Identify and Sort How Digital Power Changed World Politics

The advent of information technology ushered in new forms of political power. Machines play crucial roles in how states see, understand, and act, and scrutiny of these processes lies at the heart of Identify and Sort. It frames debates about IT in world politics, explaining how industrial sorting systems employed by political actors are renegotiating the social contract between individuals and the state. Ansorge takes the reader on a global expedition that tracks the historical antecedents of digital power, from Aztec and Inca rituals, to medieval filing systems, to a grandiose 1930s design for a German registry, to the databases used in US presidential campaigns and how IT is deployed in war and post-conflict reconstruction.

Databases are also deployed virtually to record and act upon people who have no publicly visible identification or group consciousness; modern wars and election campaigns are fought on this individualised terrain. The uneven distribution of these technical capacities engenders inequality of access, while rights discourses and legal frameworks forged in an era of mass group discrimination, subjugation, and public resistance lag behind these micro-targeting practices. Rich in examples and ideas, Identify and Sort develops an analytical model and vocabulary to explain the functions and limits of digital power in world politics.

Josef Teboho Ansorge is a JD candidate at Yale Law School. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge.

1 - The Sovereign's Data
The National Security State's Rabbit Hole
Digital Power
What this book is about
10 Theses on Information Technology and Political Power

2 - The Ship

3 - The Ear
Ear Cutting as a Punishment Technology
Ear Cutting to Identify Property
The Ear as a Site of Individual Identification
The Technological Future of the Ear

4 - Technics & Towers
Technics of Politics
Periodization and drive to Technification
Why the Technics Spread
Obelisk, Panopticon, Cuntz's Tower
The Panopticon
Cuntz's Tower: The Manual Database

5 - The Ritual
Administering Inca and Aztec Ritual
Khipu
System Failure
Theorizing the Ritual Mode

6 - The Archive
Maps and Cadastre
Census and Statistics
Passports
The Card Registry
Theorizing the Archival Mode
Weber
Benjamin

7 - The Database
The International and Digital Power
Barack Obama's Campaign Machine
Migration, Terrorism, Data
Theorizing the Digital Mode
Husserl
Heidegger

8 - The Network: Ontology in the Digital Mode

9 - Digital Power Goes To War
Vision and Orientalism
Seeing the Foe
Arithmetizing the Other and Data-Managing the Foe
A World of Hidden Indicators
War-games, Wargames, War games
Recruiting and Training with Games
War as Entertainment

10 - Digital Power Does Development
Images of Technology
'Boomerang Effects', cut (crtl+c), and paste (ctrl+v)
The Fingerprint
Fingerprints Redux
Technology as gift and domination
Information Technology as Liberator
Post-Conflict Reconstruction in Liberia
DDR: Identity with no Record
SSR: Identified and Sorted
Tribal Ontology vs. Obama's Database

11 - Resistance on our Planetary Ship of State
Resistance and Appropriation

Appendix
Cuntz's Letter
Tables and Figures
Bibliography
Endnotes