Databases and Doppelgängers: New Articulations of Power

In the early and mid-1990s, critical theorist Mark Poster turned his analytical focus to the role of databases in culture suggesting that the database operates as discourse because it is implicated in the construction of new subjectivities generated by profiling technologies. In view of the proliferation of processes of data capture through networked communication in the last two decades, my paper re-engages with Poster's critique of the 'mode of information', and in particular the power and efficacy of databases, as a sometimes forgotten piece of the contemporary landscape of 'big data'. The entanglement of people, processes, and things bound into the notion of 'data power' is a generative and dynamic assemblage: it produces not the 'one' profiled individual, but the many multiple proxies. In the context of the power of the database to generate digital dossiers as profiles of an individual, I re-imagine the profiled, the proxy, and the double through the figure of the ‘doppelganger’ as an apt metaphor for our multiple selves circulating in the flows of information. I explore 'data power', then, through the doppelganger as a mercurial figure that gestures to difference and repetition and all that is ambiguously changeable within digital culture; a culture evermore constituted by information about us generated through the incessant production, collection, and analysis of data.