Affect and politics in anticipatory data infrastructures

Keywords: anticipatory governance,, affect, platform urbanism, infrastructure, digitality
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Data are representations of phenomena, and are agents in socio-spatial practice. Data are also anticipations. In this paper, I foreground the role of data in imagining a future that does not presently exist. In doing so, I examine another site of digital politics and highlight the often overlooked affective functions of digitality. In a technical sense, anticipatory data envisions particular computational processes or users, but this paper is particularly interested in how it envisions specific socio-spatial relations, and how such visions provoke anxieties or assurances among data producers and consumers. The argument develops with literature on anticipatory governance, affect theory, sociotechnical imaginaries, and digital geographies. The empirical basis is a study of widely adopted data specifications and related professional practices in urban mobility, including transit and shared bikes and scooters. These digital infrastructures, a case of platform urbanism, can be productively understood as anticipatory, imaginative, and affective in ways that prevailing structural critiques often overlook. In particular, anticipations of certainty, and desires for a corresponding reduction in the agency of urban inhabitants, are a recurring theme in this study. Such analyses help us to understand data infrastructures as political documents imagining a collective future, pointing at once to the world as it is and to the world as someone anticipates it becoming.