The Information State: from the Library of Alexandria to the Snowden Files

With varying degrees of success, officials have long sought to rule rationally by collecting and mobilizing data. What technologies, institutions, and strategies make knowledge into power? What tools do states use to see, know, and read the world? In this course we will examine recent examples like the bureaucracy of modern surveillance or the 1960s chatbot ELIZA alongside such historical phenomena as the Incan knotted-string record-keeping system outlawed by imperial Spain and attempts to build libraries of all human knowledge. Whether or not we are dominated by the ‘information state,’ or live under ‘surveillance capitalism,’ understanding how institutions have used information as a means of control in the past can help us understand very modern controversies: redaction, authentication, metadata, indices, and searchability all have deep histories.