CPDP 2017: FEAR OF NUMBERS: DIGITAL DATA’S HISTORY OF POWER, RESISTANCE AND CONTESTATION.

Organised by CPDP

Chair: Rosamunde van Brakel, LSTS-VUB (BE)

Moderator: Arne Hintz, Cardiff University (UK)

Panel: Matthew Hannah, Bayreuth University (DE), Malavika Jayaram, Digital Asia Hub (HK), David Murakami Wood, Queens University (CA), Linnet Taylor, TILT, Tilburg University (NL)

Population databases are ways to sort, categorise and make legible on the demographic level. They are also inevitably instruments of power and discipline through choices about database design, data collection and analysis. The development of population enumeration techniques and probabilistic analytical methods in the early 1800s, when 19th-century demographers and statisticians first conceptualised ‘social physics’, first implied the claim that ‘N=all’. From the calculations of Quetelet to the first linking and merging of data performed by Hollerith’s tabulating machine, historically datafication has always involved an imbalance of information and power between those who count and those who are counted. This panel will discuss how biopolitical power becomes inscribed in data, and how popular and activist resistance to that power evolves and is expressed. We will look at historical and current manifestations of datafied power and corresponding resistance, including census boycott movements, counterveillance, and contemporary challenges to algorithmic power.

How does biopolitical power become inscribed in data, and how does popular and activist resistance to that power take shape?
What success have popular resistance strategies had in changing the ways in which population data are collected and used?
Can any cyclical dynamics be observed in the evolution of ‘social physics’ and in social responses to it?
What can resistance to datafication tell us about the adequacy of current data protection provisions as a tool for social justice?