Cambridge Journal of Anthropology

Reassuringly (or otherwise), the above paragraph reads more like the contents of a junk mailbox than an accurate depiction of our first special issue of 2024. Even so, there are uncanny glimpses of plausibility – ‘in the era of’; ‘wield unprecedented influence’; ‘intricate role in shaping narratives, policies, and individual experiences’; ‘the evolving dynamics between’. These rest less on their content than on their lexical, performative familiarity: they look and sound like the sort of thing you would find in academic journals. Put differently, these phrases seem plausible not because of what they say, but because of how they are strung together, evaluated and recognised.

For decades now, scholars of quantification have been exposing the rationalist and modernist operations that lend numbers their political qualities. Yet recent anthropological scholarship has begun to show how data's ontological plasticity and messiness are constitutive of alternative political fields. This introduction brings these two streams of literature into productive conversation to rethink the means and meanings of number politics after datafication. We move beyond extant concerns about the governing and stabilising powers of numbers to highlight the moral and affective and the collective and subjective practices out of which data's political effects emerge. Foregrounding the everyday ethical work animating data worlds gives new insights into how numeric infrastructures thrive and fail within emerging socio-cultural and politico-legal milieus.

Over the past decade, data-driven systems have transformed how UK public services engage with the population. This ethnographic study, conducted in one of the United Kingdom's poorest boroughs, investigates the implementation of a machine learning data system for identifying at-risk children in need of safeguarding. It examines the concept of a ‘data consensus’ amongst council workers pursuing the ‘public good’. Within this consensus, the article explores contrasting stances on data's potential, namely that of data scientists, who use it as a tool to predict human behaviour and prevent harm, and social workers, who resist the notion that a person is predictable and therefore incapable of change. This reveals the political implications of these opaque algorithmic systems as various groups harness data in the name of public benefit.

Big data analytics have radically transformed data collection protocols in population censuses. Yet despite the unprecedented degree of automation these technologies afford, much of the critical work that goes into making data ‘actionable’ still hinges on the ethical labour of data operators in these novel human–machine settings. By following training activities and conducting interviews with technologists who worked on Brazil's 2022 population census, this article traces the workings of a fraud-detecting system designed to reduce costs and improve data quality and collection. Our ethnography identifies two competing modes of truth-making, which we term ‘probabilistic’ and ‘performative’, whereby numbers and census-takers ‘tame’ each other. Tracking human–machine data entanglements on the fringes of calculation centres helps unpack how futurities are affectively negotiated and woven into the political fabric of these political technologies.

In 2019, the National Health Commission of China announced a nation-wide plan to incorporate blood donation into the country's emerging informational infrastructure: the social credit system (SCS). Through analysis of comments from Weibo, one of China's largest social media sites, alongside news articles and official government announcements from the time, we follow the figure of the basket, which we regard as vernacular critique. By analysing the formation of trust indicators, contestations over their commensurability, and the prospect of converting between moral deeds and financial advantage, we aim to augment understandings of the ways that quantification practices are, and become, moral projects.

Since March 2020, a huge quantity of data, rankings, charts and tables has been informing the ways we speak and act in the pandemic. This article focusses on the centrality of numbers in a major national controversy: the quantification of avoidable deaths by COVID-19. Launched by scientists who first addressed the omissions of Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro in the management of the pandemic, estimations of avoidable deaths rapidly transitioned into the political arena with the installation of a parliamentary enquiry committee on the coronavirus crisis. The article examines the emergence and development of these estimates, as well as the role they have played and continue to play in constructing the pandemic as passed as they vie for a place in the memory of the COVID-19 crisis in the present.

The evolution of information infrastructures has shaped nature conservation related to wild species, landscapes and collections of biological diversity, efforts that are germane to nation-building and many other political projects. Extensive practices of quantification are now embedded in environmental monitoring, biodiversity protection and the banking of plant genetic resources. This suggests a kaleidoscope of human intentions and institutional mandates that are embodied within fluidly changing information systems. These technologies have come to condense cultural assumptions, values, and orientations to the Anthropocene. The conservation of biodiversity must continually generate not only spectacles of nature, but also spectacles of expert knowledge and management. Information itself is the new frontier of green capitalism, affirming a paradigm of perpetual growth.

Data infrastructures are the scaffolding of the present. This afterword centres on this claim by broadening the question that animates the special issue – what does lived data politics look like? – to the question of ‘where’ it is taking place today. It extends the gaze to the systemic transformation subtending contemporary data production, which I term ‘governance by data infrastructure.’ This pervasive form of number politics represents the most recent rearrangement in matters of governance of the social. It centers regulatory data infrastructures as the preferred mode of managing complexity, bringing the industry to the kernel of the state. Furthermore, the article asks what it means to think from an anthropological vantage point considering these developments, and what fruitful methodological avenues for research this may open.

Nora Wuttke's Hospital Echoes Installation, Lady David Gallery, SOAS, University of London (13 April–2 May 2023

Moreshin Allahyari, dir. 2020. She Who Knows the Unknown: Kabous, the Right Witness and the Left Witness. Virtual Reality/Digital.

Nazlı Dinçel, dir. 2019. Instructions on How to Make a Film. 16 mm.

Scott Cook, Exploring Commodities. An Anthropologist on the Trails of Malinowski and Traven in Mexico. Oxford: Peter Lang, pp. 246. 2021.

Stephen Gudeman, Enlightening Encounters. The Journeys of an Anthropologist. New York: Berghahn, pp. 144. 2022.

Keith Hart, Self in the World. Connecting Life's Extremes. New York: Berghahn, pp. 314. 2022.