First coined by political theorist Panagia in 2017, #datapolitik is a set of operations that regulates circulation through space and time by bringing together technology and the cybernetic feedback loop; practices of tracking and capture; attitudes of safety or security; and beliefs of a threat or potential catastrophe. It’s based on the notion that, in digital governmentality, subjects are data points, and power exercise is power without authority.

The advent of the digital has made the political horizon inseparable from technologies that rely on recursive repetition to monitor and manage difference thus shaping the conditions for the infinite predictability of a moving target. Unlike its human predecessors, #datapolitik is fully automated. It’s indistinct from any other automated object. As a new arrangement of techno-human forces, #datapolitik necessitates a re-thinking of the techno-political horizon seen as a perceptual milieu that shapes the disposition of worlds.