The electrified social and its dark alternatives: policing and politics in the computational age

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article contrasts the dark with the electrified light of datafied life to bring into relief the impact of data surveillance upon social transformation. Our argument is that darkness remains fundamental to creative social experimentation and thus to a society’s capacity for change and sustained transformation. This argument might seem antithetical to the age of information. Yet, we find darkness encourages exploratory forms of engagement, intercourse and exchange, that electrified light forbids. We draw on Rancière’s considerations of politics and the police to suggest that the policing by digitally-electrified light extinguishes the politics of experimentation that test the make-up and limits of social interaction. Our work is structured by first explaining the baseline of the digital electric policing through the conceptualization of Facebook’s social graph, then switches to antithetical examples of politics enabled in the dark. We use the examples of the Dark Web, end to end encryption, and trustless infrastructures like Craigslist to illustrate generative tensions that are the signatures of what we understand as the dark social. We conclude that the dark social involves a decentralized capacity to experiment and transform what is social.