International Institutions and Information Technologies: Transformations for a Higher Order System

Abstract

This contribution focuses on the interoperation of analogue and digital information technologies (and techniques associated with them), to ask how their interoperation has determined (and changed) what is made legible in practices associated with international institutions. It traces how the interoperation of digital and analogue technologies has supported the intensification of efficiency-maximizing institutional routines, now expressed in the so-called optimization function associated with neural networks and artificial intelligence. As a result, the terrain of contestation has shifted in significant ways from arguments over rules to pattern-recognition processes that determine efficient solutions according to optimal outcomes. Institutional practice on this new terrain aspires to a sort of immediacy, a direct engagement in the becoming of the thing(s) to which the institutional mandate may apply. This immediacy defies the reflective character associated with traditional legal practice, and assumes power by defining problems and engendering governance issues in the very act of addressing them.