Mapping and Politics in the Digital Age by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Social & Cultural Studies, Political Science, Social Science
ISBN: 9781351124461
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2018-11-06T05:00:00+00:00

Subtraction

Subtraction in this case is an act of speculation because it has not already happened. Subtraction is a theory of a future with a different Aadhar – literally the ground and the foundation, as the translation indicates. Unlike a mathematical subtraction that can invoke the disappearance of a number, a subtraction of Aadhar is both material and digital. This section discusses the possibility and/or impossibility of subtraction. Materially, as a physical infrastructure – the question arises – can infrastructure fold? Can machines and circuits be folded back into the bag? Like traces in the airport, which cannot be untraced – what does it mean to imagine a material subtraction of Aadhar? I draw the word ‘subtraction’ from Keller Easterling (2014), who proposes that subtraction in architecture is not just a possibility but a requirement. She argues that if we can design protocols of expansion, we should be able to design protocols of subtraction too. Aadhar as a mapping infrastructure – a practice of multiple mapping practices, both material and digital, accumulating as a glitch-prone programme – makes subtraction a challenging proposition.

Aadhar constitutes multiple layers and interfaces. So to invoke the bag where the folds fall back, what is the speculative future of all the machines and devices made for a project of biometric governance? The limit of a material fold is a decommissioning of its function. Parts of material infrastructure such as cameras, fingerprint readers, scanners and computer modules, wires and cables fold back into this speculative bag. The vast hardware of networked state security, critical infrastructure and administration confronts subtraction as a conceptual framework – because the bag is simply too small to hold something so vast. However, as traces can leak, be copied and multiplied, subtraction is registered in the confusion of the material itself. If the glitch becomes the norm from the anomaly, the infrastructure becomes redundant.

Easterling’s (2014) proposal for subtraction is, I suggest, something interesting to think about in relation to the Aadhar project. What does it mean for a multi-billion-dollar project in the world’s largest democracy to subtract its infrastructure from space? What does it mean for identities under the state’s gaze to be democratised? These are speculations. The unfolding of a basic computer with a fingerprint scanner in bandwidth space (Easterling, 2016), linked with Aadhar infrastructures, is not valid just by its being as a unit of one but because of the active form (Easterling, 2018) of many. Drawing from Easterling, Aadhar here therefore is not just the script but also the protocol of material multiplication. It attempts to become a medium for transactions but transforms instead into a biometric sorting mechanism. Aadhar is not just design but a medium of choice for exclusion and/or inclusion. As I suggest with the concept of ‘terms and conditions’, the designer (human and/or non-human) makes this choice of inclusion and exclusion in collaboration with glitches (known and/or unknown), scaling with them.

Easterling (2016, 62) suggests that the mapping of the ‘incentives, scripts and technologies on the city itself

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