digital-power

The chapter '1. THE SOVEREIGN’S DATA' examines how sovereign power is fundamentally dependent on the identification and sorting of individuals through evolving modalities—from rituals and archives to digital technologies—culminating in the contemporary digital surveillance state exemplified by the NSA's mass data collection. It highlights the sovereign's insatiable appetite for data, the epistemological and political challenges of producing knowledge about populations, and the transformative impact of digital power in enabling granular individualization and new forms of population control. The chapter also introduces a methodological framework for analyzing political technologies as sovereignty machines, emphasizing the embedded technical codes and the need to democratize technics to reclaim political agency.

The chapter examines the rise and political implications of networked relational databases as tools of digital power that abstract and categorize individual identities through data mining, transforming governance and political legibility. It analyzes the 2008 Obama presidential campaign's innovative use of digital databases for radical individuation and actuarial aggregation, raising critical issues of data ownership and partisan control. The chapter further explores the expansion of data-driven surveillance and security practices, the depoliticizing effects of database rationalization, and the philosophical foundations of technics and measurement, culminating in a Heideggerian critique of modern technological enframing and its impact on political power and human freedom.

This chapter explores how the metaphor of the 'network' has become central in military and political discourses to represent and understand enemies, particularly in the context of terrorism and insurgency. It traces the historical use of metaphors like the hydra to dehumanize and ontologize the enemy, and shows how the network concept shifts focus from territory and individuals to diffuse, non-hierarchical social structures, enabling new forms of surveillance, representation, and depoliticization. The chapter also highlights the tension between data-driven approaches to counterterrorism and the persistent re-inscription of racial and orientalist categories through statistical and cultural modeling.

The chapter examines the global standardization of political identification technologies through the metaphor of the 'ship of state,' highlighting the challenges posed by digital power's homogenizing effects on political subjectivity and the limitations of traditional resistance methods. It critiques the concept of informational self-determination as insufficient in the digital era and proposes the principle of 'nymity'—a right to own and control personal data and self-representation—as a necessary framework for privacy and resistance, supported by emerging legal and institutional practices.