Algorithmic Decision-Making, Spectrogenic Profiling, and Hyper-Facticity in the Age of Post-Truth

This paper investigates algorithmic decision-making and data-driven profiling as particular ways of producing truth by which "(wo)men govern themselves and others." It starts with problematizing some of the fundamental assumptions on which algorithmic decision-making relies. It then conceptualizes profiling as a "spectrogenic process" in which abstractions are produced that haunt the world, thereby generating material effects of sorting people in/out from a distance. In the final section, the paper discusses emerging forms of governance and the modes of subjectification associated with the current condition of multiple profiling machines. Paradoxically, in the context of post-truth, these forms produce a hyper-facticity that governs by circumventing reflexivity, grounding government in computational truth, and substituting ethico-political decisions by calculations.