Despite the volumes written on digital politics, and notwithstanding their depth and scope, quality and clarity of arguments and insights from digital scholarship, there do seem to be some matters that require attention. In this spirit Evelyn Ruppert, Engin Isin and Didlier Bigo propose a more subtle, nuanced appraisal of ‘data politics’. They propose that digital networks, or more precisely the data they produce, reconfigures ‘relationships between states and citizens’, thereby generating ‘new forms of power relations and politics at different and interconnected scales’ (2017, 1, 2). They contrast this to the similar, albeit different, forms of calculation that feature in and facilitate modern European state formation. This comparison is apt given that Andrew Feenberg notes that ‘technology is one of the major sources of public power in modern societies’ (2010, 10). The key difference between these sets of literatures, Ruppert, Isin and Bigo argue, is that the digital one has yet to pin down its ‘subjects’. They suggest that this identification effort can best be achieved by employing the post-structuralist tools bequeathed by Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu. Ruppert, Isin and Bigo summarize their approach by stating that ‘Data does not happen through unstructured social practices but through structured and structuring fields in and through which various agents and their interests generate forms of expertise, interpretation, concepts, and methods that collectively function as fields of power and knowledge’ (Ruppert et al, 2017, 3).

Similarly invoking Foucault, and with an eye on the extensive reach of computations techniques on everyday life, David Beer describes ‘the social power of algorithms’ (Beer, 2017, 1). This power, he suggests, poses several key issues for the prevailing conceptualization of political legitimacy and governance. Much of this comes from ‘the impact and consequences of code’ (Beer, 2017, 3) but also ‘the powerful ways in which notions and ideas about the algorithm circulate through the social world’ (Beer, 2017, 2). For Beer, the current disciplinary research agenda involves questions of how much agency algorithms have in complex decision-making systems that involve ‘sorting, ordering, and prediction’ (Beer, 2017, 6), with a priority placed upon how norms are established; inter alia, the encoded demarcation of deviance, abnormality and what elements are opaque to whom (Beer, 2017, 3, 2, 6).