Honeymoon Objectivity

Abstract

Technologies of datafication exert their societal influence through a recurring modern fantasy of “honeymoon objectivity,” wherein technoscience might purify complex social problems and human biases to produce a stable grounding for judgment. Although fulfillment is constantly deferred, this fantasy enrolls society in a fast-expanding data market. Problems of criminal justice, political will, self-knowledge, and economic success are subordinated to the logic of surveillance capitalism and its search for meaning-indifferent, commercially recombinable data.