ICS Seminar Series

Arguably the relational database has had greater impact on the transformation of organisational cultures and the world economy than the Internet. This is compounded with the recent intersection of distributed and 'service-oriented' computational infrastructures, where databases and data centres combine with network protocols and novel financial arrangements in ways that organise contemporary institutions underscored by computational operations. The computational analytic potentials of databases coupled with the materiality of data has produced models of this world without historical precedent. Key here is the question of scale. Our central interest in this chapter is to consider the role of the database as a technology of governance and the scramble of power as it relates to a capacity to model the world and exert influence upon it. Moreover, we argue software-as-a-service is more than a new vogue term of the IT industry, constituting a longer temporal horizon and more complex rearrangement of relations between data and labour to which the database and its entailments remain critical.