A Brave New World: Notes on Citizenship for the Data-State

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Despite efforts to the contrary, the recent Nationality and Borders Bill passed into legislation included – among other draconian measures – a quietly added clause enabling the Home Secretary to deprive citizenship without notice. Its enactment contrasted the thwarted efforts to introduce vaccine passports –  which attempted to reintroduce the biometric ID in rebranded biosecurity form. Yet both measures indicate changes in state approaches to population management through which norms and protocols of bordering and citizenship are being remade. 

Opposition to each has largely proceeded in parallel. Those protesting the former highlighted citizenship as the site of racist politics but granted less attention to the structural and technocratic transformation of the state, of which deprivation is but one part. Those protesting the latter, more concerned with population management than citizenship, drew attention to the punitive nature of the data-state but mostly within a nationalistic, inward-looking framework. In their efforts to mobilise against institutionalised exclusions, both sets of protests illuminate changes to governance that reflect the transformation of the British state over the last twenty years; a transformation in which the authoritarianisms of the racially-charged security state – nurtured in the police, military and border control – have been matched by the authoritarianisms of data governance. 

Citizenships, in this context, are frequently treated by capitalist states less as liberal rights-bearing entities and more as commodities open for technocratic cultivation. While powers to remove citizenship will likely be of growing importance as climate catastrophe triggers scarcity and reduces habitable land, it is via the technocracy of e-governance – through which the digitised data-state re-forms subjectivities, administers mass surveillance and promotes conformity and compliance – that a broader spectrum of disenfranchisement is likely to take place. As big tech becomes more enmeshed into the operations of government and the data-state expands, digital identity looks set to be the prism through which bio- and necropolitical drives of the state will be forged. 

After 9/11 – in a bid to separate ‘genuine refugee’ from ‘terrorist’ – the use of digitised biometrics infiltrated the humanitarian sector and institutionalised the supposition that biometrics could reveal truth. In doing so, biometrics were equipped to assess the veracity of asylum applications, to distinguish between the spurious and the sincere. Via asylum management, biometric identification was rolled out on a global scale as a state governing technology effectively making biometric disclosure a prerequisite for legal recognition. As the security state sought to inscribe papers, or non-papers, onto the body – to momentarily reveal and authenticate – surveillance tech solutions also promised tracking capabilities to scrutinise targets beyond the national border. 

Bodily data’s linking to behavioural data has been central to the security state’s embrace of techno-solutionism, as Evgeny Morozov names it. The data-state is a burgeoning technocracy reliant on digital technologies to connect data dots, find needles in haystacks, ascertain locations, and predict profiles. Scrutiny of biometric identities, security intel, financial records, Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) histories, civic participation and social standing by automatonic administrators assessing legitimacy, eligibility and overstay – an elaboration of the ‘weaponisation of paperwork’ that Will Davies speaks of – is growing in sophistication and possibility thanks to its recalibration by digital tech. 

The parallel administration of welfare and employment benefits are increasingly reliant on the intelligence of machines to profile, assess and predict, to employ more efficiently and competently the full skill set earlier desired of their human counterparts. So too border policing is hardening because of the employment of technologies designed to construct and fix identity, to make visible the opaque and to relate otherwise discrete data controlled by private and public institutions. Indeed, the hostile environment policy, in its efforts to synthesise population data and promote data sharing between the Home Office and the NHS, education and other state institutions, was as much a test of existing technological capabilities as it was more dog whistle politics. And this trend is only set to worsen, with biosecurity being produced in the image of counterterrorism, intent on delving ever more deeply to mine and extract biodata to make legible ‘potentially infectious’ populations and to track population movements. 

With this push towards technocracy, surveillance tech is also reconstituting the (non)citizen-subject. Over the last twenty years, genetics have merged with behavioural science. Border policing, having routinised biometric data collection, has grown increasingly reliant on the use of prediction profiling, harnessing statistical and technological processes to police ‘asylum seekers’, ‘immigrants’, and ‘terrorist suspects’, not as individuals but by patterns of behaviour and probability – with the effect of casting the ‘foreigner’ a wider net. Thus, the data-state is interested not only in those who are undocumented, but with all, as Didier Bigo explains, ‘who have an action profile that behaviouralists establishing the profiles have judged to be a sign of potential danger’. It is not only that race-class is coded into technical/scientific suppositions as the site of the border is extended, but that one’s whole subjecthood is reduced to a series of data nodes where the measure of our worth is restricted to what is knowable and thereby calculable from the AI-derived readings of our biometrics and adjoined digital behaviours.

In a world intent on producing data-subject cyborgs, biometric identification appears a mainstay. It is the foundation of the digital state, to be used not only as a tool for momentary ‘authenticatication’ but employed as an institutionalised, fixed legal identity. Indeed, India’s name for the unique biometric identity granted to residents is Aadhaar, meaning ‘foundation’. Kenya’s Huduma Namba, Swahili for ‘service number’, is proclaimed by its government to be the ‘single source of truth’, reinscribing its assigned occultic role for the data-state. Meanwhile, for development capitalists, identification infrastructure is road-building for the digital age. Justifications for the imposition of national digital identification shift in their policing emphasis, generally pivoting between social/welfare management and securitisation. When Britain came its closest to implementing a comprehensive national ID database under Tony Blair’s government, it was a combination – border security and the threat of terrorism, welfare and employment – that underpinned policy directives in the name of combatting the threat of opacity, identity fraud and misrepresentation. 

Digital identity, now already a multi-billion dollar industry, is projected to exceed $30 billion by 2025, with the number of digital identity apps expected to exceed 6.2 billion by the same year. The issue at hand is no longer whether we can resist digital identity. It is: who will own and manage it, and by doing so, us? Mass digital biometric identities are already here and at the command of the Big Tech sovereigns who, through their ‘smart technologies’, are thrusting upon us ‘smart cities’ relying on an amalgam of state cooperation, compliance and cronyism. For the states or sections of them wishing to resist monopolistic Big Tech takeovers, the urge is to construct nation-state equivalents, which governments would control. This was Ursula von der Leyen’s reasoning when she suggested the European Commission quickly seek a ‘European solution’ for vaccine certificates – before Apple or Google got there first.

And as the pandemic hastened surveillance capitalism’s opportunity, so it accelerated the urgency for digital data-state futures. The cash cow of crises is the opportunity they provide for ideologically re-framing capitalist imperatives otherwise experiencing friction. Sold to us in the immediate aftermath of the outbreak of Covid-19, the ‘screen new deal’ – as Naomi Klein phrased it – rebranded and repackaged the all-encroaching tech dystopia encompassing everything from digital classrooms, driverless cars, drone delivery systems, permanent location tracking, and facial recognition-based security systems, many of which, and more, would come together in the beckoned ‘smart cities’ of the future. 

Smart cities promise seamless connectivity and infinite security. AI-driven street sensors, air quality monitors, autonomous buses, self-flying taxis, automated waste sharks and blockchain-based tree planting are already in cultivation, if not in use. As are the public surveillance systems, not least facial recognition cameras, upon which much of the smart city infrastructure depends. These will provide interminable data for fueling preemptive policing systems that will sustain and no doubt worsen the race-classed bordering that already structures urban space. The utopia of the smart city future is to be frictionless, not borderless. All of this, so heavily protested in the months and years prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, could now be better sold and more readily accepted as the key solution to ‘pandemic-proofing’ our lives, our loves, our livelihoods.

If the seamless, holistic smart city is still in production, the digital biometric surveillance apparatus is implanted and flourishing. Of cities ranked with the most street cameras per person, most of the top ten are in China. Atlanta is tenth. London is sixth. London’s Thatcherite legacy of privately installed CCTV cameras installed to police the crises of the 1980s is now a lucrative market opportunity for surveillance firms offering the latest facial recognition technologies to update and advance existing functionality. The police watchlists against which biometric maps of distinct facial points are currently checked by the surveillance systems used by the Metropolitan and South Wales Police will be all the more comprehensive should a national biometric register be made available. A study by professor Pete Fussey of the Met’s trial system found it was accurate just 19 per cent of the time; numerous studies in the US have pointed to the racial and gender disparities in accuracy. In India, research concurs, indicating that accuracy of facial recognition software, even when it is produced and tested in the Indian context, is significantly better for men than for women, for lighter skinned Indians than for the darker-skinned. 

So how do we make sense of the emerging digital data-state? Emergent designs largely fall under one of two dystopic models. The first simulates itself in the image of the libertarian state – tech style. That is, it uses the foundation of subject datafication – of a digital identity infrastructure – to pursue the creation of digital states, with the aim of realising a market of competing governments. A response to the inadequacies of state governance as the proponents see them, these privately run, private equity–backed ‘sovereign-investor’ states are to challenge the monopoly that nation-states have over the business of governance, offering the eligible affluent an alternative ‘free-market’, friction-free digital citizenship, trading and consuming with digital currency. In their predictions for the year 2022, Bernice Lee, research director at the policy think-tank Chatham House, and Ivan Mortimer-Schutts, a senior financial specialist at the World Bank, suggested, albeit somewhat prematurely, that we would enter a world where digital ‘countries’ would operate alongside nation-states. 

Certainly, the flexibility such virtual states are posed to offer, allowing their members to set up legal entities in one country, physically reside in a second, with salaries paid in a third, appear little different from the privileges already enjoyed by the tax-evading citizens of everywhere that the 1 per cent already inhabit. But, with the virtual replication and expansion of such a system, esteemed privileges of pick-and-mix citizenship currently reserved for high-net-worth individuals and offshore companies are set to become available to the next tier down; the ‘mass affluent’. And so: the false promise of market inclusivity where – with the assignment of digital identities produced from the calibration of biometrics, property rights, vaccination status – select datizens will be granted access to gated online worlds, including market spaces to, as Lee and Mortimer Schutts continue, ‘access digital goods and services that are not licensed or approved in the physical space in which they reside’. These are set to be ‘the new offshore, virtual free ports of the digital age.’ 

Though the virtual state in this form remains in the making, yet-to-be successful libertarian tech efforts to colonise new territories, seas and space in this image are being tried and tested – perhaps the most iconic attempt being the Peter Thiel–backed non-profit Seasteading Institute, which championed the creation of artificial floating nations in international waters. One funded project, Blueseed, aspired to put foreign workers on a cruise ship off the California coast and outside the boundaries of US immigration law – an immigration hack for capital. The inherent contradiction that structures libertarian Silicon Valley – that its desire for minimal government and maximum autonomy operates in conjunction with a business model of state capture capitalism – follows through in these digital floating islands that promise little regulation but monopolistic, secure communications infrastructure. In these gated states, the green-washing of eco-capitalism promises ‘sustainability’ via energy extraction from the beds of dying seas. While the rest perish.

In the libertarian digital state, sovereignty is to be marketised, citizenship something to be bought and sold. The exclusivity inherent in any such model of statehood, granting frictionless citizenship to those with approving data profiles, accentuates unequal distribution of resources, barring wholesale to the virtual and material wasteland those whose biometrics are immeasurable, or don’t measure up. 

Running alongside is the second dystopic and currently hegemonic data-state vision – the digital statehood being constructed in the image of the neoliberal nation-state. This model, too, warns against the overreach of government, but in its drive to dissolve the distinction between public and private goods retains neoliberalism’s philosophical commitment to – as Sivamohan Valluvan observes – reclaiming the nation as its correct unit, albeit in the image of a market. Protectors of global capital are the central driving force here – the World Bank’s programme ID4D, Identity for Development, spearheading the biometric identity rollout currently underway in some form across much of the global south, reliant on loans from the world’s largest enabler of transnational capital penetration. Returns to the preoccupation with ‘development’ are now aimed at servicing tech capitalism, particularly financial technology, where mass establishment of biometric subjecthood is held to be the solution to identity fraud and capitalist imperatives for identity verification. With digital IDs as an indexing device, a whole host of other e-governance initiatives – digitised tax and revenue collections, ‘smart’ transport management, e-voting and e-billing – proliferate. 

Estonia – where World Bank interventions encouraged the creation of a ‘digital nation for global citizens’ in the early 2000s – is among the most advanced experimenters in this state form. The Estonia model takes seriously the notion of government as platform, institutionalised via e-Estonia through which its electronic residents are ascribed a secure identification – enabling access to all manner of social, economic, political and administrative services without ever needing to put foot into the country. 

India’s digitised nation project took inspiration from this model but upped the ante, scaling up over 1000 times Estonia’s efforts so that the project at hand now concerned not a meagre 1.3 million but 1.3 billion residents, making India home to the largest biometric identification system in the world. India Stack, its equivalent e-government project, spearheaded by neoliberal tech personified billionaire and World Bank crony Nandan Nilekani, has established universal biometric identities as the foundation for a data-driven digital economy that has begun with efforts to transform the heavily bureaucratic banking system but desires much beyond. India’s model, spurred on by the World Bank–funding Omidyar Network, is in the process of being exported elsewhere – to the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Somalia, Morocco. A comparable and likely compatible system has also been embraced by the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), now working with Estonia to roll out digital ID for asylum seekers. Earlier processes of cooperation that saw, for example, the UNHCR pass on refugee identities to state institutions, such as asylum processing institutions in Kenya, may soon function all that much smoother.

Culturally, neoliberal ID proponents frame their efforts in terms of modernisation and efficiency. In India, the effective corporate capitalist assault on the small-scale economic structures that support the poor and working class – which digitisation of the state brings – has gained consensus through a discourse of anti-corruption. Tech-enabled surveillance is promoted as an effective interjection against charlatan middle-men and gangs dealing in distortion – preventing payments and subsidies from reaching their rightful recipients. Anti-corruption narratives serve, no less, the urban middle classes, for whom e-governance epitomises the arrival of the modern techno-financial Indian state, redresses the backwardness of rural regions, and fronts India on the global stage. 

In theory, the rewards promise the creation of more and more productive consumer citizens, while improving surveillance and policing capabilities. In reality, digital governance in its current form seems far from the sophisticated, holistic Orwellian nightmare it portends to be. Certainly, population indexing, with its attendant dataset linking, offers tech capital and its various offspun niches possibilities to penetrate untapped markets, to better ‘know your customers’ – all of which drive a fairly capable surveillance state. But there is also a sense in which digital ID fails to live up to everything it promises. Dysfunctional biometric technologies, the distribution of duplicates, and creation of fraudulent identities are all widely reported in India, making the system more performative than effective. There, inept, clunky, burdensome bureaucracy supplemented by the thuggery of preserved feudal social relations remains core to surveillance and control. Thus the assault implicit in efforts to instil biometric digitisation and widespread digital governance lies – for the disenfranchised labouring classes without internet, without readable fingerprints, without digital literacy, without access to consistent electricity – in the effacement of local systems of accountability, in the policing of human bartering and interaction, and in the hollowing of all avenues through which one’s livelihood is fought and sustained. It is via the destruction of such recourses to localised state support that material efficiencies – in the reduction of welfare payments made available to those entitled – are being achieved.

The flipside of such biopolitical drivers are the necropolitical urges mobilised most fervently by authoritarian nationalist forces for whom mass digital surveillance and population indexing offers scientific veneer and sometimes solutionism to the challenges of bureaucracy as a mode of population management. For this camp, data surveillance facilitates the drive to secure those ‘edge’ populations: unproductive, potentially hostile, and/or simply proclaimed threats against which state nationalisms must rally. In contrast to India’s liberal capitalists, such as Nandan Nilekani, for whom digital identity was not to be restricted to citizens but prescribed to all residents in a rather limp effort to disassociate Aadhaar from border control, for devout Hindutva nationalists digital identity authentication systems are tools that discern the ‘legal’ from the ‘illegal’, that enable the deportation of, in Amit Shah’s words, ‘infiltrators’. Though objectives differ, with the former promoting development economics and the latter emphasising surveillance, policing and immigration control, it is at this faultline – where the paternal, caretaking state meets the urges of Hindu chauvinism, both raptured by the promise of the digital – that the full spectrum of corporatist nationalist authoritarianism glimmers into view. 

No equivalent, wholesale rollout has yet been mandated in Britain. One might envisage that in a fully functional Orwellian dystopia, the data-state would both nudge and coerce behaviours; that it would ably surveil and appraise our route of entry into the country as much as our economic contribution, our productivity, and our social, cultural and political behaviours and beliefs, crediting or removing privileges and ranking citizenship accordingly. The disqualification from voting rights, the withdrawal of access to services and provisions – bank accounts, passports, driving lessons – of those who failed to measure up would perhaps follow. 

Dystopic data-states organised around datafied citizen-subject taxonomies of course came into view momentarily with the fraught efforts to impose vaccine passports: the biometric ID in rebranded, biosecurity form. Suspended for the most part for now, cultural conditioning nevertheless has begun, and technical infrastructures developed, not to enable, to be sure, disciplinary action as drastic or as final as citizenship deprivation, but certainly to institute an inevitably race-classed system of internal bordering asserting the right to exclude from aspects of social, economic, political and civic life all those without suitable data metrics. 

Yet capricious efforts to introduce the vaccine passport were hardly the rebirth of a biometric identity database that originally died with the demise of Tony Blair, viscerally destroyed by Cameron-Clegg and celebrated as one of the major victories over the Blairite project. State-managed digital ID has been in progress for some time prior to the pandemic and continues to function in the background – the gov.uk Verify programme being its principal manifestation. Employment BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) checks, universal credit applications, and rural payments are among the nineteen government services currently connected to the e-platform for identity verification by one of five private providers: Barclays, Digidentity, Experian, Post Office, and Secure Identity. NHS Digital has thus far managed to create over 22 million IDs – thanks to pandemic-induced disaster capitalism – and now sinks its claws into the nervous system of the NHS. And beyond this, landlords and employers – already responsible for administering border checks – are being encouraged to feed into digitised identity systems, while an accreditation system by the British Standards Institute certifying private organisations for complying with set guidelines is piloted, in efforts to ensure consistency and promote data sharing. Just as the installation of CCTV cameras in the 1980s relied on privatisation to counteract contestation against the semblance of a totalitarian state, so Britain’s national identity architecture is set to reflect later stages of neoliberal statecraft with, as James Meadway and others note, the ‘growing fusion of the powers of state and capital’ in ways that distract from the state presence as it is popularly understood. Still, the political in-fighting between the nationalists, the libertarians and the corporate capitalist vanguard have thus far prevented anything close to coherence in a state-run national identity system. 

For the libertarian right, devoutly anti any such big-state intervention, the vaccine passport – much like the mandate for mask-wearing – is dismissed as at the faux twin poles of Nazism and Stalinism. Indeed, prior to his premiership, this same sentiment was echoed by Boris Johnson himself when he claimed he would rather eat his papers than reveal them when asked for his identity. The ‘freedom’ from borders they call for, though, remains bounded and exclusive. As Richard Seymour observes, the ‘creative-destructive’ joys of life that right libertarians appeal to ‘is in fact a heavily policed, bordered and violent society in which a lucky few are protected and secured’. The push here is for something akin to the floating good life of the Seastead Institute where the false promise of universal capitalist abundance means caviar for the rich and crumbs for the poor. Reaction here is not against bordering and surveillance but against state bordering and surveillance, implying that biopolitical controls and identity checks are not so problematic when controlled by Google. Even the ‘non-partisan’ libertarian Big Brother Watch has not maintained its campaign against biometric ID cards since it has been administered by an amalgam of digital tech start-ups, multinationals and privatised state entities. 

But fundamentally, the bounded and exclusive idyll that libertarians seek is premised on the maintenance of race-class bordering, where the use of biometric identification for preserving the sanctity of the nation is fully embraced. So Steve Baker can wax lyrical about the encroachment of state authoritarianism in the form of a Covid pass but remain committed to the introduction of voter IDs to keep out fraudsters. Nigel Farage sees no contradiction between his anti-biosecurity protestations and his steadfast commitment to HIV tests for migrants. 

In countering reactionary libertarianism with reactionary state-managed neoliberalism, the centrist Labour Party’s boring default response has been for sensible authoritarianism via the roll out of vaccine passports to revive a productive labour force and economy. The Labour Party’s response was consistent with centrist politics of New Labour and its policy think tank reincarnation. Tony Blair and his institute have been waving the Bretton Woods flag for Britain, supporting business and industry interests which either stand to profit directly from identity creation – namely the digital ID industry – or those industries that see digital passports as the gateway to the resumption of more growth/accumulation: travel, tourism and hospitality. Excited, perhaps, about the prospect of returning to one of his long championed programmes for infrastructural change and modernisation, for Mr Blair and his people digital identity offered a solution both to the pandemic and to post-Brexit Britain’s dwindling economy. Not dismayed by the lack of take up, the Tony Blair Institute is advocating for digital ID for asylum seekers, with which they are likely to have more success. 

The left has insufficiently grappled with the authoritarianisms birthed out of the security state and their race-class stratifying effects, which inhibit any hope of realising radical class solidarities. On the one hand, the race determinist position, though sensitive to the realities of border control and policing, tends to fossilise racialised precarity in histories of postcolonial migration without reckoning with the class fracturing that this legacy has birthed. This position assumes that large swathes of British ethnic minorities, particularly those with roots across Britain’s former colonies, are now vulnerable to citizenship deprivation – exemplified by a New Statesman article predicting two in five ethnic minorities in England and Wales would be eligible. But such blanket implementation does not map on to the contemporary coordinates of race-making and management in which racialised policing systems must also navigate an established brown and black globalised middle class. It is difficult, for example, to imagine the citizenship revocation of the middle class Sunak-Patel BJP-supporting British Hindu diaspora or those Brits whose sense of imagined community extends to supporting the Israeli settler-colonial project. 

On the flip side are the left nationalists ill attentive to the full wranglings of the security state. Earlier concessions to securitisation, particularly via the domestic face of the War on Terror, indulged racisms for the sake of some social-democratic wins, nationalist welfarism and superficial multiculturalism. When state recourse to securitisation pivoted in new directions in response to Covid, fronted this time through ‘biosecuritisation’, and forged against fractured reactionary political faultlines, it was much more difficult for the left to muster a resolute, clear progressive response. Certainly sections of the left pointed to the discriminatory effects an identity pass would have, the redundancy of such a pass after a relatively short time when vaccine effects had worn off and the social cost of maintaining them, the individualisation of a collective public healthcare problem, the potential for exacerbating social inequalities, the role of vaccine passports in sustaining toxic vaccine nationalisms, and the further expansion and normalisation of data surveillance. But this discussion has proceeded in isolation from the parallel biosecuritisation and dataveillance that subsumes immigration control, an institution of the security state which ought not to be othered as elsewhere, or cast distinctly as the space where surveillance and policing mechanisms are tested, but seen as central to an anti-authoritarian, liberatory internationalist politics – particularly if we are to move beyond the constraints of challenging the demise of ‘citizenship’. For now, retorts against vaccine passports are seemingly limited by their own nationalist constraints. 

Out of the wreckage of this class fracturing and a strengthened libertarian right, the recent failed efforts to impose stringent biopolitical borders, at least internally, have brought some respite. But we need only wonder what the next political crisis will be, or when the next pandemic will erupt, to provide the necessary shock-enabling adjustment for the furtherance of mass data surveillance, for the systems and structures  already in place to be made effective. 

It is here in the chaos where hope for liberatory prospects lie, where an alternative might be salvaged.

Nisha Kapoor is associate professor of sociology at the University of Warwick. She is author of Deport Deprive Extradite: 21st Century State Extremism (Verso, 2018).