Afterword: From Number Politics to Infrastructure Politics Notes on Context and Methods

Data infrastructures are the scaffolding of the present. This afterword centres on this claim by broadening the question that animates the special issue – what does lived data politics look like? – to the question of ‘where’ it is taking place today. It extends the gaze to the systemic transformation subtending contemporary data production, which I term ‘governance by data infrastructure.’ This pervasive form of number politics represents the most recent rearrangement in matters of governance of the social. It centers regulatory data infrastructures as the preferred mode of managing complexity, bringing the industry to the kernel of the state. Furthermore, the article asks what it means to think from an anthropological vantage point considering these developments, and what fruitful methodological avenues for research this may open.