Data politics and infrastructural design : between cybernetic mediation and terminal subjectivity

Digital media technologies of Internet communication and software coupled with supporting infrastructures of storage and transmission have resulted in the production, sharing and distribution of knowledge and culture on scales previously unseen (and unsensed) in the history of human life. More recently, the rise of big data analytics associated with sensor technologies and the biometric monitoring of social, urban, industrial, and ecological systems has seen the empirical being redefined by algorithmic operations. It is no surprise that finance capital and new economies of exchange are both among the main drivers and beneficiaries of these developments. Spot rates, for example, are hedged against the delivery times of shipping containers in the maritime industries. Health and insurance industries are flourishing with the widespread adoption of consumer self-tracking devices and the scramble for standards designed to subsume life into measures optimised for the sale of medical products. The quantified (quantifying) self has become the exemplary subject around which the design and distribution of a wide array of knowledges on life and labour is organized.