Data violence

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Data violence, or algorithmic violence, encompasses the nature and consequences of so-called mechanically enabled objective solutions designed to maintain (in)security infrastructure in modern data-driven societies. Conceptually, it highlights how the visions, values, and logics embedded in data, computing systems, and algorithmic frameworks enable, support, justify, and legitimize certain forms of violence, while also making some lives more visible, legible, and expendable than others. Data violence acts as an anticipatory and legitimizing rationale, being co-constitutive of the socio-technical frameworks of a large data economy. Its byproducts, like predictive targeting, as modes of knowledge and governance, prompt critical scholarly investigation to question how data infrastructures reproduce and justify regimes of surveillance, control, and inequality with ethical, epistemological, and political consequences. Our project explores how systems and platforms that enact these practices - often developed by, or in partnership with, private corporations - shape the conditions under which life-and-death decisions are made in modern warfare.