What does the abundance of data and proliferation of data-making methods mean for the ordinary person, the person on the street? And, what could they come to mean? In this paper, we present an overview of a year-long project to examine just such questions and complicate, in some ways, what it is to ask them. The project is a collective exercise in which we – a mixture of social scientists, designers and makers – and those living and working on one (...) street in Cambridge, Tenison Road, are working to think through how data might be materialised and come to matter. The project aims to better understand the specificities and contingencies that arise when data is produced and used in place. Mid-way through the project, we use this commentary to give some background to the work and detail one or two of the troubles we have encountered in putting locally relevant data to work. We also touch on a methodological standpoint we are working our way into and through, one that we hope complicates the separations between subject and object in data-making and opens up possibilities for a generative refiguring of the manifold relations. (shrink)

Securing the internet has arguably become paradigmatic for modern security practice, not only because modern life is considered to be impossible or valueless if disconnected, but also because emergent cyber-relations and their complex interconnections are refashioning traditional security logics. This paper analyses European modes of governing geared toward securing vital, emergent cyber-systems in the face of the interconnected emergency. It develops the concept of ‘bureaucratic vitalism’ to get at the tension between the hierarchical organization and reductive knowledge frames of security (...) apparatuses on the one hand, and the increasing desire for building ‘resilient’, dispersed, and flexible security assemblages on the other. The bureaucratic/vital juxtaposition seeks to capture the way in which cybersecurity governance takes emergent, complex systems as object and model without fully replicating this ideal in practice. Thus, we are concerned with the question of what happens when security apparatuses appropriate and translate vitalist concepts into practice. Our case renders visible the banal bureaucratic manoeuvres that seek to operate upon security emergencies by fostering connectivities, producing agencies, and staging exercises. (shrink)

This paper explores the distinctive features of the critical agenda associated with the ‘Social Life of Methods’. I argue that although this perspective can be associated with the increasing interest, often associated with scholars in Science and Technology Studies, to reflect on how methods can become objects of inquiry, it also needs to be rooted in the current crisis of positivist methods. I identify the challenge for positivism in terms of the decreasing ability of its procedures to effectively organize increasingly (...) ‘lively’ sources of standardized data, which can now be assembled using aesthetic registers. In developing this argument, I dispute the idea that this development is due to historical shifts linked to the way that methodological devices are playing an increasingly significant role in contemporary social life, which might be argued by writers such as Thrift or Castells. I also argue that by opening up issues of method to the aesthetic, we also recast the relationship between theory and method, pointing to the exhaustion of a certain kind of cultural theory within the social sciences. I contextualize these issues by considering how methods are implicated in the intellectual differentiation between scientific and humanities expertise. Rather than conceiving the ‘Social Life of Methods’ in terms of the rise of instrumentalist modes of governance, it is preferable to place it within the dialectic of transparency and the relationship between the implicit and explicit. These issues are addressed through introducing the papers in the special issue. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to intervene in debates about the digital and, in particular, framings that imagine the digital in terms of epochal shifts or as redefining life. Instead, drawing on recent developments in digital methods, we explore the lively, productive and performative qualities of the digital by attending to the specificities of digital devices and how they interact, and sometimes compete, with older devices and their capacity to mobilize and materialize social and other relations. In doing so, (...) our aim is to explore the implications of digital devices and data for reassembling social science methods or what we call the social science apparatuses that assemble digital devices and data to ‘know’ the social and other relations. Building on recent work at CRESC on the social life of methods, we recommend a genealogical approach that is alive to the ways in which digital devices are simultaneously shaped by social worlds, and can in turn become agents that shape those worlds. This calls for attending to the specificities of digital devices themselves, how they are varied and composed of diverse socio-technical arrangements, and are enrolled in the creation of new knowledge spaces, institutions and actors. Rather than exploring what large-scale changes can be revealed and understood through the digital, we argue for explorations of how digital devices themselves are materially implicated in the production and performance of contemporary sociality. To that end we offer the following nine propositions about the implications of digital data and devices and argue that these demand rethinking the theoretical assumptions of social science methods: transactional actors; heterogeneity; visualization; continuous time; whole populations; granularity; expertise; mobile and mobilizing; and non-coherence. (shrink)

Taking a Foucauldian framework as its point of departure, this paper discusses how transnational discourses of knowledge and learning operate in the profession of computer engineering and form a certain logic through which modes of being an engineer are regulated. Both the knowledge domain of computer engineering and its related labour market is heavily internationalised and characterised by a general focus on universalism and standardisation. Moreover, rapid shifts in technologies and institutional arrangements contribute to an embracement of more wide-ranging discourses (...) related to lifelong learning and the enterprising self. Thus, dominant discourses of knowledge and learning within this profession reflect processes of globalisation and take a transnational character. The paper discusses how the discourses in play constitute mechanisms of governmentality that present certain expectations to professionals and shape their energies, efforts and desires in certain directions. In order to be influential, however, the discourses depend on individuals who take up the subject positions offered and enact them in locally relevant and partially creative ways. Thus, careful analyses of the discourses in specific knowledge communities, as well as of their interrelated subject positions, may enhance our understanding of the more epistemic dimensions of globalisation and how these come to influence the imaginations of individuals as ‘citizens of the world.’. (shrink)

A recent interpretation of artificial intelligence (AI) (Floridi 2013, 2022) suggests that the implementation of AI demands the investigation of the binding conditions that make it possible to build and integrate artifacts into our lived world. Such artifacts can successfully interact with the world because our environment has been designed to be compatible with intelligent machines (such as robots). As the use of AI becomes ubiquitous in society, possibly leading to the formation of increasingly intelligent bio-technological unions, there will likely (...) be a coexistence of a plethora of micro-environments wrapped and tailored around humans and basic robots. The key element of this pervasive process will be the capacity to integrate biological realms in an infosphere suitable for the implementation of AI technologies. This process will require extensive datafication. This is because data is the basis of the logical-mathematical codes and models that drive and guide AI. This process will have huge consequences on workplaces, on workers, as well as on the decision-making processes required for the functioning of future societies. In this paper we will offer a comprehensive reflection on the moral and social implications of datafication as well as a set of considerations about its desirability, which will be informed by the following insights: (1) full protection of privacy may become structurally impossible, thus leading to undesirable forms of political and social control; (2) worker’s freedom may be reduced; (3) human creativity, imagination, and even divergence from AI logic might be channeled and possibly discouraged; (4) there will likely be a push towards efficiency and instrumental reason, which will become preeminent in production lines as well as in society. (shrink)

Contemporary capitalism is becoming increasingly metaphysical. The article contrasts a ‘physical’ capitalism – of the national and manufacturing age – with a ‘metaphysical capitalism’ of the global information society. It describes physical capitalism in terms of extensity, equivalence, equilibrium and the phenomenal, which stands in contrast to metaphysical capitalism’s intensity, inequivalence, disequilibrium and the noumenal. Most centrally: if use-value or the gift in pre-capitalist society is grounded in concrete inequivalence, and exchange-value in physical capitalism presumes abstract equivalence, then value in (...) contemporary society presumes abstract inequivalence. The article argues that the predominantly physical causation of the earlier epoch is being superseded by a more metaphysical causation. This is discussed in terms of the four Aristotelian causes. Thus there is a shift in efficient cause from abstract homogenous labour to abstract heterogeneous life. Material cause changes from the commodity’s units of equivalence to consist of informational units of inequivalence. Formal cause takes place through the preservation of form as a disequilibriate system through operations of closure. These operations are at the same time information interchanges with a form’s environment. Final cause becomes the deep-structural generation of information from a compressed virtual substrate. This may have implications for method in the social and human sciences. The article illustrates this shift with a brief discussion of global finance. (shrink)

The relationship between politics and the digital has largely been characterized as one of epochal change. The respective theories understand the digital as external to politics and society, as an autonomous driver for global, unilateral transformation. Rather than supporting such singular accounts of the relationship between politics and the digital, this article argues for its specificity: the digital is best examined in terms of folds within existing socio-technical configurations, and as an artefact with a set of affordances that are shaped (...) and filled with meaning by social practice. In conceptualizing the digital as numeric, countable, computable, material, storable, searchable, transferable, networkable and traceable, fabricated and interpreted, it becomes clear that the digital cannot be divorced from the social. These affordances of the digital are discussed in relation to specific political, digital practices that are further developed in the different contributions in this special issue, such as predictive policing (Aradau and Blanke, this issue), data protection (Bellanova, this issue), extremist recruitment videos (Leander, this issue), political acclamation (Dean, this issue), and pandemic simulations (Opitz, this issue). (shrink)

In this paper, we discuss the development and piloting of a new methodology for illuminating the socio-material constitution of data objects and flows as data move between different sites of practice. The data journeys approach contributes to the development of critical, qualitative methodologies that can address the geographic and temporal scale of emerging knowledge infrastructures, and capture the ‘life of data’ from their initial generation through to re-use in different contexts. We discuss the theoretical development of the data journeys methodology (...) and the application of the approach on a project examining meteorological data on their journey from initial production through to being re-used in climate science and financial markets. We then discuss three key conceptual findings from this project about: the socio-material constitution of digital data objects, ‘friction’ in the movement of data through space and time and the mutability of digital data as a material property that contributes to driving the movement of data between different sites of practice. (shrink)

This article explores the ways in which predictive information technologies are used in the field of personalized medicine and the relations between this use and how patients and disease are perceived. This is examined in a qualitative case study of a personalized cancer clinical trial, where oncologists made clinical decisions for each patient based on drug matchings and efficacy predictions produced by bioinformatic technologies and algorithms. I focus on personalized practice itself, as a postgenomic phenomenon, rather than on epistemic, ethical (...) and institutional critiques. Personalized medicine aims to process molecular, clinical, environmental and social data into individually tailored decisions. In this case, however, the engagement of clinicians with data and digital artefacts that processed multiple information sources resulted in treatment choices that were paradoxically both immutable and uncertain. In contrast to the situatedness of the body in postgenomics, this practice subverted the personalized medical approach while decontextualizing both cancer and patients. (shrink)

The introduction of open source in the life sciences is increasingly being suggested as an alternative to patenting. This is an alternative, however, that takes its shape at the intersection of the life sciences and informatics. Numerous examples can be identified wherein open source in the life sciences refers to access, sharing and collaboration as informatic practices. This includes open source as an experimental model and as a more sophisticated approach of genetic engineering. The first section discusses the greater flexibly (...) in regard of patenting and the relationship to the introduction of open source in the life sciences. The main argument is that the ownership of knowledge in the life sciences should be reconsidered in the context of the centrality of DNA in informatic formats. This is illustrated by discussing a range of examples of open source models. The second part focuses on open source in synthetic biology as exemplary for the re-materialization of information into food, energy, medicine and so forth. The paper ends by raising the question whether another kind of alternative might be possible: one that looks at open source as a model for an alternative to the commodification of life that is understood as an attempt to comprehensively remove the restrictions from the usage of DNA in any of its formats. (shrink)

Digital data inundation has far-reaching implications for: disciplinary jurisdiction; the relationship between the academy, commerce and the state; and the very nature of the sociological imagination. Hitherto much of the discussion about these matters has tended to focus on ‘transactional’ data held within large and complex commercial and government databases. This emphasis has been quite understandable – such transactional data does indeed form a crucial part of the informational infrastructures that are now emerging. However, in recent years new sources of (...) data have become available that possess a rather different character. This is data generated in the cultural sphere, not only as a result of routine transactions with various digital media but also as a result of what some would want to view as a shift towards popular cultural forms dominated by processes of what has been termed prosumption. Our analytic focus here is on contemporary prosumption practices, digital technologies, the public life of data and the playful vitality of many of the ‘glossy topics’ that constitute contemporary popular culture. (shrink)