excerpt: Seeing Like a Platform, Petter Törnberg & Justus Uttermark

AI has in recent years seen growing use for governance also outside the realm of platforms, as states and public institutions are increasingly experimenting with AI as a method of governance. From welfare (Dencik, 2022; Jørgensen, 2023), to taxes (Reutter, 2023), to borders (Amoore, 2021), AI techniques and large-scale data are being leveraged to predict, profile, preempt, and even make decisions within the public sector. Some scholars argue that we are standing on the precipice of a fundamental transition to an algorithmic and data-driven paradigm of governance (Yeung, 2023), in which “systems of social protection and assistance are increasingly driven by digital data and technologies that are used to automate, predict, identify, surveil, detect, target and punish” (Alston, 2019). Other scholars speak of the rise of a “new public analytics,” in which decision-making is partly or fully automated through the processing of vast quantities of data (Dencik et al., 2019; Yeung, 2023). AI is particularly employed in the governance and control of populations of the Global South. Molnar (2021) argues that vulnerable populations tend to be used as the “technological testing grounds” for datafication and AI innovation, while Amoore (2023: 8) shows that firms strategically test and develop controversial new forms of digital technology, surveillance, and control in the Global South in a “twenty-first century variant of the ‘boomerang effect of colonial practice’” (Amoore, 2023: 8). The borders between the Global North and Global South, too, are controlled and indeed created through new technologies relying on biometric data extraction, satellites, and AI (Beduschi, 2021; Madianou, 2021; Molnar and Gill, 2018).

– Seeing Like a Platform: An Inquiry into the Condition of Digital Modernity, p. 124

Törnberg and Uttermark use a rough and ready approximation of the theoretical approach, in Foucault, in Guattari, by which discourses are considered to create their objects. Metaphors for them are the operative elements, shaping social understanding and thereby shaping society itself.

The primary metaphors of digital modernity are swarms, flocks, or ant colonies, but the market, which they say is at the heart of neoliberalism (I would say it is the brain, hence AI, where the metaphors ruling modernity coalesce, constellate), has not been succeeded, rather is being remade, it is, they write, increasingly conceived, regulated, and taxed by platform firms.

AI, the brain of neoliberalism, is remaking the market in its own image, to be increasingly conceived, regulated and taxed by platform firms