30 September 2026 · Jonas Breuer, Carina Nasser · #DATAGOV #EASST #GovernancebyDataInfrastructure #DataInfrastructures #DataAssemblages #STS
Hosted in Kraków in early September, EASST 2026—Europe’s largest science & technology studies (STS) conference—asked its participants to think about the more-than-now:the STS conviction that the present is not fixed, that things could be otherwise, and that the future is already being built in what we make today. It was an invitation to ask which of those futures are worth living in, and who gets to decide. The regulatory data infrastructures that DATAGOV studies are already building them. They sort who will be eligible, who will be seen, who will count, often long before anyone votes, applies, or has a chance to object. They are, in this sense, more-than-now machines: they decide in advance which futures remain open. These infrastructures do not merely need governing; they govern. That small shift, from the governance of data infrastructures to governance by them, is where our work begins.
Representing DATAGOV, Jonas Breuer and Carina Nasser set out to ask what these machines do and to whom, and whether there is still room to contest them in a panel and a workshop, both under the title: Infrastructures of Governance: Power and Assemblages in the Data-Driven State. Governance by infrastructure, as we study it, forecloses the otherwise. Biometric identity systems, digital identity wallets, welfare databases, health technologies, the quiet data layer of a school: largely invisible, these infrastructures produce, circulate and interpret the data by which social life is made legible. And in that ordinary work they set the terms on which people may appear, claim, and belong, shaping societies and democracies, and unevenly so.
This is why EASST is such a hospitable place to ask about these more-than-now-machines. STS has long taken seriously the agency of non-human actors: things, systems and infrastructures act, mediate, and produce effects rather than remaining passive. In a field already at ease with that idea, one does not first have to argue that an infrastructure can govern at all. One can move to the harder question of how it does so, and with what consequences. DATAGOV studies these infrastructures through the concerns of citizenship, sovereignty and inequality across different cases, since no single vantage point captures what an infrastructure does. That commitment shaped our two sessions in Kraków, where a diverse set of contributions showed governance by data infrastructures in action. They provided the concrete analytical example, and it is to their work that we now turn.
Closing the Otherwise
What the panel showed is that this foreclosure, the way these infrastructures close off some futures while holding others open, happens quietly in the ordinary running of a system. Ali Mohsin (Graduate Partnership Network, University of Kassel) traced Pakistan’s biometric welfare system producing ‘data-fictions’: records so neutral-seeming that claimants cannot contest them, denying standing even as the system claims to secure it. Carolina Polito (LUISS Guido Carli University) and Cristina Alaimo (ESSEC Business School), following South Africa’s digital identity infrastructure, showed biometric records that “drift” over the years, recalibrated and re-encoded until they govern the person instead of describing them, a slow erosion of the state’s own capacity to know who it is dealing with. Klara-Aylin Wenten (University of Kassel), comparing health AI in Germany and Japan, showed how crude emotion models (categories chosen for cost, not accuracy) become the standard for healthy feeling. In each case, a technical choice made once, and largely out of sight, decides which of a person’s futures remain open.
If those papers showed the machine closing options, two others showed what happens when it is made visible. Jo Pierson, (Hasselt University and Vrije Universiteit Brussel) read Flemish schools’ smartphone ban as ‘infrastructural inversion’: prohibiting the device suddenly exposed how deeply the school had come to depend on it, from timetables to parent contact to learning platforms, and with it, how unevenly that dependency was distributed among pupils. The dependency became visible, even if the ban did not undo it. Angela Chan (University of Southampton) used investigative art to examine distributed acoustic sensing and build public awareness and agency before inequality and exclusion settle into its design.
Taken together, these studies span Pakistan, South Africa, Germany, Japan, Belgium and the United Kingdom. We placed them side by side not to compare regions but because these infrastructures are global and no single context stands in for the whole. What one case makes visible, another leaves in shadow. That is why we treat the spread of cases not as a problem to tidy away, but as the analytical resource itself.
Against inevitability
The panel ended, and the register changed. No slides, no findings to present, only questions we had prepared to open the discussion: what can we say together that none of us could say alone. Four discussants anchored the conversation, each bringing a different infrastructure and a different kind of unease.
Lukas Schmitz (Johannes Kepler University Linz) is tracking the rollout of the European Digital Identity Wallet, due across every member state by 2027, from the perspective of undocumented and underdocumented migrants: people for whom identification is at once a precondition of inclusion and a source of danger. Stefan Bächtold (Monash University Malaysia) is following Malaysia’s ambition to become an “AI nation” by 2030, and gave the room its sharpest phrase of the day: AI FOMO, the fear of being left behind that drives governments toward a technology in search of a problem to solve. Petter Falk (Södertörn University) staged what happens when a Swedish welfare system compiles a person’s data from seventeen agencies into a single “datafied” version that can tell a caseworker something different from what the person sitting in front of them just said. Frederik Schade (University of Copenhagen), working with Chiara Carboni (Technical University of Denmark), traced a shift from digital sovereignty to what is called technopolitics, in which technology itself, rather than the market or the citizen, has become the primary object of government.
What the conversation built from there was not agreement on a single case, but a shared unease with a single word: inevitability. Around the table and from the floor, the same pattern kept resurfacing. A digital identity wallet that excludes some people also, in another country, becomes the only way a person can open a bank account or receive treatment. A blockchain identity built for a stateless population, dismissed at first as a technological fix for a political problem, took on a political life of its own. These infrastructures foreclose options, and they occasionally, unexpectedly, open a door. The danger, several participants agreed, is not any single infrastructure. It is the sense that adopting one is simply inevitable, a race that must be run because everyone else is running it. That is where the politics disappears: Once a technology is treated as unavoidable, there is nothing left to argue about, only how fast to move.
If the panel showed us machines that decide the future in advance, the workshop left us with a harder, and more hopeful, question: Whether naming that inevitability, out loud, in a room, is itself a way of reopening it.
A glimpse of hope?
If there was an answer in the room, it was not a solution but a habit. Make the infrastructure visible, so it can be argued with. Keep asking, as Petter Falk did, where the politics are. And treat the people at the point where data is made—the nurse, the social worker, the claimant—as the real experts.
None of this, making infrastructures visible and trusting those at the point where data is made, is naïve. Visibility is not change, and everyone in that room knew it. A smartphone ban that exposes a school’s dependencies does not dissolve them. But visibility is where contestation becomes possible, and that is not nothing.
This is where DATAGOV’s own participatory ambitions read less like a slogan and more like an answer. The workshop was one small attempt at that visibility. The DATAGOVlab—the participatory research space we are building in Amsterdam—is a larger one: an effort to hand the tools of inversion to the people these infrastructures act upon, rather than keeping them for researchers alone.
Who builds the future
We came to Krakow as guests in a field that has long taken seriously the idea that things, not only people, can act. DATAGOV belongs to that tradition, and asks something more specific of it: to hold citizenship, sovereignty and inequality together, across cases that refuse to sit still inside any one country or technology.
The future is already being built into these systems, quietly, one classification at a time. EASST asked which futures are worth building. Our question, more modestly, is who gets to do the building, and how more of us might have a hand in it.