Governance by data infrastructure in the post-pandemic democracy

ongoing

Facial recognition cameras, digital identity systems, and health dashboards have become a staple of daily life. By generating data aimed at monitoring or decision-making, these “regulatory data infrastructures” take up functions that were once performed by humans inside state entities and public administrations. Regulatory data infrastructures are at the core of a new mode of governance normalized in the post-pandemic society, termed “governance by data infrastructure”. With the pandemic and generative AI accelerating the digital transition of society, regulatory data infrastructures are creeping further into public and private space—at high societal costs. DATAGOV explores the dynamics of governance by data infrastructure in the post-pandemic democracy in the European Union and non-Western countries (Brazil, India, and South Africa). It focuses on three consumer technologies disciplining the social—biometrics, digital identity and health technology—as living laboratories to explore how regulatory data infrastructures become agents of governance. Contributing to critical data studies, the project deploys qualitative and participatory methods to examine how governance by data infrastructure transforms three key areas of concern to the modern state: citizenship, state sovereignty, and inequality. DATAGOV breaks new ground in four areas. i) By mobilizing the notion of regulatory data infrastructure, it evaluates emerging data-centric assemblages and exposes the growing influence of the private sector on the welfare state. ii) By extending the gaze to non-Western democracies, it breaks with “Western” universalistic assumptions on the dynamics of datafication. iii) By developing participatory methods rooted in citizen science, it contributes to methodological innovation for the study of the datafied society. iv) By unmasking the impact of regulatory data infrastructure in the governance of the social, it charts the future of democracy amidst pervasive datafication.