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Does technology further democracy?

By Sally Bland - Oct 16,2016 - Last updated at Oct 16,2016

Identify and Sort: How Digital Power Changed World Politics
Josef Ansorge
London: Hurst and Company, 2016
Pp. 271

It is a given that any political authority wants to know the subjects under its jurisdiction, whether to provide services or to control them. In the words of Josef Ansorge: “The sovereign hungers for data,” and this requires “a reliable process to identify and sort our visceral, constantly reproducing, dying, and migrating mass of humanity into stable, legally constructed categories and socially meaningful graduations.” (p. 2) 

In “Identify and Sort”, Ansorge looks back in history to find three different modalities for identifying and sorting: rituals, archives and digital tools, and how each evolved into its successor. “Each represents a cluster of technical practices and a type of political power.” (p. 3)

Even more importantly, he reviews specific events and philosophical writings to pinpoint the social and political implications of each system. While his examples of the ritual and archival modes are fascinating, his depiction of the digital age is quite scary. Analysing widely disparate phenomena, from Obama’s 2008 election campaign to the US army’s use of gaming as a recruitment and training tool, Ansorge raises many pertinent questions about the relation between digital technology and democracy.

For ancient peoples and even some more modern slave societies, certain rituals defined communities and physical interventions, such as ear cutting or tattooing, identified peoples’ status and sorted out transgressors and slaves. As empires and states developed, more precise means of identifying the population were needed for the purposes of taxation, representation and conscription. Increasingly, technical solutions and standardisation were enacted to deal with political problems, as they appeared to be neutral, fit into any belief system, and did not require consensus, with the result of distancing the general population from decision making. 

While some of the processes and models used to identify and sort are quite complicated, others are amazingly simple. It is funny to think that it was the advent of the index card and resulting library catalogues that paved the way for the archival mode, enabling the extensive identifying and sorting that forms the basis of all kinds of population registries used by police, border control, hospitals, educational institutes, etc. 

Some of Ansorge’s most interesting examples come from the annuals of colonialism. His reading of the Aztec empire’s fall to Cortes does not focus solely on the Spanish invaders’ superior weapons. It also highlights “a fundamental incompatibility between two different systems that regulated politics, two systems that failed to effectively communicate with each other” — the Aztecs living in the ritual mode and the Spanish, the archival one. (p. 63)

The Aztecs’ information system broke down in the face of the invaders’ (to them) unpredictable behaviour, and Cortes’ requests to see Montezuma were seen as the ultimate in belligerence since it was taboo for anyone to look at the emperor. 

Coming to more recent colonialism, Ansorge emphasises “global interconnection by showing that there are many cases where more radical and sophisticated practices and technologies were first field-tested in the colonies — census, fingerprint, Hiide, drones, human terrain teams are all applied to the non-Western other — before then being shipped home”. (p. 151)

Ansorge gives a number of recent examples of development policies that challenge the idea that technology transfer from North to South has a democratising effect, and reminds that hi-tech companies are no more neutral than other corporations. 

The development of digital technology has led to the amassing of unprecedentedly huge data bases with more information than the operators can process and whose contents, and the criteria by which people are identified and sorted, are largely unknown to the public. The danger here is that biased criteria can be used to sort out people of particular races, cultures or religions, but it is difficult to challenge such discrimination, as the criteria are unknown. Equally disturbing is the impact of the digital mode on war and defining the enemy, to which Ansorge devotes a whole chapter, often referring to Edward Said’s work on Orientalism. “In the global War on Terror one can see a combination of the empirical with the imperial in a complex technological assemblage that is used to keep track, identify and categorise the ‘Muslim out of place’.” (p. 131) 

While people often accept government surveillance assuming it aims to protect them, in Ansorge’s view, the present situation presents a constitutional crisis, as was highlighted by Edward Snowden’s revelations. “This mass archiving of information is a unilateral modification of the social contract between individuals and political authority. We live in a totalitarian digital present in which state organs capture virtually all of our machine-mediated communications. How did this Stasi-fantasy manifest in a system that imagines itself as anti-totalitarian?” (p. 5)

 

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