualised lately has to do with the fact that life and social relations are subject to ever more subtle architectures of technological mediation and automation of social relations. A marginal philosophical conversation on what datafication and technological enmeshment mean for the autonomy of human cognition has gradually expanded to a popular scale with a broader realisation that the predatory logic and dependencies embedded in the design of contemporary technology impact not only individual consumer choices (for those who have them), but they can erode and prevent the possibility for political agency entirely.
It is in this context that the question of sovereignty enters the conversation, and it is important to emphasise that the concept often demarcates profoundly different sites of struggle. On one hand, it concerns democratic control over algorithmic systems and the capacity of citizens and institutions to audit, contest and shape technologies that influence civil life. On the other hand, indigenous and decolonial analyses extend the discussion further, insisting that algorithmic governance cannot be separated from histories of dispossession and epistemic domination. For instance, the imposed imperatives of technological transfers from ‘developed’ to ‘developing’ countries come with intensified dependencies and asymmetries that repeatedly extract from bodies, communities, lands and cultures, while feeding into systems that rarely return benefits or recognition of political agency. There is a huge difference in what sovereignty means for a subject, whose human and civil rights are assumed, and whose passport enables them to move freely through the world, and what it means for those whose struggle for such rights is always both personal and geopolitical. While they fight for their civil rights at home, their legitimacy is systematically denied through the fragility of the sovereignty of the state that issued their passports, as well as through technologies of exclusion that are embedded in border regimes, polysemy of law, ontopower, and so on.
The concept of sovereignty is central to the European theory of statehood. It regained its urgency exponentially within the last decade, mainly for two reasons. First, the escalation of the Russian war on Ukraine brought geopolitics back, as some commentators observed, having shaken the already crumbling post-WW2 model of global order, where sovereignty of the state was key. In 2022, the vocabulary of sovereignty was expanded to energy sovereignty and other rhetorics that drift away from the promises of an interconnected globalised world towards the idea of self-sufficiency for European states – a somewhat misleading concept, the material reality of which reveals new frontiers for extraction and dependency. With the onslaught on Gaza, and more recent conflicts that span from the Middle East to Taiwan to Latin America, and now Greenland – it is becoming clear that a different order is to be formalised, for which much conceptual work is needed. Second, the question of geopolitical sovereignty is now merging with the question of technological sovereignty, with technology being inextricable to contemporary forms of governance. Suddenly, what was clear for bodies and lands that were sites of extraction and resistance – namely, that ‘data’ is material and geographical – becomes clear to the receiving ends, such as the EU, that is fearing the political reconfigurations and its significant dependency on US-based technology, and is already pushing forward its own ‘AI’ agenda.
Along these lines, DATAS: The Data and the Sovereign is set to invite its audiences to think about questions of sovereignty, technological mediation datafication, while broadening its conceptual horizon through geographical and social repositioning. As curator Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás points out, the project was conceived as an assembly of people, artworks, artifacts and texts that enable experiments of rewriting the manifold systems of sovereignty. In practical terms, this meant inviting artists and experts who are coming from Eastern Europe and the Caucasus, some of whom extensively engage with a cosmotechnical approach, while working on questions of technology outside the European canon and with considerations of politics that are often excommunicated or overlooked in contemporary debates.
The title of the project is a reference to Jacques Derrida’s The Beast and the Sovereign, with a conceptual maneuver that introduces the centrality of technology to the realm of contemporary political life. Derrida, who departs from the founding text of modern political theory – Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651) – elaborates on how the trope of an animal or the beast is mobilised as one that stands for a form of political supra-agency that operates above and outside the law. In Hobbes’ logic, the beast is the state – the absolute, indivisible sovereign authority created through a social contract to ensure peace and security, a contract without which a war of all against all is unleashed. In the case of this project, following the curatorial proposition that ‘the beast is replaced with a threatening contemporary force: the feral flow of data.’
Such a framing, again, indexes contemporary debates about the shift in power from the state to the private sector – in fact, to a few people that consolidate political power, including through the monopoly on technology. Since it is these actors who define how technology mediates our social relations, and towards what ends, the increasing concern is that we might not be able to imagine democracy as we knew it if or when the state as a mediator disaggregates. In the Anglo-Saxon realm, new vocabularies are forged on all sides of the political spectrum, describing these transformations of politico-economic realities as ‘digital’ or ‘techno-feudalism,’ and as ‘technofascism.’ Commentators have argued that competitive capitalist dynamism has given way to a regime dominated by monopolistic platforms extracting rent through control of infrastructures, data and intellectual property, where economic and political power appear increasingly fused, resembling premodern arrangements. Critics of such a framing caution against treating this development simply as a return to feudalism as it risks overlooking the longer histories of imperial extraction and global inequality that enabled contemporary technological capitalism in the first place, and, we can add from here, are not limited to Western imperialism only.
It is, therefore, important to resist the totalising power of metaphors that inevitably brings us back to European discursive positions. If we were to pick one key take-away from Derrida’s deconstruction of the beast, it is that sovereignty – which, again, becomes its own actant – constructs and sustains its power through narratives. It mobilises various forms of mediation to enable the atmosphere of fear as both the condition of possibility of sovereignty and its main effect. This logic applies today both across ideological divides, whose actors appeal to threats localised in different sites (the data, the refugees, the monopolies), and on the level of an individual, whose mere physical presence and movement through the word is a resource and a battleground. Yet, the techno-doom narratives of the far West, as well as a more universally appealing theorisation of data as a meta-medium, contribute to the reproduction of the analytical frameworks and epistemic regimes that render the discussion in Eurocentric terms, while building on the genealogy of the theory of the statehood (as well as of sovereignty, and of geopolitics) as it was conceived in Western Europe.
While it is correct to understand the teleology of data as that of governance through increased forms of topological control and power, operating along the lines of the extractivist capitalist order, what must be taken into account is the asymmetries embedded in contemporary analysis. One way to account for such asymmetries is to pay attention to the emerging critique that destabilises the foundational beliefs behind the logic of the sovereign state as such. Hobbes’ propositions, to begin with, have been questioned because they operate on political implications that lack accuracy and remain ignorant to the realities both within and outside of the European canon. We can pick up from here and ask: whose body, whose agency, whose sovereignty is foregrounded in contemporary debates and politics? And here other possibilities open up, namely to challenge the familiar conceptual frameworks that reproduce the geopolitical logic of the East–West divide and its domesticated affective analysis of the Cold War, where ‘data’ becomes an episteme of its own, akin to radiation during the atomic era – similarly invisible, potentially omnipresent. This will not be easy, as the reliance on existing theory is compelling. Yet, when the ground on which one is standing is trembling, it is the time to shake the epistemic one as well.
The Allure and the Corrosiveness of Contemporary Information Infrastructures: A Contextual Overture
Uroš Veber
This book is one of the outcomes of the project DATAS: The Data and the Sovereign (2025–2026), a collaboration exploring the shifts in both personal and national sovereignties within the context of our growing reliance on information and automation technology. The project took up the task to address this new shift in the eternal interplay between technology, power and society. Within the fast-paced introduction of new communication, automation and generation tools, we ask for at least a short pause to rethink our worldviews and actions, especially regarding the impact of technologies like AI on life and politics. We particularly question established beliefs, behaviours and paradigms about technology, sovereignty and decision-making, which are too often based on convenience and the short-sighted utilitarian pragmatism.In order to employ an urgent critical lens, which challenges the normalisation of surveillance, data extraction and algorithmic governance, six partnering organisations from five European nations brought together artists, theorists and technologists. The goal was to foster dialogue, resistance and to allow for the growth of much-needed alternative imaginaries.
For at least three decades we have been witnessing the rise of transnational large-scale data production, storing, classification, distribution and advanced searching capabilities. These new infrastructures have created completely new cultural, geopolitical, socioeconomic, psychological and creative landscapes, as well as new inter-dependencies. The pace of these fast shifts is exploding with the recent exponential utilisation of AI, and the nature of these global transformations moves the traditional concept(s) of sovereignty onto shaky grounds. Not only is the data sovereignty of individuals threatened by techno-colonial tendencies, but national and even supranational entities, such as the EU, are awaking to the new realities. Too often only when it is already very late, even too late, do we realise how deeply challenged our political agency has become. At all levels of our lives, we are empowered by the use of new information technologies, but at the same time the traditional, taken for granted sovereignties seem to have been eaten away.
The DATAS initiative explicitly stems from the long-term research of curator, art historian and
educator Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás. Already in 2020, she curated the international show Data and the Sovereign, supported by ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Goethe-Institut and hosted by BIO26 | the Twenty-Sixth Biennial of Design in Ljubljana. Within our new DATAS project she was crucial in connecting the teams of Goethe-Institut, Projekt Atol, Tallin Art Hall, IZOLYATSIA, Galerie Rudofinum and Meet Factory. The team of Goethe-Institut Czech Republic was essential in their support and their unwavering determination to help Nolasco-Rózsás develop this new stage of her investigative process, and the team of Projekt Atol was honoured to be entrusted with leading the intense two-year process and its exciting multinational partnership.
Once the conditions to start the project were secured, through gaining support by the Creative Europe Programme, the project commenced with an international public call for artists to participate in a transnational residency programme. Through the call, we engaged eight artists and collectives from Central and Eastern Europe and the South Caucasus. They were hosted by partner organisations in Ljubljana, Prague, Tallinn and online, in the case of our Ukrainian partner, where war is causing displacement and devastation.
The project has practical and ethical reasons to keep its focus on the East of Europe. Artists from the post-socialist regions, even more often than in the ‘composed and organised’ Western and Northern EU countries, lack strong organisational and financial infrastructures, and have less international visibility.More importantly, they are operating in highly tense areas burdened with explicitly illiberal tendencies, where national sovereignty has already been redefined, as (dis)information campaigns and culture battles are waged within the brutal context of modern warfare. These are the old new geographies where critical thinking and the ability to imagine different realities become notably more important, where the increasingly algorithmic threat to democratic rights and processes are poorly addressed, where practice-based artistic research on the theme of sovereignty evokes a special kind of pertinence.
Through the presentation of artwork, accessible discourses and this publication, which gathers various approaches to the subject, DATAS: The Data and the Sovereign fights against the process of knowledge disintegrating into information.
In DATAS, curatorial work and artistic production catalysed by the support of experts inevitably avoids a sheer representation of reality and turns to the constructivist approach of building new worlds. These worlds are models and emulations of life, as well as prefigurations or prototypes of possible futures. Artistic projects produced and presented as part of DATAS aim to raise awareness and foster a much-needed shift in how we understand the entangled relationship between technology and power. They engage critically with the entangled dynamics of technology and power, offering speculative and research-driven responses to our algorithmically mediated reality.
These works propose future-oriented political imaginaries that confront pressing global challenges – from the ecological crisis and AI governance to disinformation and the erosion of sovereignty. Through diverse media forms including films, interactive installations and web-based interventions, they adopt strategies such as reimagining decision-making from fictional futures, repurposing technological infrastructures and reclaiming data agency. Some construct immersive environments or digital counter-geographies that resist surveillance and centralised control; others expose the emotional architecture of propaganda or critique the mythologies of self-sustaining techno-utopias. Collectively, these projects function as world-building exercises – speculative, resistant, and materially grounded – imagining ethical alternatives to the dominant sociotechnical systems.
The interplay of power and technology has a long history in art and, if over six decades of exploration of computation through art has taught us anything about our ever more digitally dependent lives, the challenges it brings will remain a pertinent and demanding set of topics. As a short (only 24-month-long) project, DATAS cannot single-handedly remedy the scope of systemic challenges it addresses. It could not even pretend to do so. But it serves as a significant point of reflection and resistance against the many steps our society has already taken towards the growing democratic deficit, often brought to us by the alluring powers of information infrastructures, which we only ex post facto find cemented in our algorithmically governed lives together with their immense unchecked disciplinary capacities.
This book bears witness to the outcomes of the artistic investigation and development of the DATAS project. By addressing power and technology interplays through Eastern artistic topoi, it unpacks some necessary beastliness of our growing dependency on the new digital worlds. This is undoubtedly relevant not only for Europe, but also for the global networked community.
Data, Beasts and Other Species
Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás
What beasts threaten us most nowadays? A beast, as pointed out by Derrida, is a being outside the law, incapable of reason, language and political order. An entity beyond accountability and incapable of responsibility. In the Western political tradition, the sovereign is the highest authority in a political order: the one who decides the exception;1 the one who can suspend the law; the one who is not subject to the law they enact. This clearly produces a paradox: The sovereign is both inside and outside the law. It belongs to the political order yet is not fully bound by it.In the seminar series The Beast and the Sovereign, Derrida demonstrates that both figures occupy the same structural position: outside or above the law, one by power, the other by supposed incapacity.2 Political discourse continuously animalises sovereigns (wolf, lion, fox) while depicting animals as pseudo-sovereigns that roam lawlessly. This complicates the supposedly humanist foundation of politics, and may lead to a confusion of species. This confusion may manifest in a chimera-like skeletal figure, hovering between predator and alley cat, coloniser and colonised, danger and vulnerability.
Solely animalising the sovereign misses the technological component from the equation, although the link between politics and technology is not a modern invention. As early as in Ancient Greece, devices were used for the purposes of jury selection, helping a community avoid bias by rendering choices perfectly random. These devices were no computers but were similarly fed with data and ‘calculated’ a result.
Today, the computational impact on political decision-making operates on a less visible level, even though the principle remains the same: data enters a computational system and, several steps later, results in altered human decisions. What has changed is the scale complexity, and opacity of these processes.
Like the beast and the sovereign, today’s rapidly advancing information technologies often function beyond the law. The expanded capacities of big data analytics, such as network externalities, self-generated online traces, user profiling, micro-targeting and real-time supercomputing leave the average citizen with little possibility of directly grasping the conditions that structure social reality.
To paraphrase the slogan that proclaims data as the new oil, one might say that data is the new beast. This widely circulated phrase marks the transformation of petrocapitalism into infocapitalism and the emergence of surveillance capitalism, among other formations yet to unfold. Conceiving data as a beast, however, shifts the emphasis: rather than treating it solely as an extractable asset, it frames data as an entity with agency and force.
This exhibition brings the concepts of data and sovereignty into relation, on both personal and political levels, and unfolds their entanglements. Beyond political and technophilosophical inquiry, the constellation of artworks engages questions of representation and assembly. It reflects on emergent image regimes, critiques the infrastructures that sustain them, and speculates on new forms of gathering and collective articulation.
Images in Operation
CCTV cameras introduced a new and elusive regime of representation. Unlike traditional visual forms, surveillance footage is not primarily aesthetic but operational. Operational images do not simply depict; they perform.3 They function as instruments within military operations, policing, logistics and data analysis. Here, functionality is embedded within the visual framework itself.
Such surveillance imagery informs aaajiao’s life-size transparent resin torso, modelled on an ‘Asian male’ generated by an image-to-3D AI platform. The figure is nameless yet saturated with identity politics, resembling an isolated identification card translated into sculptural form.
Under these conditions, representation, which was once a central tenet of the visual arts, becomes subordinate to operation. The visible image is a surface effect of underlying processes: protocols, measurement, optimisation, guidance, erasure and archival selection. Images are no longer evaluated according to mimetic fidelity but according to procedural efficacy. What matters is whether they function within a system, even if the processes that produce them remain partially invisual or opaque. These operational images thus move beyond the classical distinction between subject and world implied by representation, asserting a more autonomous, system-bound mode of existence.
What such images often promise is objectivity – ‘seeing nature as it truly is.’ As Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have shown, however, scientific objectivity is historically contingent, shaped not only by technical developments but also by shifting moral, epistemological, and social practices.4 Scientific imagery can therefore be mobilised to project authority, including state power. This dynamic is examined in Anna Engelhardt and Mark Cinkevich’s hybrid documentary Terror Element, which follows Nina, a reclusive forensic expert who discovers a videotape related to the 1999 apartment bombings in Russia.
Blending digital reconstructions with archival footage, the film investigates the conflicting narratives used to justify the Second Chechen War. As Nina immerses herself in degraded television images, she begins to question how forensic laboratories became instruments of opaque political power. Gradually, her own lab mirrors the one on screen, raising doubts about her complicity in that legacy.
The Art of Non-Representation
Representation is commonly understood as the depiction or symbolic rendering of something in an image. Yet this model has been unsettled in both art and science. Technologies such as sensors, data capture, and visualisation do not simply record the world – they actively shape what becomes visible and knowable. Drawing on quantum physics, Karen Barad’s theory of agential realism extends this shift.5 She argues that knowledge does not stand apart from an independent reality; rather, reality emerges through specific material practices, the apparatuses, measurements and frameworks that stage it. At its core, Barad’s non-representational approach foregrounds the performativity of knowledge. Knowing is not a matter of describing what is, but of participating in its becoming. Scientific experiments, measurements and artistic practices do not represent a pre-given reality; they intra-act with matter to produce phenomena. Within this exhibition, such phenomena appear as choreographic reconfigurations of the self through an array of mediated images.
Intra-action is most palpable in Nina Davies’s Bystander Assembly, a media installation composed of smartphones, tracking sensors and lighting units distributed throughout the space. As visitors move through the room, these devices detect and track their bodies and faces, responding to subtle gestures. The encounter oscillates between surveillance and recognition, between exposure and affirmation.
Here, the mirror image does not simply reflect; it contributes to the construction of a digital twin, or, in Olga Goriunova’s terms, an ‘ideal subject’:6 an abstract digital entity generated through data and algorithmic modelling rather than an extension of lived experience. Everyday behaviours and traces are captured, segmented and organised by AI into predictive computational models that function as new forms of subjectivity shaped by data and pattern recognition. On the brink of surrendering sovereignty to its digital double, such a subject appears in Spit and Image 1.
Building New Sovereign Worlds
Westphalian sovereignty – the post-1648 model in which the nation-state is the primary sovereign unit, authority is territorially bounded and borders define jurisdiction – is increasingly destabilised by digital technologies. Cloud computing, global networks, AI systems, and platform infrastructures generate new forms of jurisdiction that cannot be reduced to national territory.7 This ongoing reconfiguration suggests that alternative political arrangements, and thus alternative worlds, remain possible.
While DATAS: The Data and the Sovereign foregrounds voices from Eastern Europe and the South Caucasus, an African anti-colonial perspective expands its geopolitical horizon. Nolan Oswald Dennis’s Endless Column, recalling Constantin Brâncuși’s modernist motif, occupies the exhibition space with insistence. By stacking the globe and its blacked-out negation in a vertical sequence, the work invokes planetary scale, infrastructural imaginaries, and the politics of orientation.
This perspective signals a refusal of dominant Western epistemologies as the normative ground for worldbuilding. Following Dennis, the exhibition treats prevailing languages of world-ordering as historically situated constructs rather than universal truths, and seeks to move beyond the limits they impose on imagination and political possibility.
The show’s geographical and technological focus challenges the assumption that technology is culturally neutral. In line with the concept of cosmotechnics, it proposes that technical systems are embedded within specific cosmologies and moral orders.8 Rather than defining a fixed regional identity, the exhibition aims to reopen technological thinking to plural ontologies and divergent futures.
Infrastructural Critique
Sovereignty today is exercised through infrastructure as much as it is declared through law. As Benjamin H. Bratton argues, sovereignty is reorganised across computational layers, including cloud systems, identity protocols and logistics networks, so that control over infrastructure becomes a form of sovereign power. For this reason, the exhibition necessarily engages the infrastructures of computation, labour, energy politics and their entanglement with sovereignty.
Tekla Aslanishvili’s experimental two-channel documentary follows rivers in the South Caucasus from their mountain sources to the Black Sea, tracing the infrastructures that shape the landscapes and communities along their course. The narrative converges on the EU–Georgia initiative to construct a high-voltage power cable beneath the Black Sea, intended to reduce Europe’s dependence on Russia for energy and data transmission. Interweaving personal histories, myth and speculative futures, the film reveals how energy infrastructures reconfigure territories, borders and practices of statecraft.
Similarly, Jonas Staal’s project turns to Ascension Island and its role in successive imperial formations. Over three centuries, the island has been reshaped by shifting regimes of power, ultimately becoming a site of military and planetary surveillance infrastructure. Today, this terraformed and technoformed territory anticipates visions of off-world colonisation, echoing contemporary plans for Mars and beyond.
As the previous works show, the infrastructure of surveillance and computation continues to expand, propelled in part by the rise of AI. Largely invisible yet energy-intensive data centres are pivotal nodes in this transformation. Rudolf Samohejl’s large-scale sculpture stages an allegory of the data centre. It is neither strict realism nor pure abstraction but a split model: on one side, a representation of the data centre; on the other, its ontological weight, rendered as a perforated stone helmet whose mass evokes the burden of inhuman cognition.
Artificial intelligence is no longer merely artificial but increasingly an inhuman force. In Deep Reality Markets, Martyna Marciniak adopts the branding and rhetoric of a fictional AI company modelled on major tech firms, exposing the hidden labour, exploitation and manipulation that sustain AI systems. By mimicking the quasi-religious language used to promote boundless technological potential, the project reveals how such speculation fuels financial hype while diverting attention from regulation and accountability.
Together, these works enact infrastructural critique, a task that contemporary art can scarcely avoid. Building on the legacy of institutional critique that emerged in the 1960s, Marina Vishmidt reframes critique not as interpretation or exposure alone, but as a materialist engagement with infrastructure itself.9 This approach moves beyond representation and ideology to examine how infrastructures (from logistics networks to regimes of labour and reproduction) shape the conditions of political struggle and collective becoming.
Method
Artur Magrot’s triangular tiles form an interactive installation that creaks and shifts as visitors walk across it. This subtle yet consequential modulation of space, articulated without narrative or figurative representation, signals the operative logic of the exhibition itself.
DATAS: The Data and the Sovereign is grounded in the premise that exhibitions do not represent the world but function as infrastructural sites for constructing scenarios and prototyping possible worlds. Rather than presenting matters of concern from a distance, exhibitions act as nonrepresentational technologies: performative constellations in which actors, spatial configurations and materials co-produce aesthetic and political effects. Within a digital condition that unsettles linear temporality, exhibitions extend across platforms, interfaces, and protocols, expanding both their assemblies and their material supports.
The project draws on the concept of the Gedankenausstellung, particularly from Making Things Public: Atmosphere of Democracy where Bruno Latour conceived the exhibition as a political assembly staging both issues and their modes of articulation.10 In this sense, DATAS: The Data and the Sovereign positions objects as catalysts for reflection and contestation, and viewers as participants rather than spectators. Curating here operates as a democratic practice – not to generate consensus, but to render visible the networks of association and stakes that structure contemporary conditions.
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1 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 5. Originally published as Politische Theologie: Vier Kapitel zur Lehre von der Souveränität (Munich and Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1922).
2 Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1 and vol. 2, trans. Geoffrey Bennington, ed. Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009 and 2011).
3 Jussi Parikka, Operational Images: From the Visual to the Invisual (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2023).
4 Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007).
5 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).
6 Olga Goriunova, Ideal Subjects: The Abstract People of AI (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2025).
7 Benjamin H. Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016).
8 Yuk Hui, The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2016).
9 Marina Vishmidt, ‘Between not Everything and not Nothing: Cuts towards Infrastructural Critique,’ in The Former West: Art and the Contemporary after 1989, eds. Maria Hlavajova and Simon Sheik (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017), 265–68.
10 Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds., Making Things Public: Atmosphere of Democracy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2025). Coined by Latour and Weibel, the term Gedankenausstellung describes an exhibition conceived as a thought experiment, staging hypothetical ‘what if’ scenarios akin to those of Galileo or Einstein. Rather than simply visualizing ideas, it creates an exploratory parcours that actively involves visitors. A Gedankenausstellung emerges when science moves beyond empirical demonstration into speculative reflection, and when art departs from purely technical function to engage in forms of inquiry traditionally associated with science.
Digital Leviathan: Big Data and Sovereignty in the Age of Algocracy
Adam Lovasz
Introduction: The Technological Metamorphosis of the SovereignIn 1651, in the midst of the English Civil War, Thomas Hobbes published Leviathan, a treatise that would come to define the entire architecture of modern political thought. The book’s frontispiece depicts the sovereign not as a human, but as a body politic – a colossal, artificial monster composed of the multitudinous bodies of its subjects, wielding the sword of temporal power and the crosier of spiritual authority. This metaphor established the paradigm of modern sovereignty: a centralised, visible locus of secular authority derived from the social contract, a construct to secure peace by compelling the citizenry into submission. For centuries, this model held: the state was the ultimate arbiter of life, death and law within a legally defined territory.
However, Leviathan has a nemesis, namely Behemoth or stasis (civil war), a result of the division of the political community against itself. In a less widely read work, Of The Principles Of Christian Politiques, Hobbes affirms the post-Augustinian Christian doctrine of the separation of terrestrial and divine power. Giorgio Agamben claims that we may infer the following from such an eschatological framing of government: ‘The State not only does not act as a katechōn, but in fact coincides with the very eschatological beast which must be annihilated at the end of time.’1 In theology, the katechōn is a mysterious actor who postpones the arrival of the apocalypse. The simultaneous disappearance of the terrestrial state and of secular politics is a necessary precondition of the Apocalypse.
As one of the Moderns, Hobbes was keen to assert the doctrine of constructivism. Humans, insofar as they come together as a people, are ‘makers, and orderers of’ commonwealths.2 Stasis, however, is the true maker and unmaker of the human body politic: the ubiquity of Behemoth, as the virtual possibility of self-dissolution of the political community, reveals the hubris of Hobbes as a representative of political modernity. Sovereignty culminates in self-destruction, driven by the internal violence of its own self-positioning. According to the Torah, in the end times, Leviathan and Behemoth shall contend with one another, bringing an end to conflict, heralding an era of peace. This latter is achieved at the cost of mutual destruction:
Behemoth and the Leviathan are to engage in a wild-beast contest before the righteous in the Time to Come, and whoever has not been a spectator at the wild-beast contests of the heathen nations in this world will be accorded the boon of seeing one in the World to Come. How will they be slaughtered? Behemoth will, with its horns, pull Leviathan down and rend it, and Leviathan will, with its fins, pull Behemoth down and pierce it through.3
Today, the anatomy of the Sovereign is undergoing a radical transmutation. In the era of what Jacques Ellul described long ago as ‘the technological system,’ sovereignty too is undergoing a process of technologisea.4 Both the political and the eschatological are displaced by the sovereignty of technology, yet they do not disappear without a trace. In the form of metaphors, they survive, albeit in entirely new and unexpected contexts, couched in the language of risk. Today, technology is endowed alternately with the potential for redemption or damnation. Despite its apparent secularism, Agamben claims that Leviathan is ‘Satanic and Antichristic.’ 5 If one takes this logic far enough, then no terrestrial form of human power is legitimate. The issue is that such an absence of metaphysical legitimation does not automatically entail any dysfunctionality on the governance level. Social systems today can operate independently of whether human subjects provide assent or not.
In this chapter, I provide an overview of the emergence of a new regime of power I call Digital Leviathan, supported by ‘algocracy.’ Digital Leviathan represents a technodeterministically-driven reconfiguration of sovereignty, in the context of a shift from the exclusive territorial authority of the nation-state to the functional, pervasive authority of global surveillance capital. This transition is not merely technological but also philosophical, rooted in a will to power that seeks to order the spontaneity of human experience, rendering the behaviour of subjects legible and predictable. In this sense, algocracy represents a challenge to the ideal of human freedom that has long informed the Western tradition, if only in spirit and often not in practice.6
First, I examine the emergence of Digital Leviathan, tracing its roots to the behaviourist laboratories of psychologist B.F. Skinner to the boardrooms of Silicon Valley, where the ‘technetronic revolution’ birthed a new, recursive, cybernetic logic of accumulation that has schematised itself into the form of what some describe as ‘surveillance capitalism.’ Second, I attempt to deconstruct the epistemological foundations of this regime, analysing how the ideology of Dataism legitimises the displacement of human judgment by algorithmic metrics. Third, I explore the structural transformation of society itself; following Jesper Tække, I inscribe Digital Leviathan into the broader shift from functional differentiation to ‘algorithmic differentiation.’ Finally, I articulate a realistic social philosophy of resistance, grounded in the ‘right to the future tense’ and the defense of indeterminism and spontaneity against the totalising certainty of algorithmic governance.
From Behaviourism to Surveillance Capitalism
Some commentators claim that we are witnessing the birth of a Digital Leviathan, accelerated by processes such as the 2020–2022 pandemic-related global ‘state of exception’ and the wars on terror.7 Unlike its Hobbesian ancestor, this new sovereign does not inhabit the political plane exclusively, nor does it rely principally on the monopoly of violence to enforce its will. Instead, it dwells within distributed, recursive infrastructures of servers, fiber-optic cables and neural networks. It operates through ‘algocracy’ – rule by and, most importantly, for algorithms – a hierarchical and self-organising system in which the administration of life is delegated to automated systems that prioritise correlation over causation, prediction over judgment and efficiency over justice.
Digital Leviathan is not an accidental byproduct of the technological of the evolution of society. It is the realisation of an historically contingent ambition for total control – one that pre-dates the advent of the Internet, but has found its realisation in the age of Big Data.8 To understand the logic of Digital Leviathan, we must uncover its intellectual ancestry in the psychological school of behaviourism and its subsequent weaponisation by the imperatives of advanced cybernetic capitalism or ‘technofeudalism.’9
The underlying logic informing Digital Leviathan is rooted in the early twentieth-century psychological movement of behaviourism. J.B. Watson, founder of behaviourism, defined the theoretical programme of behaviourism as follows: ‘Psychology as the behaviourist views it is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behaviour. Introspection forms no essential part of its methods… The behaviourist… recognises… no dividing line between man and brute.’10 This naturalism proposed that humans are animals that may be subjected to rational control and planning. Watson rejected the study of consciousness, introspection and internal mental states as ‘pre-scientific’ superstitions, arguing that the human being should be treated as machinery – equipped with stimulus-response mechanisms that could be conditioned if the environment were sufficiently manipulated. Human society is the subject of optimisation via management.11
This project was radicalised by B.F. Skinner, who provided the blueprint for the ‘instrumentarian’ power underlying Digital Leviathan. Skinner conceived of the human subject not as a being with free agency, moral interiority, or a soul, but as an ‘information object’ or ‘other’ to be observed, measured and managed by social engineers. In his seminal works, particularly Beyond Freedom and Dignity, Skinner argued that the concepts of the autonomous individual – freedom, dignity, responsibility – were impediments to the design of a rational and efficient social order. For Skinner, what we call ‘freedom’ is merely a description of human ignorance regarding the causes of our own behaviour. Skinner posited that behaviour is entirely determined by environmental contingencies; therefore, this naturalism was also curiously culturalist, in the sense that it underlined the plasticity of human existence. If we could fully understand and control such ecological contingencies, a society free of conflict, dissonance and ‘irrational contrariness’ could be engineered. This connects to a tradition within American sociology that emphasised the need for technocratic governance over the previous laissez faire form of classical liberalism that had predominated in the nineteenth century ‘Robber Baron’ era.12 Skinner envisioned a ‘technology of behaviour’ comparable in its power and precision to physical and biological technologies – a ‘totalitarianism of means’ that would solve social problems by eliminating the unpredictability of human will-power.
Digital Leviathan, in Shoshana Zuboff’s interpretation, is the technological realisation of Skinner’s utopian dream. Ubiquitous computing infrastructure – smartphones, wearables, smart cities and the Internet of Things (IoT) – functions as a planetary ‘Skinner Box,’ transforming the lived world into a laboratory of observation, informed by regulated positive feedback mechanisms. Unlike the enclosed laboratory, however, the digital environment is ‘panvasive,’ insinuating itself into all aspects of social life: ‘Skinner’s vision is brought to life in the relentless pursuit of surveillance capitalism’s economic imperatives and the ubiquitous digital apparatus… Instrumentarian power bends the new digital apparatus – continuous, autonomous, omnipresent, sensate, computational, actuating, networked, internet-enabled – to the interests of the surveillance capitalist project… The result is a panvasive means of behavioural modification’.13 The invasion of life by Digital Leviathan does not halt at observation of behaviour; it also ‘actuates’ actions. Through notifications, ‘nudges,’ algorithmic curation and gamification, the digital apparatus intervenes to herd human behaviour toward ‘probable outcomes.’ Algocracy in this sense is also a ‘nudgeocracy.’14
While behaviourism provided the intellectual blueprint for Digital Leviathan, surveillance capitalism provides the economic imperative to build it. Zuboff identifies this as a mutation of capitalism that treats human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data. Historically, industrial capitalism evolved via an extractivist logic, claiming nature as a free resource.15 Surveillance capitalism reiterates the logic of ‘cheap nature,’ applying it toward the inner environment of human nature, operating through a logic of conquest. The private experiences of individuals – movements, voices, emotions and social relations – are ‘free for the taking.’ Datafication involves a cheapened reductionism of the human experience. This extraction process commences with ‘digital exhaust’ – data trails that users leave behind as they navigate the Internet. Initially, this data is used to improve services; however, surveillance capitalist infrastructures have discovered that ‘behavioural surplus’ contains rich predictive signals regarding future behaviour. This discovery birthed the ‘prediction imperative’: the drive to manufacture ‘prediction products’ anticipating what individuals will do.16
The trajectory of surveillance capitalism reveals an evolution from monitoring to actuation. Prediction alone has become insufficient; to elicit outcomes, the system needs to actively shape the behaviour it predicts. This shift – ‘from automating information flows about you to automating you’ – marks the maturation of Digital Leviathan.17 The datafied self is itself a data product.18 An ‘actuating logic’ is implemented to condition behaviour at scale, bypassing human awareness to achieve power-driven objectives.
The rise of algorithmic control occurs within a specific historical context that may be described as the ‘technetronic revolution’. We inhabit a ‘VUCA’ world – Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous – wherein traditional institutions and cognitive frameworks are unable to manage the speed of social change. The convergence of digitalisation, artificial intelligence and biotechnology has created a civilisational inflection point. In this environment of heightened uncertainty, the promise of Digital Leviathan is seductive. It offers ‘manufactured certainty’ in exchange for freedom, promising to resolve the complexities of VUCA ontology through the superior data processing power of machines. This appeal is bolstered by ‘transhumanist’ ideologies that view the human biological substrate as obsolete, advocating for a merger of human and machine intelligence. This ‘technological posthumanism’ is informed by the urge for totality: transhumanism, by denying ‘the nature of complexity, projects a tractable, machine-like world and Big Data functions not only to interpret this world but also to produce it’.19
Epistemologies of Control: Dataism and the Death of Causation
It would be a serious mistake to claim that Digital Leviathan is sustained solely by economic imperatives. Rather, it represents a new epistemological framework that redefines what counts as knowledge and truth. This framework, often termed ‘Dataism,’ functions as the secular religion of the algocratic age.20 Dataism posits that the universe consists of information and data flows, the value of any entity or phenomenon being determined by its contribution to the complexity of data processing. It venerates the integration and transformation of all human activity, even natural processes, into data, promoting the belief that with enough data and sufficient computational power, the complexity of the world can be fully understood and optimised. Such an ideology is represented vividly in the 2024 film Godzilla × Kong: The New Empire, where Monarch, an international non-profit organisation dedicated to conservation, monitors the activities of Hollow Earth flora and fauna, while managing occasional chaotic invasions of the surface world by a range of kaiju.21 Monarch employees do this via real-time surveillance techniques. The logic of Dataism is portrayed excellently: chaos, a natural product of a ‘VUCA’ world, is not foreclosed but rather, normalised, with Godzilla engaging in regular bouts of strength with rival kaiju, with damage control operations. The occasional destroyed city is just collateral damage, a new data point to be managed, of course, for benevolent, conservation purposes. A profit or power motive is not even present, as Monarch is a strictly non-profit organisation, resistant to encroachment by business or politics. This underlines that Dataism and algocracy transcend a narrowly conceived capitalist logic of monetary accumulation – what matters is the accumulation of information, even at the cost of manufactured uncertainty.
Dataist ideology facilitates the ‘interlocking’ of government, business and science, outsourced into a recursive space, taking place outside any of the listed function systems, lacking modes of accountability that would correspond to either of them considered in isolation. Algocracy is a ‘shortcut’, allowing for data management without transparency.22 If there is an empire in Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, it is the virtual empire of data, operating beyond even economic or political imperatives. Digital Leviathan exists outside the boundaries of democratically elected governance bodies, encouraging citizens to trust that the institutions collecting their data are benevolent facilitators of progress, framing the surrender of privacy not as a loss of rights, but as a necessary contribution to the collective intelligence of a self-organising networked sovereignty.23 Under the logic of Dataism, ‘life mining’ – the extraction of knowledge from digital trails to predict future activities – becomes a quasi-moral imperative.24 For Dataism, the unmeasured life, much like the prephilosophical ‘unexamined life,’ is viewed as inefficient, opaque and ultimately non-existent.
A central tenet of Dataist epistemology is the obsolescence of causality. Advocates of Big Data argue that we are witnessing an ‘epistemological revolution’ or a ‘fourth paradigm’ of science. The traditional scientific method – based on hypothesis, empirically verifiable experimentation and the construction of causal theories – is the relic of a bygone era of data scarcity. In the age of ‘data deluge,’ we no longer need to know why things happen; we only need to know that they happen together. Digital Leviathan abandons the search for causality in favor of surface associations detected by algorithms. As David Chandler notes, the ‘datafication’ of everyday life is at the heart of Big Data: a way of accessing reality through bringing interactions and relationships to the surface and making them visible, readable and thereby governable, rather than seeking to understand hidden laws of causality. Big Data is thereby generally understood to generate a different type of ‘knowledge’: more akin to the translation or interpretation of signs rather than that of understanding chains of causation.’25 Knowledge production shifts from understanding deep structures to reading ‘digital signs,’ a process akin to ancient divination.26 This shift has political implications. If governance is based on real-time correlations rather than causal understanding, it can be transformed into a technical process of adaptation and resilience rather than a political project of transformation. Problems are managed as they arise via the mediation of predictive signals, without delving into underlying reasons or meanings.
Architectures of Control: The Regime of Algorithmic Differentiation
How does Digital Leviathan organise society? Sociologist Niklas Luhmann theorised that modern society is characterised by ‘functional differentiation,’ wherein society is organised into autonomous subsystems (law, economy, science, politics) that categorise reality through binary codes unique to themselves (legal/illegal, profitable/unprofitable, true/false, power/non-power). No single system dominates the others; the economy cannot dictate the truth of science, nor can politics dictate scientific truths, and so on. Digital Leviathan disrupts this structure of modernity. As observed by Jesper Tække, we are transitioning away from polycentric modernity toward a recentralised algorithmic differentiation. In this new social form, digital media and algorithms act as a ‘meta-code’ dominating and subordinating all functional systems. Algorithms do not merely support decision-making within systems; rather, they replace the internal logic of function systems themselves. In law, risk-assessment algorithms may replace judicial judgment regarding sentencing and parole. In politics, micro-targeting algorithms replace real intersubjectively integrated public debate with personalised social media manipulation. In science, data mining replaces hypothesis testing.
Tække proposes that the rise of algocracy may lead to ‘de-differentiation’ wherein the distinct and autonomous logics of heteogeneous social spheres are collapsed into the singular logic of algorithmic optimisation: ‘with digital media, the combinatory scope of the time dimension and the social dimension is not decreased in the functional systems but proto-controlled and in principle possible to regulate, either through intervention or through nudging in real-time.’27 Digital Leviathan assumes the role of decision-maker, partitioning society not by class or function, but by algorithmic risk scores and predictive categories. This erosion of boundaries promises a new, nonhuman or posthuman mode of sovereignty: ‘The sociotechnical imaginary carries the idea that the algorithms will regulate society better than humans can.’28 Whether this prediction is literally true or not is irrelevant, for it functions as an already present implicit belief underlying much of Silicon Valley’s effort to construct a superintelligent artificial God.29
Zuboff argues that the power exercised by Digital Leviathan is distinct from twentieth-century totalitarianism. The latter was a political project that sought to transform the human soul through ideology, terror and violence, demanding political loyalty, operating through the ‘engineering of the soul’ (as demonstrated by masterfully crafted propaganda films directed by Leni Riefenstahl or Sergei Eisenstein). In contrast, Digital Leviathan exercises what Zuboff calls instrumentarian power. The contents of the human psyche/soul and ideological conviction are secondary; what matters is observable and measurable behaviour, as output. Digital Leviathan is radically indifferent to the interiority of the human subject. Its goal is to ensure certainty, shaping behaviour for further data point production: ‘It is no longer enough to automate information flows about us; the goal now is to automate humanity. In this phase of surveillance capitalism’s evolution, means of production are subordinated to an increasingly complex and comprehensive ‘means of behavioural modification’ … Instrumentarian power knows and shapes human behaviour toward others’ ends. Instead of armaments and armies, it works its will through the automated medium of an increasingly ubiquitous computational architecture of “smart” networked devices, things and spaces.’30
Instrumentarian power tunes, tinkers and conditions individuals and their behaviours. It treats society as a bee hive, with individual liberty subordinated to the ‘confluence’ of the group: instrumentarian society is… a confluent hive mind in which each element learns and operates in concert with every other element. In the model of machine confluence, the ‘freedom’ of each individual machine is subordinated to the knowledge of the system as a whole. Instrumentarian power aims to organise, herd and tune society to achieve a similar social confluence, in which group pressure and computational certainty replace politics and democracy, extinguishing the felt reality and social function of an individualised existence.’31 It is indeed interesting to see how forums for apparently spontaneous online discourse such as Reddit are integrated into deep learning infrastructure, their very raison d’être being data extraction and behavioural observation.32 Instrumentarian power relies on the ‘uncontract’ – non-negotiable terms of service which are constantly changing – attempting to strip the individual of any power to dissent.
The rise of Digital Leviathan has fractured the Westphalian order which was grounded upon territorially exclusive nation-states, leading to geopolitical competition over ‘digital sovereignty.’ The concept of sovereignty shifts from the body politic of the nation-state to the distributed network of the platform. In response, nations are attempting to reassert control through the discourse of digital sovereignty. This ideology, primarily promoted by technology companies and their advocates, frames AI infrastructure (data centers, chips, models) as essential for national independence; however, this is often an exercise in propaganda. The ‘Sovereignty as a Service’ (SaaS) model sold to the public often deepens dependency on U.S.-based tech giants, replicating colonial modes of extraction: the ‘sovereign’ nation provides energy, land and data, while the corporation retains intellectual property, especially ownership and control of information.33 This leads to ‘contested spatialities,’ the borderless and cosmopolitan ideal of the internet (it is difficult not to feel nostalgia for the cyber-libertarian 1990s) being replaced by data localisation laws, digital firewalls and the securitisation of information flows. Digital Leviathan is thus not an entirely unitary global entity, but a complex terrain of competing algorithmic ‘empires’ (US, China, EU), each seeking to enclose and harvest the data of subjects.
Reclaiming Sovereignty: The Critique of Big Data and a Philosophy of Resistance
The epistemological confidence underlying Big Data ideology is fundamentally flawed. Often surprising theoretical sources can be uncovered that can provide arguments to counter and delegitimise Digital Leviathan. Neoliberal economist Friedrich August von Hayek’s critique of the ‘pretense of knowledge’ remains acutely relevant in the age of AI. Hayek distinguished between ‘simple’ phenomena (like mechanics), which can be described by formulas with few variables, and ‘complex’ phenomena (biological or social processes), Reclaiming Sovereignty: The Critique of Big Data and a Philosophy of Resistance
The epistemological confidence underlying Big Data ideology is fundamentally flawed. Often surprising theoretical sources can be uncovered that can provide arguments to counter and delegitimise Digital Leviathan. Neoliberal economist Friedrich August von Hayek’s critique of the ‘pretense of knowledge’ remains acutely relevant in the age of AI. Hayek distinguished between ‘simple’ phenomena (like mechanics), which can be described by formulas with few variables, and ‘complex’ phenomena (biological or social processes), which involve an incomputable multiplicity of heterogeneous elements that cannot ever be observed or mapped.34 Hayek argued that attempting to model complex systems such as societies using the reductive methods of the physical sciences leads to a false sense of knowledge. The epistemological ‘pretense’ here lies in assuming that if we cannot measure a variable, it does not exist or is not important. In the context of Digital Leviathan, the scientistic tendency manifests as overreliance upon ‘measurable types’ – analytic constructs defined solely by what is available for measurement (clicks, location, purchases) rather than what is actually meaningful (intent, context, emotion).
Historian of ideas Jerry Z. Muller extends the Hayekian critique of Dataism in The Tyranny of Metrics, identifying flaws in the metric-driven mindset that dominates most, if not all, societies today. Firstly, when a metric becomes a policy target, it ceases to be a good measure. This may be formulated by Goodheart’s Law, which states that ‘any measure used for control is unreliable.’35 Secondly, agents, being responsive entities with their own interests in mind, will optimise for the metric at the expense of the underlying goal. This may be observed especially in the case of unintended consequences of government interventions.36 Thirdly, actors will have a vested interest in only selecting cases which are simple, so as to artificially improve metrics (for example, surgeons avoiding difficult patients to maintain low mortality rates or social workers rejecting clients with complex issues).37 Fourthly and most dangerously, measurement may displace judgments it was meant to aid, leading to an overemphasis on numbers instead of problem- or goal-orientedness.38
Digital Leviathan systemically falls into such traps, leading to many unintended social consequences which are often difficult to manage. Dataism creates a closed loop, in which algorithmic prediction becomes the self-fulfilling prophecy it predicts, not because it is true, but because the system acts so as to exclude any data that contradicts its models. It reduces the rich dimensionality of human life to ‘measurable types’ that facilitate control while degrading understanding. There is a high probability that qualitative and subjective factors such as human happiness are unquantifiable: ‘If an algorithm wanted to recommend a spouse, what constitutes a good marriage? Is it equality, number of moments of romantic ecstasy, shared values, stability, or time spent together? … Should we use self-report measures of happiness, evaluations of overall satisfaction with life or physiological recordings weakly correlated with mood? The last may be the easiest for a computer to record, but it might not best capture what humans have in mind when they think about happiness.’39 We all know individuals who should, by all objective standards, be happy, but are not, and vice versa.
Digital Leviathan represents a displacement of democratic sovereignty by the instrumentarian power of surveillance capital. Resistance requires a reclamation of human agency and democratic control. Zuboff articulates such resistance as a struggle for the ‘right to the future tense,’ that is, the right to imagine, intend and create a future that is not predetermined. As Zuboff declares, ‘We choose the fallibility of shared promises and problem solving over the certain tyranny imposed by a dominant power or plan because this is the price we pay for the freedom to will, which founds our right to the future tense. In the absence of this freedom, the future collapses into an infinite present of mere behaviour, in which there can be no subjects and no projects.’40 In Zuboff’s view, any meaningful concept of liberty in the 21st century must encompass a defense of the ‘will to will,’ that is, the ability to autonomously access our inner resource of autonomy, allowing for moral judgment and deviation from norms. To secure such a right to personal autonomy, we must reclaim ‘sanctuary’ – places of refuge where experience is not rendered automatically into data.41 Reclaiming sanctuary means creating ‘friction’ within data flows, disrupting the extractivist imperative while reintroducing opacity that protects human interiority.
As Daniel First has argued in a similar vein, we must resist the prophecy that algorithms will inevitably make better decisions on our behalf. Liberty still has a future, if under this we understand a self-reinforcing, more-than-human system of autonomy beyond narrow technological or economic imperatives.42 Friends of liberty, however, must recognise that algorithms are developed primarily by interests that follow reductive incentives (control, power, data accumulation) which clash with the well-being of humans or even the planet. Resistance involves a far-reaching shift from ‘decision-making’ algorithms (which replace human judgment) to ‘decision-enhancing’ algorithms that enhance species possibilities for humans and nonhumans alike. We should use technology to optimise ecologies of choice – making relevant information and options accessible – while eliminating any authority or monopoly of judgment. This requires a cultivated skepticism and a refusal to delegate ethically loaded choices to machines.
Conclusion
Digital Leviathan seeks to close the gap between map and territory, replacing the unpredictable richness of human life’s spontaneity with the certainty of predictive modelling. Dataism attempts to colonialise the lifeworld, making the latter into a resource for data extraction. To resist this trend, we must refuse the inevitability of instrumentarian futurity. The map is not the territory – philosopher and systems theorist Alfred Korzybski’s famous formulation (later famously adapted by Argentinian novelist Jorge Luis Borges) underlines that models can never be as complex as their underlying realities.43 Good models share structural similarities with reality, but there can be no question of representation thereof. This insight entails a skepticism regarding the Dataist promise of quantified social engineering. The fight for digital sovereignty is not a struggle to build better technologies; neither is it yet another tired humanist gesture of saving a pristine, essentialised human nature from technological encroachment, let alone the construction of more refined data models. Rather, it is the struggle for a sanctuary of and for spirit. While Leviathan may calculate, correlate and predict, spontaneity, chaos and stasis resist any systematisation or ‘enframing.’44 Digital Leviathan is a Golem with feet of clay, built upon the fragile premise that nature can be quantified. By inhabiting glitches, reclaiming the right to a future tense and reasserting the value of unmeasured life (inclusive of humans, but not exclusive to them), we may reprogram this architecture of oppression and transform the digital into a heterotopia for unregulated vitality.
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1 Giorgio Agamben, Stasis. Civil War as a Political Paradigm, trans. Nicholas Heron (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), 67.
2 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) 2.XXIX.1/212.
3 Targum Psalm 104:26, available at https://intertextual.bible/text/targum-psalms-104.26-leviticus-rabbah-13.3.
4 Jacques Ellul, The Technological System. trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Continuum, 1980).
5 Agamben, Stasis, 55. Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, who is famously preoccupied by the theme of apocalypse, echoes this view as follows: ‘The apocalyptic spectre would be Antichrist or Armageddon. And I think there is a lot in this runaway science technology that’s pushing us towards something like Armageddon. And then there is the natural pushback on this is [sic], we will avoid Armageddon by having a one-world state that has real teeth, real power. And the biblical term for that is the Antichrist.’ Quoted at https://medium.com/%40srini.hebbar/navigating-the-end-times-a-conversation-with-peter-thiel-89ca94aa7b94.
6 John Danaher, ‘Freedom in an Age of Algocracy, in Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Technology, ed. Shannon Vallor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 250–72.
7 Lukas Lorenz, Albert Meijer and Tino Schuppan, ‘The Algocracy as a New Ideal Type for Government Organisations: Predictive Policing in Berlin as an Empirical case,’ Information Polity 26, no. 1 (2021): 71–86.
8 Matteo Pasquinelli, The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence (London: Verso, 2023).
9 Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (Newport: Melville House, 2024).
10 Quoted in Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2018), 340.
11 The idea of optimising humans via rational management was prevalent in the social sciences of the era; John Dewey’s pragmatist social philosophy championed the transformation of human nature via scientifically informed interventions, as well.
12 One of the most influential representatives of the technocratic movement in American social thought was Thorstein Veblen who, prior to Skinner, already articulated similar views regarding the necessity of centralised governance and management of human populations, supposedly in the public interest. Already in the case of the early twentieth-century technocratic movement, we may see how populist, quasi capitalism-critical discourses intersect with the drive for increased governance.
13 Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2019), 351.
14 Nudge economics, coined by behavioural economist Richard Thaler and legal scholar Cass Sunstein, is a paradigm within post-neoliberal governance that aims to guide individuals towards optimal decisions. Nicholas Gane, ‘Nudge Economics as Libertarian Paternalism,’ Theory, Culture & Society 38, no. 6 (2021): 119–42.
15 Alyssa Battistoni, Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025).
16 Tristan Thielmann and Christoph Borbach, ‘The Digital Leviathan: Medializing Sovereignty for Critical AI and Data Studies,’ communication+1 11, no. 2 (2025): 1–31.
17 Alexander Thomas, The Politics and Ethics of Transhumanism: Techno-human Evolution and Advanced Capitalism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2024), 102.
18 Deborah Lupton, The Quantified Self (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2016).
19 Thomas, Politics and Ethics of Transhumanism, 99.
20 Andoni Alonso and Iñaki Arzoz, ‘The City of God Revisited: Digitalism as a New Technological Religion,’ Environmental Values 33, no. 1 (2024): 42–57.
21 Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, dir. Adam Wingard (Burbank: Legendary Pictures, 2024); Kaiju are fictional mega-monsters originating in Japanese film culture.
22 Nardine Alnemr, ‘Democratic Self-Government and the Algocratic Shortcut: The Democratic Harms in Algorithmic Governance of Society,’ Contemporary Political Theory 23, no. 2 (2024): 205–27.
23 ‘The New Leviathan Is an Autonomous Digital Machine,’ LSE Business Review, 8 Feb. 2021, https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2021/02/08/the-new-leviathan-is-an-autonomous-digital-machine/.
24 José van Dijck, ‘Datafication, Dataism and Dataveillance: Big Data between Scientific Paradigm and Ideology,’ Surveillance & Society 12, no. 2 (2014): 200.
25 David Chandler, ‘A World without Causation: Big Data and the Coming of Age of Posthumanism,’ Millennium 43, no. 3 (2015): 836.
26 A dark side of which is the well-known circularity of self-fulfilling prophecies. Elena Esposito, Artificial Communication: How Algorithms Produce Social Intelligence (Cambridge MIT Press, 2022), 100.
27 Jesper Tække, ‘Algorithmic Differentiation of Society: A Luhmann Perspective on the Societal Impact of Digital Media,’ Journal of Sociocybernetics 18, no. 1 (2022): 12.
28 Ibid., 13.
29 Maggie Harrison Dupré, ‘Sam Altman Implies OpenAI Is Building ‘God,’’ Futurism, November 15, 2023, https://futurism.com/sam-altman-imply-openai-building-god.
30 Zuboff, Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 15.
31 Ibid., 26.
32 Ben Edwards, ‘Reddit Sells Training Data to Unnamed AI Company ahead of IPO,’ Ars Technica, February 19, 2024, accessed December 30, 2025, https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/02/your-reddit-posts-may-train-ai-models-following-new-60-million-agreement/.
33 Rafael Grohmann and Alexandre Costa Barbosa, ‘Sovereignty-as-a-Service: How Big Tech Companies Co-opt and Redefine Digital Sovereignty,’ Media, Culture & Society (2025), https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437251395003.
34 Strangely, critiques of neoliberalism rarely mention the extent of Hayek’s critique of scientism, an aspect of his work especially relevant in the era of Big Data social engineering. See F. A. Hayek, ‘The Theory of Complex Phenomena,’ in The Market and Other Orders, vol. 15 of The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, ed. Bruce Caldwell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 257–78.
35 Jerry Z. Muller, The Tyranny of Metrics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 20.
36 For example, rent controls can disincentivise the construction of new housing. see Konstantin A. Kholodilin and Sebastian Kohl, ‘Does Social Policy through Rent Controls Inhibit New Construction? Some Answers from Long-Run Historical Evidence,’ DIW Berlin, discussion paper no. 1839 (2020), https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3518332.
37 Muller, Tyranny of Metrics, 24.
38 Ibid., 169.
39 Daniel First, ‘Will Big Data Algorithms Dismantle the Foundations of Liberalism? How the Emergence of Recommendation Algorithms Will Shape the Pursuit of Happiness in the 21st Century,’ AI & Society 33, no. 4 (2018): 553.
40 Zuboff, Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 317.
41 Ibid., 454.
42 First, ‘Will Big Data Algorithms Dismantle the Foundations of Liberalism,’ 553–55.
43 ‘A map is not the territory… An ideal map would contain the map of the map, the map of the map of the map, endlessly. This characteristic was first discovered by Royce. We may call it self reflexiveness.’ Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics (New York: Institute of General Semantics, 1933), 750–51.
44 Philosopher Martin Heidegger’s expression for the integration of nature into technological structures.
The Tragedy of Infrastructure
Václav Janoščík
One of the most popular quotes from Marx is from the very beginning of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, namely that historical events and their heroes appear twice, ‘the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.’1 For Marx it was Napoleon III’s coup from 1851 that mirrored his uncle Napoleon assuming power in 1799.Today, Marx might contend that not only specific events and figures but all of history and politics, the way we conceive of our past and future, has reached the point of farce. We do not necessarily need to go into the buffoonery of Donald Trump and his kind or the conspiratorial dynamism of current populist movements. Let us focus more on current media and networked technologies and how, due to its myopia of everything being either breaking news or ‘all the time, everywhere,’ and its ability to bring us closer to any conflict or problem, to force us to take sides and make statements, all while it actually conceals (its corporate drive) then reveals – how this remediates the tragedies of this world into farce.2
Let me therefore begin with a notion that infrastructures are not only (digital) platforms, but that they have a deeply narrative nature. Infrastructures are ways and systems through which we not only (physically) access the world and its resources (like energy or information) but also understand this world. My concept of the tragedy of infrastructure is aimed at addressing this coagulation of narrative and infrastructural conditions today.3 Namely, I will claim that today we live in a crisis of narrative infrastructure; which in turn can force us to rethink tragedy as one of the oldest and most fundamental (infra)structures, at least in European culture.
The Tragedy of Cosmotechnics
First of all, tragedy is not only a dramatic event, a breaking point or something serious as opposed to something light or ironic. For Yuk Hui, tragedy is also a technology in its own right. In his book Art and Cosmotechnics, he even ambitiously claims that tragedy is the ontological technology of the West. Tragedy is the dynamic between individuals (Antigone) and the world of authority (habitual law that Antigone breaks). It gives shape to the unending clash between individual aspirations or desires and the conditions against which they always break.
Yuk Hui contrasts this model of the West with the more harmonious shanshui model of the East. Shanshui is a historically dominant genre of Chinese painting in which the natural order, represented by the interplay of mountain (shan) and water (shui), is completely independent from human figures who dwell in the world as its tiny inhabitants, not as (tragic) heroes.4
However simple this perspective may be, it provides a relatively novel, fresh concept of what (cosmo)technologies are, which may be helpful when facing phenomena like social media, ‘AI’ (today synonymous with LLMs or generative AI), gaming, corporate monopoly over research and development, as well as their political and social effects.
Technologies are, of course, not only tools or gadgets, on a more profound level they are models through which we understand, imagine and inhabit our worlds – a fact that Yuk Hui gives shape to in his concept of cosmotechnics.
Acceleration of the Narrative Flux
If we accept both of these hypotheses, namely that technology is always a model of our worlds, and that tragedy has been, at least on some level, succeeded as such a model by farce, then the question is why this evolution took place and to what effect.
This is what Camille de Toledo wants to address in his book Une Histoire de Vertige. For him people are a predominantly narrative creature (sapiens narrans) and the vertigo we experience today is, in respect to all the issues of our world, fundamentally a narrative displacement.
To put it as simply as possible, he summarises our (post)modern evolution in three stages: 1) fiction is distinguished from reality; 2) fiction is recognised as the foundation of reality; 3) individuals become creators of their own fictions (and not only their consumers).5 In this respect, we experience a proliferation and ‘acceleration of the narrative flux.’6
Just to explain these steps tiny bit more: 1) the birth of modern culture coincides with its consciousness of being different from reality, being its representation; 2) despite this distinction, the separation of fiction and reality is never really possible due to the foundational role of imagination for our world; 3) as a part of individual emancipation we can take hold of this role and inflect reality through devising our own stories, values, identities and other ‘fictions.’
De Toledo does not address the changing nature of such narratives themselves, nor their dependence on platforms and infrastructures; rather, his book concludes as a meditation on the crises of our world, which do not only entail climate change and actual environmental crisis, but a deeper rupture between humans and the planet, a rupture that narration and language represent, reflect upon but also co-create.)
He terms these successive steps as a ‘forgetting of the world’ and, besides the uncertainty of the vertigo, does not create a positive – world-creative – force of these individualised and platformed fictions.
This is precisely the trajectory we need to address here, and the vector in which contemporary critique of planetary computing ventures.
From Stack to Forensis
Benjamin Bratton’s foundational book The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty outlined an entirely new perspective, not just on network technologies but on the world in which we live. Despite the various new phenomena that have developed since its publication in 2016, it still presents the most robust theory of what exactly the thing we usually call the internet is. His theory is structured along six foundational layers: Earth > Cloud > City > Address > Interface > User. It also makes a clear plea for planetary computational governance or a new type of sovereignty (that of the Stack – hypercomplex and layered structure in which everything is embedded).7
Despite its great importance and argumentative force, Bratton’s project and subsequent work lack a deeper narrative or set of political assumptions.8 It appears as if the Stack is a reality we should just cope with and adapt to.
In respect to, and almost as an extension of his concept of the Stack, I feel there are three theoretical and artistic examples that deserve to be considered more than any others. These are the works of Forensic Architecture, the afterlife of the ‘theory of the young-girl’ and the ‘dark forest theory’ (of the internet).
Forensic Architecture, a multidisciplinary research group based in London, works with human rights infringements or criminal acts that take place in regions which lack unbiased, (technologically) competent or simply the juristic infrastructure to inquire into such events. In doing so, they resort to working with what they term ‘open intelligence,’ the data from accessible infrastructure and its users.
Another important thing for our present concern is how they themselves theorise the spaces in which they operate. First of all it is the 1) field, where events take place; then 2) laboratory, where they exert their technological expertise; and finally 3) forum, both juristic or artistic, as a place where truth becomes manifest.
While this ontology may strike us (from an ‘arts’ point of view) as very pre-postmodern and rigid, it makes sense if we loop it back to our initial models of tragedy and farce. With little pathos and much technological bravura they use and restore not only the ‘forensic’ (forum as the place of public truth) but also the sense of tragedy (in the sense of accepting the harsh problematicity of this work – deeply entwined with planetary-scale computation) treating the world as a crime scene.9
The Politics of Infrastructure
Let me use as an example here one of Forensic Architecture’s most renowned projects, Triple-Chaser. It was created in collaboration with Praxis Films for the 2019 Whitney Biennale as a reaction to Warren Kanders – at that time the vice-chair of the board of trustees of the Whitney Museum of American Art and also owner of Safariland group (through Cadre Holdings Inc.), a producer of ‘law-enforcment equipment.’ Safariland’s most discussed product is Triple-Chaser, tear gas used in ‘crowd-control’ (for instance by US border control against immigrants).10
Forensic Architecture trained image recognition algorithm to identify Triple-Chaser cans. Yet actual pictures for the potential learning set were relatively scarce; therefore, they created artificial pictures with generative AI based on a 3D model of the can to teach their ‘computer vision classifier.’ Hence, the real (Triple-Chaser can) is recognised on basis of ‘unreal’ (in the sense of not actually existing) objects visualised by generated images. Here we avoid the rudimentary epistemology of reality vs (fictitious) representation (the one step in de Toledo’s evolution of modern narrative cultures) and engage in more complex epistemology (real is always classified and generated on the basis of our predispositions or even imagination, be it machinic or ‘human’).
But more importantly for us here – both the field and the forum are problematic because of, and analysed as, infrastructures. On the one hand, we have the distribution of arms (tear gas) as military-industrial infrastructure; on the other hand, we face the financial and power infrastructure of the world. Infrastructure is not only used to identify and situate a place or object within, it is also enacted.
This focus of Forensic Architecture and their methodologies limit the narrative level of their work to a non-fictitious, anti-poetic form. In de Toledo’s words, they are restoring the first stage of modern narrative evolution – the division between reality and fiction (despite the aforementioned machinic epistemology of AI-generated dataset). In this paradoxical way they create the aesthetics of Bratton’s Stack (infrastructure as both we and machines imagined it to look and operate). They give an ‘Unreal-Engine-Power’ or dataphilic, yet relentlessly sober, aesthetic to Bratton’s rather anti-aesthetic, technocratic idea of planetary-computation.11
By the same token, they add a rudimentary and much-needed political level. To frame this more precisely, we might summarise that where Bratton sees relatively abstract networked nodes, they see specific places and agents (witnesses, victims, perpetrators). Where Bratton tacitly suggests following infrastructure, they use it to unveil not only the violations of human rights but also to trace the landscape of obfuscation.
Does and Sirens in the Dark Forest
While technocratic Bratton and technophilic Forensic Architecture present the most important basic account of infrastructures and their artistic usage, the most emblematic narrative account of them today may be encapsulated by the ‘dark forest theory of the internet.’12
Originally developed by Yancey Strickler in his email newsletter in 2019 (prior to Covid, which accel-
erated the dynamic), it was originally meant to represent a kind of condensation of disillusionment from the Internet (as a space of communicative dwelling), and later on taken up by, among many others, Bogna Konior in a more = poetic or narrative fashion.13 The open web (indexed or openly accessible web, regular social media) becomes a source of conflict or anxiety rather than one of safe discussion, and has prompted a move to a ‘dark web’ of fenced areas (Discord, newsletters, paywalled areas).
This immediately conjures up associations with the Fermi paradox, the alleged disproportion between statistic possibility of life in the universe and its silence. The dark forest theory suggests that the cosmos is not silent because no one inhabits it, but because it is a dangerous, ‘dark’ place, where ‘one better stay silent or prepare for conflict.’14 The main import of this dark forest theory might be the intuitive intertwining of the internet and the universe. Here one is a (conceptual and narrative) model of the other.
Down a similar avenue, this aggressive, ‘dark’ environment seems to also be behind contemporary revampings of the figure of the Young-Girl. Originally contentiously proposed by Tiqqun as the embodiment of capitalist ideals of ‘beauty,’ ‘youthitude’ and ‘femininitude,’ today it has been appropriated in a reversed, affirmative way, most notably by Alex Quicho and Maya B. Kronic with Amy Ireland.15
Alex Quicho takes the Young-Girl as her outlet in the predatory nature of the current internet, where the platforms thrive on our interaction. She suggests taking an affirmative stance, to adopt a kind of ‘prey mode,’16 accepting the seemingly frail, docile position of the young girl (with her doe or siren eyes) within which we may save our agency.17 In her parlance, we can assume ‘tactical passivity,’ develop ‘girl intelligence’ and be active parts of the ‘girlstack.’
A different avenue, though in a nonetheless similar direction, is taken by Maya B. Kronic and Amy Ireland in their project Cute Accelerationism. In their remarkable little book and reading performances, they connect e-girls, otaku communities, NEETs, anonymous internet culture, and meme aesthetics with ‘Martin Kawaiidegger,’ ‘Martin Egghider’ and ‘Franny Deleuze.’ They take the cute as the locus of capitalist logic that can be appropriated and played with.
In both cases, theorizing current social-media conditions, philosophy and one’s own individuation all become analogous.18 In respect to de Toledo’s framework, we have subsequently attempted 1) to revive the first step of modern narrativisation – the division of truth and fiction (Forensic Architecture); 2) accepted the foundational role of imagination and fiction for truth and reality (Dark Forest theory); and 3) assumed one’s own responsibility for narratives and identities we are featured in (girlstack, the cute).
Aristotelian Tragedy (of the Internet)
Usually, we understand farce as a comedy or situation where humour (and meaning) is generated (or subverted) through exaggerated, absurd, and often improbable circumstances. Such a broad definition would encompass the January 6 attack on the US Capitol and online conspiracy proliferation, Kardashians and the self-as-capital, or K-pop and exalted affect. In situations where reality becomes more (or as) exaggerated as fiction, where users, the more they try to be heroes, only embrace their objectification and commodification (‘everyone is a girl online’;19 ‘everyone is training data’20), where exaggeration must be cute, surrender might be the only acceleration.21
Furthermore, tragedy in its most notorious, Aristotelian sense can be linked to current strategies in art theory. Aristotle defines tragedy as the representation or imitation (mimesis) of human action, which should follow a unity of time and place (and those agents). This may be a weird but actually rather fitting description of how Forensic Architecture works: reconstructing crime scenes with obsessive focus on the unity of their timelines and Unreal Engine-rendered 3D sites.
But qualitatively, Aristotle defines good tragedy as revolving around a sudden break (peripeteia) that should coincide with recognition (anagnorisis). Like in the example of Oedipus Rex, where the main character ‘recognises’ that he is the son of the man he killed and of the woman he married, and that is what constitutes the ‘tragedy’ of his fate, the sudden reversal from good fortune to utter misery. Therefore, the tragedy consists not of some external circumstance but of his own mistake (hamartia).22
This is why we usually conceive of climate change as a tragic story, since we too have retrospectively realised we are the tragic heroes, in conflict with the planetary ecosystem. 23 Our engagement with technologies and their exploitative tendencies, even in the form of the girlstack or the dark forest theory, could be seen in this light. We are the tragic heroes trapped in the internet, which on one hand feeds on our interactions and on the other hand has been created (at least that is what we are being told officially) to satiate our desire to communicate or to express ourselves.
Girlstack and cute accelerationism may even be seen as a reversal of the tragedy (and its reversal). While in a tragic story, we realise our mistake and face our fate, by participating in the girlstack or cute/acc, we undo the tragedy of our position (exploration of the girl or cute) and appropriate it. Unsurprisingly, Alex Quicho, Bogna Konior, and even more illustratively, Amy Ireland and Maya B. Kronic take their respective theories not only as discourses but rather as actual personal strategies on how to co-inhabit our digital landscapes and develop ourselves within them.
Between Possible and Impossible
The last thing about Aristotelian tragedy, something which is usually overlooked and even surprising, is the dialectics of the actual and the virtual, and also of the possible and the probable. At the beginning of his Poetics, when trying to delimit the entire field, Aristotle claims that poetry (artistic narration) is far more serious than history, since the former deals with what is possible (general or common) and the latter tracks merely what actually took place (what is particular).24
Today, however, the reverse is the case: what can be scientifically (or historiographically) established as fact is taken to be serious, while narrative (what is virtual or even fictious) is largely relegated to the art and culture industry, or to frivolous ‘speculation.’ This is what Mark Fisher means by capitalist ‘realism’ – capitalism is the actual reality, while all its radical reforms are utopias at best.25
It is this very relationship that establishes the relevancy and the more modest starting point of current speculative thought. Rather than going into some science fiction, we resort to speculation because of how it can make us recognise and manipulate the conditions of the possible, conditions which will in a moment turn out to be the foundations of infrastructural critique – or as one of the episodes of Twilight Zone succinctly puts it: ‘science fiction is the improbable made possible.’26
I believe this is what Aristotle means when he ends his Poetics with the remark: ‘convincing impossibility is preferable to that which is unconvincing possibility.’27 Not only do I find it surprisingly fitting to think of the work of Alex Quicho, Bogna Konior, Amy Ireland and Maya B. Kronic as developing this kind of (hyper)convincing impossibility (which itself is the tendency of networks), but I also believe this section illustrates once again the need for transcending the (socially established) condition of the possible, and therefore the need for speculation.
In this direction I hope I have established sufficient legitimacy for bringing up the old context of tragedy and farce. Their affective force is still operative in contemporary media and its critical reflection. But so far, we have said hardly anything about the infrastructures themselves.
Infrastructural Critique
Before defining infrastructures, let us fully grasp the philosophical and methodological implications of the change from idealist, humanist or modernist frameworks of thinking about art and our world (artist, artwork, audience; human × world; nature × culture) to infrastructural ones (diverse agents within environments); or even more narrowly from an institutional critique to infrastructural one. It is not just the shift of focus (from artists or institutions towards infrastructures) but also a different remapping of what art and the world are, a different ontology if you will.
On this note, I will turn to Marina Vishmidt, who, despite her recent tragic passing, will publish Infrastructural Critique: Between Reproduction and Abolition, a text which should present a fundamental discursive shift, one which we may have already experienced and indeed need, in respect to assessing contemporary techno-political conditions. In a section of the book published recently in e-flux Journal, she states that all her work (leading to the program of infrastructural critique) has been animated by a focus on ‘conditions of possibility, whether those conditions are considered formal, social, economic, historical or ontological.’28 This direction (not an interest in digital platforms) drove her towards conceptualizing infrastructural critique, which virtually stands for a ‘materialist theory of ‘conditions.’’29
This, according to Vishmidt, should counter the ‘idealistic’ focus on ideas, images or human agents (yet still account for the social and historic ontology of art). The goal of such a standpoint is to account for ‘social abstraction,’ which I imagine in all simplicity and generality to be the enfolding of our lives or (art) practices into capitalist modes of proliferation and extraction of value.30 More diverse and even practice-oriented avenues than Marina Vishmidt’s work, and in particular her rather academic book Speculation as a mode of production,31 with all its theoretical qualities do not provide symbolic examples or more tangible, practical ways of putting this.32 Let us note that infrastructural critique faces the danger of becoming all-too-academic. And that is exactly why I am trying to contextualise it here with artistic examples and narrative, tragic framework.
Infrastructural Horror
Anna Engelhardt and Mark Cinkevich push infrastructural critique toward what they call infrastructural horror. In both their collaborative practice and an eponymous text, they seek to give infrastructure a tangible, almost visceral form. Tracing oil networks from Russia to the ISAB refinery in Sicily (owned by the private-equity firm GOI Energy Limited, run by figures linked to Lukoil) and onward to European gas stations, they reveal how these systems are entangled with – and ultimately help finance – Russia’s war efforts.
In general, they claim that while for the 19th century it was ruins that provided a stage for Gothic horror, today ‘sprawling limbs and hulking frames, towering oil platforms, writhing wires, and bottomless mines are omens of contemporary dread.’33 Yet their videos, as well as the aforementioned text, engage a highly affective, first-person perspective. They not only create horror, but show its effect on particular people or in the realm of politics.
In this direction, the infrastructural horror for Engelhardt and Cinkevich is both the aesthetic site of structural violence and colonial expansion which use infrastructures to generate and complicate or obfuscate their destructive activities but also as a critical method of exposing these linkages. They want us to see infrastructures, like the oil industry, as symbols and mechanisms of dispossession, domination, and violence.
This technique of exposing a real function, as well as an aesthetic, symbolic form of power, has been embedded in various forms in art since its earliest critical aspirations; from Las Meninas and Don Quijote to the early institutional critique of Hans Haacke. The horror genre too, from the early inhumanism of Frankenstein, or the realism of Charles Dickens, to the speculative horror of Eugene Thacker, Zach Blas and Joey Holder. Yet horror’s affective force is usually to incite dread or fear, as even Engelhardt and Cinkevich clearly show.
Tragedy Not of Commons but of Infrastructures
Usually, we understand infrastructures to be places of intersection, transportation or communication while the means of production, despite their clear reliance on infrastructures, were bound to places of production like fields or factories. Today, hardly anyone would contest the fact that infrastructures (rather than the sites of production) are the crucial locus of value-creation and accumulation. (LLMs and large datacenters literally fuse both of these poles, they represent infrastructure that has become the site of production, sort of a new factory for data-capitalism.)
Let me illustrate this complex evolution through one relatively well-known problem, namely the ‘tragedy of commons.’ Though it was explicitly formulated only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this argument is widely used by many advocates of private property and capitalist modes of production.34 It denotes a situation wherein individual agents, acting in their own self-interest, overuse and deplete a shared, finite resource (the ‘commons’) to the detriment of the entire group’s long-term welfare – examples would include overfishing or deforestation. This argument has naturally been criticised by current theorists, notably by Sylvia Federici.35
I am not an economist, nor expert enough to cite specific and representative examples that would support either side of this conflict. (Nonetheless, I have more than a strong inclination to think that shared usage is far less conducive to overuse than capitalist exploitation.) I want to just bring up the now obvious perspective of digital (or post-online) commons, which could indeed turn out instructive.36
Apparently, today’s commons include: attention economies (feeds, timelines, discourse cycles); affective labour (connection, solidarity, care, outrage, vulnerability, authenticity); symbolic resources (gestures, critiques, moral positioning, radicality); speculative imaginaries (futures, crises, promises, collapse). All platformised businesses (not just social media) use these resources – allow me to refer to them as behavioural or affective capital – in their channels of affect, from Tesco Clubcard to gaming and conspiracy theorising.
Clearly our attention, affects and online behaviour are far more flexible resources than coal or even water. We can amplify their abundance by staying online non-stop (due to addictive dynamic of scrolling, dopamine cycles, or simply because exit costs are too high), with cross-connections between various platforms, by inserting other layers (of platforms, relations and interfaces), or even through bots or generated content. This dynamic is significant within today’s form of capitalism (and has been theorised in a fresh way by Marek Poliks and Roberto Allonso Trillo).37
It is beyond obvious that this relatively new, expanded flexibility of resources and their capitalist accumulation has further intensified exploitation. One might argue that these commons are exhausted (I believe we can all feel the ennui with networked communication and labour)38 but not yet over-exhausted in the sense denoted by the tragedy of commons (like a forest that is simply cut down). Yet this reproduction apparently only further entrenches exploitation and our work in extrapolating infrastructures.39 To put it simply, todays platformised capitalism inflates our attention (makes us play or post more) in order to have more resource for value accumulation, with the only limit of making us stay online.
The tragedy we are living through is not of the resources themselves, the commons, or our attention or affection; it is a tragedy of infrastructures, their power and ability to reproduce.
Are There Any Limits?
The question of limits (of exhaustion, of one platform of attention economy or affects) is truly intriguing because it is an inverse question of what can or should be done. It can illustrate how digital economies are progressively drifting away from any horizontally navigable space, where resources might be organised topologically, laid out as if on a map one next to another, towards a far more multimodal ontology. On the other side it can help us explain why we might have the feeling of not being able to do anything with (critical) theory or art; it may even give us some renewed hope in production and reception of theory and art.
In Exocapitalism: Economies with Absolutely No Limits. Poliks and Trillo claim that capitalism has lost its limit and is progressively becoming more autonomous. They ground their analysis in four relatively novel concepts: scale, lift, fold and drag. 1) The first chapter elaborates scale. But not only in the sense of abstractive tendencies, the scaling up (of economical activity). Rather they claim that ‘exocapitalism is infinite, unbound, untethered, independent, totally unbothered with the human condition, completely preoccupied with its own obsessions.’40 2) The economy is increasingly built from modular, recursive software services (SaaS) that stack upon each other creating intermediary layers or folds than can be economically exploited. This is mostly tied to the vector of Software as a Service (SaaS) in which we do not buy product (like Adobe InDesign) but we enter a fold (Creative Cloud) where other forms of interaction and value aggregation can happen (like subscription fees, cloud storage upselling, user data collection…). 3) Within such accelerating circulation it is important to elevate – lift – some objects of affect from their (physical or other) constraints. This is, at least I think, the core of how value is generated in such economies (as opposed to production as the engine of classical capitalist economies) and how value-aggregation is, to a large extent, freed from labour. 4) Finally, the platforms need to lock-in, anchor or entrench their (user) base in order to extract value in the form of rent. In this direction they drag us along.
In practice, for instance high-frequency-trading is based on scalarity, the ability of a system to deal with contingencies in respect to the whole.41 Fold is the middleware, APIs, Salesforce (which is a kind of emblematic example for Trillo and Poliks), Amazon Marketplace, social media advertisement markets or loyalty programs, which insert intermediaries that generate new surfaces of accumulation. Lift can be represented by gaming currencies, NFTs, or algorithmic trading, where value exists independently of (is lifted from) material goods or labour. Drag emerges in subscription models, Apple’s ecosystem lock-in, intellectual property regimes or the simply too-high cost of exiting a platform like Facebook or Instagram, all of which anchor users and flows to extract rent and stabilise capital.
A very similar vector of thought is inherent to the concept of ‘janky capitalism’ developed mainly by the artist Daniel Felstead. In their work, he and Jenn Leung explore how seemingly minor glitches, workarounds, and improvisations within digital platforms – ‘janky’ interfaces, broken flows, and unexpected affordances – become productive sites of value capture, shaping user behaviour, attention, and affect in ways that are both exploited and monetised. Just as Fold or Drag describe the engineered intermediaries and constraints of exocapitalism, janky capitalism highlights how informal, unstable, and contingent aspects of infrastructures are folded into circuits of accumulation, revealing the deep entanglement of everyday use, platform design and capital’s adaptability.42
Theorising with Absolutely No Limits
Metaphorically, we can see all these steps in the very form of tragedy. It abstracts – scales – our life onto a more general artistic level (mimesis). The artistic (and even critical) structure is – folded – creates its on narrative meanders existing in a sens on top of larger cultural layers and even creating space for new derivative ones (other artworks, discourse, critique, curation). But the core of (Aristotellian) tragedy is to elevate – lift – our feelings (catharsis), so that we may loop back into our lives through exercise and the cultivation of empathy (sympatheia, eleos, phobos). The world of these tragedies can create scaling gravitational pulls – drags – (aggregating institutional, social and even critical capital) as can be seen not only in recent franchises like Star Wars or Game of Thrones but even the serialised origins of novel and modern literature (that were published in magazines).
More and more we can see that unlike Aristotle and the subsequent philosophico-narratological tradition, today we have to focus not on singular (and still linear) narratives or heroes, but rather on these serialised, seemingly never-ending, multimodal narratives and life-moulding (infra)structures. One of the best examples of this is gaming.
Contemporary games no longer operate primarily as closed narratives with a beginning, a climax and a resolution, but as persistent worlds with service infrastructures, ingame currencies and affective machines.43 Games like Fortnite, Red Dead Redemption 2, League of Legends, World of Warcraft and even mobile gacha games, scale massively across time, platforms, and social contexts, folding play into streaming, modding, esports, fandoms and economies of microtransactions. They lift affect by abstracting effort, attention, and desire into points, skins, currencies, ranks, or probabilistic rewards – forms of value increasingly detached from any stable notion of labour or completion.
At the same time, games are deeply folded through middleware, engines, live-ops systems, analytics and monetisation layers that insert continuous intermediaries between player action and meaning. Finally, they operate through drag: subscription models, battle passes, daily quests, sunk-cost mechanics and social obligations that anchor players within ongoing loops rather than narrative closure. In this sense, gaming exemplifies a tragic structure without catharsis: there is no final resolution, only perpetual engagement, optimisation and return – not the hero’s journey but the endlessly deferred endgame.
Analogously, my quasi-method here is to not to build up an essay on a classic, linear basis, but to use the multimodal, more additive, syncopal contraction of scale (tragedy as cosmotechnics, or infrastructure), lift (making affective points rather than academic arguments), fold (add new intermediary layers, new referential planes) and drag (maintain some theory surplus-value while generating momentum). Still, the problem of how to genuinely reflect upon theory as an infrastructure (in this context) is for another text and we should turn back to our argument.
If we accept we are really living in this progressively scaled, lifted, folded and dragged economy, can we use this dynamism? Should we oppose it? If not, what is the possible course of (artistic or critical) action? More succinctly, what is the tragedy of infrastructure?
Tragedy of Infrastructure
It is traditionally assumed that the Homeric epic laid out the narrative basis for Western culture by surpassing the oral tradition of myth and its underlying idea of the cosmos of (super)natural powers and gods with linear narration,44 a hero’s journey plotline, the imperial ambitions of Hellenic culture and a proto-capitalist subjectivity built upon social hierarchy (as famously demonstrated by Adorno and Horkheimer in their Dialectic of Enlightenment).45 When tragedy appeared in its most emblematic examples in fifth century BC, it already signalled a crisis (both internal and external) of the Greek proto-imperium. While in the epic, the hero (Odysseus) prevails, in the tragedy she (Antigone) always tragically crashes against the larger structures of culture, power and universe.
Writing this text in a moment when wars in Ukraine and Gaza seem never-ending and the US, after its abduction of the President of Venezuela and his wife, escalates its threats to conquer Greenland, I cannot help but think about the invisible scaffolding of narrative, and the cultural subconscious of this situation. I think it is legitimate to draw significant similarities between the Homeric epic – the conquest of Troy, the eventually successful heroic, patriarchal return home (to an idealised, static, hierarchical past), and the current imperial ambitions of today’s superpowers.
While ‘our’ first reading of what is happening (from populist movements, a corroding democratic consensus, distrust in institutions, a rise of xenophobia and other illiberal tendencies, to all the geopolitical strife) might be that of farce, our second consideration and framing, based on our critical and artistic tradition, should be that of tragedy. This point is neither defeatist nor inherently sad, but rather structural.
Moreover, the current tragedy is less about specific characters and heroes, and more about our structural constraints and freedoms – it is a tragedy of infrastructure. I consider it very important to note that this is also the avenue of some contemporary philosophers like Reza Negarestani, Ray Brassier, Peter Wolfendale and Armen Avanessian (but even including xenofeminists and authors like Luciana Parisi, Amanda Beech, Jonas Staal and Patricia Reed) who theorise intelligence (or reason) not a human or individual capacity, but rather an infrastructural yet outside-oriented or even inhuman phenomenon, an ongoing obligation for the ‘infrastructure of self-realisation.’46
It is my understanding that exploration of this condition is not only at the core of the project of infrastructural critique, but also presents what the artist and thinkers involved in DATAS: The Data and the Sovereign are so vitally engaged in.
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1 Karl Marx, ‘Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,’ https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/.
2 For similar framing of farce and tragedy see: Hal Foster, What Comes After Farce? Art and Criticism at a Time of Debacle (London: Verso, 2020). For the seeming ubiquitousness of things (represented through media) and its effect see: Stuart Jeffries, Everything, All the Time, Everywhere: How We Became Postmodern (London: Verso Books, 2022).
For the detachment of viewers from the suffering on images or in media see: Ways of Seeing, episode 4, Fine Arts and Commerce,' written by John Berger, directed by Michael Dibb, aired January 29, 1972 on the BBC, 30:12, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35NiWhVyki8.
3 In this vector I follow up on the work of not only Yuk Hui, as will be clear below, but also Bernard Stiegler’s project of critique of technics. See, for instance, Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
4 For instance: Yuk Hui, Art And Cosmotechnics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press / New York: e-flux, 2021), 46–47.
5 Camille De Toledo, Une Histoire Du Vertige (Paris: Verdier, 2023), 26.
6 Ibid., 36.
7 Benjamin H. Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016).
8 Bratton even warns about the West’s tendency to conflate AI in our cultural imagination with actually existing AI. See his afterword, ‘Apology for Western Theory of AI,’ in Benjamin H. Bratton, Anna Greenspan and Bogna Konior, Machine Decision Is Not Final (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2025), 373.
9 For a concise critique of their practice, see Claire Bishop, Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today (London: Verso Books, 2025), 66–68.
10 Triple-Chaser, Forensic Architecture, https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/triple-chaser.
11 Unreal Engine is the most advanced shared platform for creating games, visualisations or scenes. Forensic Architecture uses this particular tool in many of their projects. For reasons Forensic Architecture’s usage of it, see ‘Computer Vision in Triple-Chaser,’ https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/cv-in-triple-chaser.
12 Bishop, Disordered Attention, 67; Yancey Strickler, ‘The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet,’ Medium, May 20, 2019, https://ystrickler.medium.com/the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-internet-7dc3e68a7cb1.
13 Bogna Konior, The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet (Cambridge: Polity, 2026).
14 Bogna Konior, The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet: Flugschriften no. 6 (Berlin: Disruption Network Lab, 2020). Available at https://flugschriften.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/flugschriften-6-bogna-konior-the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-internet-v.2.pdf.
15 Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012), 16.
16 Alex Quicho, ‘Prey Mode: Why Girls Are Pretending to Be Cute Animals,’ Dazed, November 20, 2023, https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/61336/1/going-prey-mode-girls-cute-animals-online-canthal-tilt-tiktok?utm_source=chatgpt.com.
17 Václav Janoščík and Doris Sisková, ‘Doe vs Siren Zine,’ Academia.edu, July 11, 2025, https://www.academia.edu/130500007/Doe_vs_Siren_Zine.
18 For a critical account of a broader phenomenon of ‘auto-theory,’ see Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or the Style of Too Late Capitalism (London: Verso Books, 2024).
19 Alex Quicho, ‘Everyone Is a Girl Online,’ Wired, September 11, 2023, https://www.wired.com/story/girls-online-culture/.
20 Konior, The Dark Forest, 31.
21 Amy Ireland and Maya B. Kronic, Cute Accelerationism (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2024), 6.
22 See Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Stephen Halliwell et al., Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1932). Mimesis: 1449b24; unity of time and place: 1099b30; peripetia: 1451b; anagnorisis: 1447a16; hamartia: 1453a7.
23 For a critique of generalizing humankind as ‘we’ and its displacement for a positive concept of Cthulhucene, see Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).
24 Aristotle, Poetics, 1451b5-6.
25 Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism (Winchester: Zer0 Books, 2009).
26 Quoted in Steven Shaviro’s foundational text on speculation, ‘Defining Speculation: Speculative Fiction, Speculative Philosophy and Speculative Finance’ in Speculation, ed. Marina Vishmidt (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2023).
27 Aristotle, Poetics, 1461b26–28.
28 Marina Vishmidt, ‘Infrastructural Critique: Between Reproduction and Abolition,’ e-flux Journal 155 (2025), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/155/675808/infrastructural-critique-between-reproduction-and-abolition.
29 To quote the entire and most fundamental paragraph of the introduction of the forthcoming book: ‘This very contained flashback furnishes a backdrop for explaining what I have come to refer to as infrastructural critique. In my approach, attention to infrastructure is inseparable from the attempt to develop a materialist theory of ‘conditions.’ This means the material conditions of the institution’s reproduction, both in and beyond the art field. We need a theory that doesn’t rely on idealist philosophical paradigms and yet can simultaneously attend to the so-called historical and social ontology of art. Beyond this, it needs to engage with the space of social struggle and organizing, the field of work, and everything that the field conceals or excludes, both within and beyond its own institutional environment. At its far limit, it should also be able to deal with questions of social abstraction, which, as I will argue throughout this book, also means with colonialism and race.’ Vishmidt, ‘Infrastructural Critique.’
30 In this vein social abstraction is an extension of the famous Marxist concept of real subsumption, according to which capital does not ‘subsume’ only actual labour (time) but envelops the entire life of labourers (including, for instance, reproductive and unpaid labour). The theoretical discussion of this concept, from Marx, via Althusser and Alfred Sohn-Rethel to Antonio Negri and Marina Vishmidt is indicative of the evolution of Marxist thought since it addresses the question of (over)determination of condition (base) of our lives and culture (superstructure).
31 Marina Vishmidt, Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019).
32 A more variegated and example-rich overview could be found in Bassam El Baroni, ed., Between the Material and the Possible: Infrastructural Re‑examination and Speculation in Art (London: Sternberg Press, 2022).
33 Anna Engelhardt and Mark Cinkevich, ‘Infrastructural Horror,’ e-flux Architecture: New Silk Roads, September 11, 2024, https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/new-silk-roads/621479/infrastructural-horror.
34 Garrett Hardin, ‘The Tragedy of the Commons,’ Science 162, no. 3859 (December 13, 1968): 1243–48; William Forster Lloyd, Two Lectures on the Checks to Population, 1833 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968).
35 Silvia Federici, ‘Feminism and the Politics of the Commons,’ The Commoner 24 (2011): 1–19.
36 See, for instance, Nico Dockx and Pascal Gielen, eds., Commonism: A New Aesthetics of the Real (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2018); Cornelia Sollfrank, Felix Stalder and Shusha Niederberger, eds., Aesthetics of the Commons (Zürich: Diaphanes, 2021).
37 Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo, Exocapitalism: Economies with Absolutely No Limits (Berlin: Becoming Press, 2025).
38 This is one of the main motifs of the dark forest theory of the internet, see Strickler, ‘The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet.’
39 Or in other words, this is precisely the reproduction of conditions, about which Marx and Althusser famously write – reproduction that is necessary for the system (mode of production) to survive and reproduce itself. See Louis Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (London: Verso Books, 2014), 233.
Algorithmic Reconfiguration of Borders and Tactical Anonymity: Migration Struggles in the Age of Digital Bordering
Mojca Pajnik
Over the past two decades, European border regimes have undergone a profound digital transformation that has fundamentally altered how borders are governed, experienced and contested. Biometric databases, interoperable information systems, predictive analytics and automated risk assessments now form the infrastructural backbone of EU migration control. Systems such as Eurodac, the Schengen Information System, the Visa Information System and more recent instruments including the Entry/Exit System and ETIAS under the Pact on Migration and Asylum do not merely supplement existing border practices – they reorganise the very ontology of the border.Borders are no longer confined to territorial demarcations or juridical thresholds encountered at specific points in space and time. Instead, they increasingly operate as algorithmic assemblages that sort, anticipate and differentially govern mobile populations. Borders have become information systems that regulate mobility by categorising, filtering and ranking migrants.1 This shift marks a move away from episodic border encounters toward continuous regimes of monitoring, assessment and anticipation that extend into migrants’ bodies, biographies and everyday lives.
It is through these data-driven and anticipatory arrangements that power is increasingly exercised at the border. Visibility becomes a central technological means of governance, as migrants are rendered legible through biometric registration, database interoperability and risk-scoring algorithms, while the infrastructures that classify and decide remain opaque and largely unaccountable. Control is exercised less through the visible presence of border guards than through automated rules, stored biometric traces and algorithmic evaluations that pre-emptively shape access to territory, rights and protection. Contemporary borders thus operate through lines of code that sort lives into hierarchies of risk.2
These transformations are not politically neutral. The datafication of migration governance has been readily mobilised by authoritarian populist actors across Europe, who frame biometric systems and security databases as objective tools of national protection and sovereign control. Digital border infrastructures provide a powerful means to intensify racialised surveillance while displacing responsibility onto technical systems, algorithms or EU-level requirements. Decisions that are deeply political – about exclusion and belonging – are recast as technical outcomes, thereby depoliticising coercive border governance and enabling actors to evade accountability.
This essay situates digital bordering within critical border studies, feminist political economy and the autonomy of migration perspective. It advances three core arguments. First, it conceptualises European borders as regimes of structurally produced violence and cruelty rather than neutral systems of migration management. Second, it shows how algorithmisation and datafication reorganise violence by embedding it within routine administrative and technical processes under conditions of surveillance capitalism. Third, it foregrounds migrant agency, resistance and struggle – particularly through practices of tactical anonymity – as constitutive power that contests and destabilises digital border regimes. In doing so, we show that struggles over migration and digital bordering are central to contemporary debates about democracy, sovereignty and freedom of movement.
Perspectives from Critical Border Studies: Border Management as Cruelty
Critical border studies have consistently challenged the understanding of borders as neutral, technical, or merely administrative institutions. Instead, borders are theorised as historically contingent and politically productive sites where power, inequality and violence are actively constituted and reproduced.3 From this perspective, borders are not peripheral to liberal democratic orders but central to their functioning, as they delineate the boundaries of political community, legal protection and human worth. Contemporary European borders, in particular, operate less as fixed territorial demarcations than as dispositifs of governance that regulate mobility, stratify populations and distribute vulnerability and death.
This line of conceptualisation frequently draws on Foucault’s understanding of biopolitics as a form of power concerned with the administration of life – its optimisation, regulation and abandonment.4 Borders are a key site where biopolitical power intersects with necropolitical logics: they decide whose lives are fostered and whose are exposed to harm, neglect or death. Border regimes thus do not merely control movement; they govern the differential valuation of lives. In this sense, borders function as technologies of selection that organise populations along the lines of race, nationality, class, gender, sexuality and legal status, producing hierarchies of mobility and belonging.
Critical border studies insist that borders are not singular or uniform entities but heterogeneous and polysemic institutions that take different forms depending on social position and geopolitical location. The same border may operate as an invisible administrative filter for some and as a lethal obstacle for others. This insight has led to a decisive analytical shift away from viewing the border as a line or object toward analysing bordering as a set of practices. Borders are produced and reproduced through everyday acts of classification, surveillance, legal interpretation and enforcement carried out by state authorities, supranational agencies, private contractors and humanitarian actors alike.5 Borders are thus processual and relational, continuously enacted across multiple sites and scales rather than confined to territorial edges.
Within this framework, violence is not external to bordering practices but intrinsic to them. As Balibar argues, borders are foundational to modern political orders precisely because they authorise violence in the name of security, sovereignty and order.6 European border regimes exemplify this logic through practices that systematically suspend and erode rights while remaining formally embedded in legal and bureaucratic procedures. Critical border scholarship has therefore conceptualised borders as spaces of exception where extraordinary measures become normalised, and where legal ambiguity is mobilised to justify coercion, exclusion and abandonment.7
Building on this tradition, Sajjad, with reference to Balibar’s discussion of extreme violence, proposes the concept of politically purposeful, ‘strategic cruelty’ to capture how suffering at borders is not an unintended consequence of migration governance but a deliberate governing rationality. Cruelty, in this sense, is not reducible to individual acts of brutality or moral failure; it is institutional, routinised and strategically deployed.8 Exposure to harm – through dangerous routes, prolonged precarity, detention or deprivation – is instrumentalised as a deterrence mechanism. Borders thus operate as technologies of intimidation, where the anticipation of suffering becomes a central means of migration control.
Sajjad relates this understanding to Balibar’s distinction between ultraobjective and ultrasubjective violence. Ultraobjective violence refers to impersonal systemic forms of harm embedded in administrative procedures, legal frameworks and institutional arrangements. It is violence without an identifiable perpetrator, appearing as neutral governance, ‘cruelty without a face’ that is impersonal and bureacratised. Detention regimes, deportation infrastructures and responsibility-shifting between states exemplify how violence is rendered technical, faceless and depoliticised. Ultrasubjective violence, Balibarian ‘cruelty with a Medusa face,’ by contrast, names direct and embodied forms of harm – pushbacks, beatings, humiliations, denial of medical assistance – often carried out by state agents or their proxies.9
Jones powerfully encapsulates this argument by insisting that borders themselves are violent. Violence is not a deviation from otherwise orderly border enforcement; it is constitutive of it. Border control depends on the credible threat and enactment of force, both material and symbolic. The border materialises as violence precisely at the moment when mobility is refused and bodies are rendered disposable.10 From this perspective, borders should be understood as infrastructures of harm that normalise suffering as a condition of governance.
Importantly, critical border studies emphasise that such violence is sustained through regimes of denial and moral distancing. Liberal democratic states reconcile humanitarian self-representations with violent border practices by fragmenting responsibility across institutions, jurisdictions and actors. Borders function as performative sites where state power is enacted over bodies marked as disposable, undeserving or wasted, while accountability is continuously deferred.11 Violence is thus both enacted and disavowed, rendered invisible through bureaucratic abstraction and legal complexity.
Border violence is not accidental, or exceptional: it is a structural condition of contemporary migration regimes. Understanding borders as violence – and bordering as a continuous process of violent differentiation – allows for a more precise critique of European border management as a regime that governs through cruelty while preserving the appearance of legality, neutrality and moral legitimacy. The digitalisation of borders does not replace this violence; it reorganises it. Algorithmic systems allow cruelty to be distributed across infrastructures, making it even harder to trace responsibility. Violence becomes pre-emptive, statistical and anticipatory, enacted through risk profiles and exclusions before migrants even reach a physical border.
Algorithmisation and Datafication in Conditions of Surveillance Capitalism
Contemporary border regimes increasingly govern migration not only through law and force but through algorithmic systems that sort, anticipate and constrain migrant lives by transforming bodies, movements and histories into data. As Amoore demonstrates, algorithmic governance introduces a shift from rule-based judgement to probabilistic calculation.12 Decisions are no longer grounded primarily in past actions or legal facts but in speculative assessments of possible futures. In the context of migration governance, this logic materialises through risk profiling, credibility scoring and security classifications that anticipate threat, fraud, or undeservingness before a migrant’s claim is substantively examined.
In practice, algorithmisation operates through the continuous production and circulation of data across interconnected systems. European migration governance relies heavily on biometric identification, database interoperability and automated cross-checking between asylum, visa, law enforcement and security systems. Problematically, migration databases are routinely exempted from core data protection safeguards under the justification of security and migration control, normalising exceptional data practices as administrative necessity.13
Datafication produces a profound asymmetry of power. Migrants become hyper-visible subjects of continuous scrutiny, while the infrastructures that classify and assess them remain opaque. As Browne argues, surveillance is never only about seeing; it is about structuring relations of power through differential visibility.14 Data infrastructures such as fingerprinting, facial recognition and document verification do not merely identify individuals; they stabilise identities as fixed, legible and comparable across time and space. Migrants rarely have access to the data that governs them, nor the ability to challenge how their bodies, movements and histories are rendered legible within computational systems.
Biometric systems reduce bodies to data points – fingerprints, facial templates, iris scans –treating embodiment as a site of extraction rather than lived experience. These systems presume bodily stability and coherence, systematically disadvantaging those whose bodies do not conform to normative assumptions, including people affected by trauma, disability, ageing, or gender non-conformity.15 Algorithmic credibility assessments further entangle the body with suspicion, as inconsistencies in narrative, or biometric traces are interpreted as indicators of risk or deceit. In related welfare contexts, such systems do not eliminate discretion but relocate it within technical architectures that are harder to contest.16
From a critical border studies perspective, algorithmic bordering intensifies rather than replaces violence. Automated systems embed exceptionalism within routine administrative processes, enabling continuous categorisation and exclusion without direct encounter. Violence becomes bureaucratically distributed and temporally extended: migrants may never experience overt physical force, yet remain suspended in prolonged uncertainty, repeated data capture, restricted mobility and permanent evaluability. These regimes produce what Puar describes as ‘debilitation’ rather than death – forms of slow violence that wear down bodies and lives through exhaustion, precarity and anticipatory fear.17
The displacement of political decision-making into technical domains has significant implications for democratic accountability. While EU institutions formally retain authority over migration policy, the practical operation of borders increasingly depends on proprietary technologies developed and maintained by private actors. Judicial oversight struggles to keep pace with these developments, as courts are often denied full access to algorithmic systems or lack the technical capacity to meaningfully scrutinise them.
Feminist critiques offer crucial insights into how algorithmic border regimes disproportionately affect those already marginalised. From a feminist perspective, surveillance is always embodied, situated and unevenly distributed, deepening discrimination while appearing neutral.18 Migrant women, LGBTQ+ individuals and racialised subjects experience border surveillance not only as legal regulation but as intimate intrusion into bodily autonomy, family life, sexuality and care relations.19 Algorithmic systems often reproduce gendered and racialised assumptions embedded in historical data, treating deviation from normative narratives of victimhood, family structure, or femininity as suspicious or risky.20 In this way, technological and security infrastructures themselves are revealed as deeply gendered, valuing speed, domination and abstraction over relationality, care and accountability.21 In migration governance, this translates into investments in surveillance systems rather than reception conditions, legal support, or informed protection.
Situating algorithmic bordering within the broader political economy of surveillance capitalism clarifies these dynamics. Zuboff defines surveillance capitalism as a new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction and sales.22 While often associated with digital platforms, its logics increasingly structure public-sector governance, particularly in security and migration. European borders have become lucrative markets for biometric technologies, AI-driven analytics and data integration platforms. Hayes and Vermeulen describe this as a ‘border industrial complex,’ in which state agencies and private corporations mutually reinforce the expansion of surveillance infrastructures.23
From a feminist political economy perspective, this raises critical questions about whose interests border technologies ultimately serve. Surveillance capitalism at the border operates through coerced participation: migrants cannot opt out of biometric registration or algorithmic assessment. Data extraction becomes a precondition for access to asylum, protection, or mobility, transforming vulnerability into a source of value extraction. These regimes normalise control while foreclosing alternative imaginaries of mobility grounded in care, solidarity and social justice. Algorithmic borders thus do not simply manage migration; they reshape the meaning of protection itself, converting it into a conditional and data-dependent privilege.
Migration Struggles, Autonomy and Tactical Anonymity
Despite increasingly violent, technologised and opaque border regimes that seek to push migrants into invisibility, precarity and death, migration does not cease. It struggles. Contemporary bordering practices may aim to immobilise, filter and exhaust migrant lives, yet they are persistently confronted by acts of movement, refusal and reorganisation. Against dominant representations of migrants as passive objects of control or humanitarian management, critical scholarship insists on understanding migration as an active social and political power that continuously unsettles the very regimes that attempt to contain it.
The autonomy of migration perspective foregrounds this insight by conceptualising migration not as a derivative reaction to economic ‘push and pull’ factors, nor as a deviation from a sedentary norm, but as a constitutive power in its own right.24 Migration is understood here as a form of collective action, refusal and flight that actively co-produces borders themselves. From this perspective, borders are not stable structures occasionally disrupted by external shocks; they are permanently contested fields of struggle shaped through the ongoing tension between control and mobility. As Papadopoulos et al. argue, migration precedes and exceeds its regulation, forcing states and institutions into continuous cycles of reaction, adaptation and technological escalation.25
Seen from this vantage point, the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015 appears profoundly misnamed. As Hess and Kasparek argue, it was not primarily a crisis caused by migration, but a crisis of the European border regime itself.26 The events of 2015 exposed the structural instability of a system dependent on continuous exclusion, selective mobility and fragile coordination across national, supranational and local scales. Rather than resolving this instability, the subsequent ‘restabilisation’ of the European border regime – through emergency measures, humanitarian securitisation, outsourcing of control and intensified surveillance – normalised crisis as a mode of governance. Ten years later, crisis is no longer an exception but a permanent condition of bordering.
Within this terrain of managed instability, migrants actively navigate, negotiate and contest borders. Critical border scholarship documents how migrants learn to manage biometric encounters, strategically engage with asylum and registration systems, exploit bureaucratic gaps, circulate situated knowledge about surveillance practices and adjust mobility strategies in response to shifting control regimes.27 Migrant-led organisations, solidarity networks and activist collectives have developed counter-mapping projects, legal advocacy tools and practices of collective documentation that expose the violence embedded in border technologies and challenge dominant representations of migration as a problem of control.28
Visibility plays a central role in these struggles. In algorithmic and datafied border regimes, visibility is not simply a precondition for recognition or rights but a mechanism of power that produces differential inclusion and exclusion. Migrants are rendered hyper-visible through biometric registration, while the infrastructures that classify and govern them remain opaque and largely unaccountable. Visibility thus operates as a political relation that distributes vulnerability, rights and disposability. Being seen does not necessarily mean being protected; it often means being exposed to detention, deportation, or abandonment.
It is against this backdrop that tactical anonymity emerges as a crucial practice within contemporary migration struggles. Tactical anonymity does not signify withdrawal from politics or a desire for invisibility per se. Rather than signifying withdrawal from politics or a simple desire for invisibility, tactical anonymity refers to the strategic management of visibility in response to coercive datafication – deciding when, how and to whom one becomes visible. Brunton and Nissenbaum conceptualise ‘obfuscation’ as the deliberate production of ambiguous, confusing, or misleading information to disrupt surveillance and data collection.29 Complementarily, the notion of ‘opacity’ frames non-knowability not as retreat but as a political strategy that resists domination by refusing full legibility.30 Under regimes that equate legibility with governability, such practices constitute both a means of survival and a form of resistance.
Migrants deploy tactical anonymity in multiple ways: by avoiding or delaying biometric registration, refusing identification, circulating through informal networks, sharing knowledge about surveillance and enforcement practices, using encrypted communication, or relying on collective strategies of movement and concealment. These practices do not abolish power asymmetries, nor do they guarantee safety. Rather, they introduce uncertainty, delay and friction into border regimes that rely on seamless data capture and uninterrupted classification. Tactical anonymity disrupts the smooth functioning of digital border infrastructures by refusing their demand for total transparency.
From the perspective of the autonomy of migration, such practices are not marginal or merely reactive. They are constitutive of border regimes themselves. Migration continuously challenges the state’s attempt to monopolise mobility, identification and population management, forcing border systems into cycles of crisis, innovation and expansion.31 Tactical anonymity is one expression of what Mezzadra describes as the ‘stubbornness of migration’: a persistent capacity to move, evade, reorganise and insist on freedom despite increasingly invasive and violent forms of surveillance.32
At the same time, tactical anonymity must not be romanticised. Avoiding registration can increase exposure to exploitation, restrict access to services and deepen legal precarity. The political significance of ano-nymity lies not in its inherent emancipatory potential, but in its function as a tactic under conditions where consent is largely absent and refusal is criminalised. Feminist critiques of surveillance are particularly instructive here. As Butler and Puar remind us, visibility is not neutral; being seen can itself be a form of violence when recognition is tied to exposure to harm, detention, or death.33 Under such conditions, refusal to be fully legible becomes a way of contesting regimes that govern through differential valuation of lives.
Digital Sovereignty and Abolitionist Horizons
The practices of agency, refusal and tactical anonymity do not merely disrupt existing border regimes; they open up broader political questions about how mobility, data and power are governed in contemporary societies. Migrant struggles force into view the infrastructural conditions through which borders are enacted and contested, revealing that the governance of migration is inseparable from wider transformations in sovereignty, democracy and political responsibility.
Within this context, debates on digital sovereignty acquire renewed urgency. Digital sovereignty cannot be reduced to technical questions of data localisation, cybersecurity, or system efficiency. Rather, it must be understood as a deeply political problem concerning control over digital infrastructures, the allocation of decision-making authority and the distribution of power embedded in data-driven governance.34 At stake is not simply where data is stored or how securely it is managed, but who defines the purposes for which data is extracted, analysed and acted upon – and whose interests are ultimately served by these processes.
Algorithmic sovereignty, in this sense, refers to the capacity of public institutions to govern algorithmic systems in ways that remain accountable to democratic norms, legal standards and public interests. In the European migration context, this capacity is increasingly eroded. Border control and asylum management depend on complex technological ecosystems developed through public–private partnerships involving security companies, IT contractors and data analytics firms. These actors exert significant influence over the design, operation and evolution of border technologies, yet their role is largely shielded from public scrutiny. Decision-making is displaced from political arenas into technical domains, where proprietary systems and security rationales limit transparency.
Calls for publicly responsible data governance therefore demand more than incremental regulatory adjustments. They require a fundamental reorientation of current practices, including strict limitations on data extraction, enforceable rights to explanation and redress and institutional capacities for independent algorithmic auditing. Crucially, responsible governance must also include mechanisms for meaningful participation by those most affected. Migrants cannot remain passive data subjects in systems that so profoundly shape their lives; they must be recognised as political actors with the right to contest, refuse and reshape data regimes.35
These debates increasingly intersect with abolitionist perspectives in critical migration studies.
Abolitionism does not denote a narrow policy agenda or the reform of specific institutions, but a broader
political horizon rooted in historical struggles against racialised violence, carcerality and domination.36
Drawing on W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1935 analysis of the ‘general strike’ of enslaved people, contemporary scholars such as Mezzadra reinterpret flight itself as a political act.37 Just as the collective escape of enslaved people undermined the institution of slavery from within, contemporary migratory movements destabilise border regimes and generate political possibilities beyond them. From this perspective, freedom of movement is not a benevolent concession granted by states nor the outcome of moral persuasion alone. It is produced through struggle, conflict and collective action. Migrants’ disobedient movements – through border crossings, refusals of registration, or practices of tactical anonymity – are constitutive of this field of contestation.
The implications of surveillance-oriented digitalisation, however, extend well beyond migration governance. Border regimes increasingly function as laboratories for future forms of social control, where technologies of classification, prediction and exclusion are developed and subsequently generalised across policing, welfare provision, healthcare, education and everyday life. The logic of digital bordering – continuous assessment, risk categorisation and conditional access – prefigures broader authoritarian and exclusionary modes of governance that threaten democratic accountability across society.
It is here that Hannah Arendt’s 1951 analysis of ‘superfluous people’ becomes particularly resonant. Writing on exiles, stateless persons and the rightless in interwar Europe, Arendt identified the central danger of modern political orders: the production of populations that can be stripped of rights, dignity and political belonging altogether.38 Contemporary data regimes extend this logic by reducing refugees and migrants to numbers, risk scores and database entries. The condition of superfluity that Arendt identified as the most extreme form of political exclusion thus becomes, under data-driven governance, a generalised political possibility.
In this sense, struggles over migration, borders and digital surveillance are not marginal or exceptional. They are central to contemporary debates about democracy and freedom. Taking migrant agency seriously – through concepts such as autonomy of migration, tactical anonymity and abolitionist horizons – does not deny violence or suffering. Rather, it refuses a humanitarian gaze that reduces migrants to passive victims and instead recognises them as political actors whose movements expose the limits of existing regimes and gesture toward alternative futures grounded in freedom of movement, collective care and democratic accountability.
Conclusion
Digital border regimes must be understood not as neutral technological upgrades but as reconfigurations of power that intensify the violence inherent in contemporary migration governance. Drawing on critical border studies, this essay conceptualised European borders as infrastructures of cruelty that differentially value lives, normalise suffering and operate through regimes of denial and depoliticisation. Algorithmic systems do not replace this violence; they reorganise it by distributing coercion across databases, risk scores and interoperable systems that obscure responsibility and foreclose contestation.
At the same time, the essay has insisted that migration is not merely governed by digital borders but actively reshapes them. Through the autonomy of migration perspective, it foregrounded migrant struggles, refusals and practices of tactical anonymity as political acts that disrupt the demand for total legibility on which datafied border regimes depend. These practices reveal the limits of algorithmic governance and expose the fragility of systems that seek to monopolise mobility and identification.
Borders function as laboratories in which techniques of classification, exclusion and anticipatory control are developed and later generalised across society. Taking migrant agency seriously therefore matters not only for migration politics but for the future of democracy itself. Whether digital infrastructures are mobilised to entrench authoritarian forms of rule or reoriented toward accountability, care and freedom of movement remains a profoundly political question, one that will continue to be shaped by struggle, contestation and refusal.
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1 Dennis Broeders and Huub Dijstelbloem, ‘The Datafication of Mobility and Migration Management: The Mediating State and Its Consequences,’ in Digitizing Identities, ed. Imma Van der Ploeg and Jason Pridmore (London: Routledge, 2015), 242–60; Btihaj Ajana, Governing through Biometrics: The Biopolitics of Identity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Shoshana Amielle Magnet, When Biometrics Fail: Gender, Race and the Technology of Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).
2 Louise Amoore, Cloud Ethics: Algorithms and the Attributes of Ourselves and Others (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020).
3 Étienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013); Reece Jones, Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move (London: Verso, 2016).
4 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley, vol. 1, An Introduction (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978); Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
5 Sabine Hess and Bernd Kasparek, ‘Under Control? Or Border (As) Conflict: Reflections on the European Border Regime,’ Social Inclusion 5, no. 3 (2017): 59.
6 Balibar, We, the People of Europe?
7 Didier Bigo, ‘The (In)securitization Practices of the Three Universes of EU Border Control: Military/Navy–Border Guards/Police–Database Analysts,’ Security Dialogue 45, no. 3 (2014): 209–25.
8 Tazreena Sajjad, ‘Strategic Cruelty: Legitimizing Violence in the European Union’s Border regime,’ Global Studies Quarterly 2, no. 2 (2022): 4.
9 Ibid.
10 Jones, Violent Borders.
11 Mojca Pajnik, ‘Wasted Precariat: Migrant Work in European Societies,’ Progress in Development Studies 16, no. 2 (2016): 159–72.
12 Louise Amoore, The Politics of Possibility: Risk and Security beyond Probability (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013).
13 Compare with Arne Hintz, Lina Dencik L, Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, Digital Citizenship in a Datafied Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018).
14 Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015).
15 Ajana, Governing through Biometrics.
16 Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality: How High-tech Tools Profile, Police and Punish the Poor (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018).
17 Jasbir K. Puar, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017).
18 Browne, Dark Matters; Magnet, When Biometrics Fail.
19 Sharon Pickering, Women, Borders and Violence: Current Issues in Asylum, Forced Migration and Trafficking (New York: Springer, 2011).
20 Ruha Benjamin, Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019).
21 Judy Wajcman, ‘Feminist Theories of Technology,’ Cambridge Journal of Economics 34, no. 1 (2010): 143–52.
22 Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2019), 8.
23 Ben Hayes and Mathias Vermeulen, Borderline: The EU’s New Border Surveillance Initiatives (Berlin: Heinrich Böll Foundation, 2012).
24 Dimitris Papadopoulos, Niamh Stephenson and Vassilis Tsianos, Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the Twenty-first Centur (London: Pluto Press, 2008); Mezzadra and Neilson, Border as Method; Hess and Kasparek, ‘Under Control?’
25 Papadopoulos et al., Escape Routes.
26 Hess and Kasparek, ‘Under Control?’ 61–62.
27 Jones, Violent Borders; Martina Tazzioli, ‘The Politics of Migrant Dispersal: Dividing and Policing Migrant Multiplicities,’ Migration Studies 8, no. 4 (2020): 510–29; Martina Tazzioli, ‘Choking without Killing: Opacity and the Grey Area of Migration Governmentality,’ Political Geography 89 (2021), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2021.102412.
28 Stephan Scheel and Philipp Ratfisch, ‘Refugee Protection Meets Migration Management: UNHCR as a Global Police of Populations,’ Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 40, no. 6 (2014): 924–41.
29 Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum, Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015).
30 Tazzioli, ‘Choking without Killing.’
31 (Papadopoulos et al., Escape Routes; Tazzioli, ‘The Politics of Migrant Dispersal.’
32 Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, The Politics of Operations: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019).
33 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009); Puar, The Right to Maim.
34 Luciano Floridi, ‘The Fight for Digital Sovereignty: What It Is, and Why It Matters, Especially for the EU,’ Philosophy & Technology 33, no. 3 (2020): 369–78; Julien Jeandesboz, ‘European Border Policing: EUROSUR, Knowledge, Calculation,’ Global Crime 18, no. 3 (2017): 256–85.
35 Compare with Hintz et al., Digital Citizenship in a Datafied Society.
36 Ruth Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
37 W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: 1860–1880 (New York: Free Press, 1998); Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, The Politics of Operations.
38 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1951).