Anxiety about Data comes a widespread sense of worry about the uncontrollability of the digital sphere, whose incessant growth seems to elude every established mode of governance. We need to consider the radical potentialities in the accelerated unscalability of the digital, while evaluating its current encasement in neoliberal strategies. We must move beyond this data anxiety, and form an expanded awareness of data as a new arena of public life. In the past, the public sphere was largely elaborated through spatial analogies that foreground a physically tangible division between the public and the private, between rights of ownership, control and usage. The contemporary public sphere of data can no longer be comprehended in such terms – as a static, albeit progressively opaque environment that we simply traverse.

A universalising order, where everyone and everything is placed in relation to one another, has been superseded by a system of dynamic management, in which socio-economic currencies such as access, belonging and potential are folded into each other. Increasingly “user-generated”, today’s data publics bring with them a profound blurring of the capacities, roles and motivations of different actors. From digital citizenship to peer-to-peer networks and from online community services to virtual support groups there is an increasing range of sites that are data-dependent or data-driven and in which individual, commercial and governmental agendas and interactions are becoming increasingly blurred. Traditional power apparatuses of national governments are confronted with the global reach of digital providers. Citizens become enlisted in the self-servicing of the social, cultural and infrastructural fabric of societies. And affective capital such as desire and identification, fear and rejection turns into the most decisive currency determining the fate of new technologies and their associated economies.

The public of these new data publics is thus a multi-faced figure. Forms of representation that have hitherto enabled social entities to manifest themselves in action – nation states, political parties, regulatory authorities, professional associations, unions, etc. – are increasingly losing their traction, giving way to new forms of sociality that are not contained by traditional notions of the people or the public.