We can’t count our way out: Rethinking quantification amidst digital authoritarianism

Abstract

As digital infrastructures become increasingly central to statecraft, so too do the quantitative techniques that animate them. In this commentary, we contend that digital infrastructure, authoritarian politics, and postpositivist thinking coalesce in authoritarian counting, or ways of making evidence that couch projects of exclusion, expulsion, austerity, and violence in the aesthetics of objectivity. We argue that the ascent of authoritarian counting requires that we re-envision the goals, audience, and character of quantification. Confronting an antagonistic state forces us to reconsider who the audience for counter-data is and what its goals are. A core contribution of critical quantitative work must therefore be to conceptualize, as a central measure of quantification's efficacy, whether counting with each other can engender forms of counting on each other.