sovereign-data

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.