This chapter develops the concept of ‘algorithmic managerialism’ to show how long-standing managerialist ideology is digitally intensified rather than replaced. Algorithms embed managerial discretion in code, automating surveillance, standardising tasks, shaping emotions and narrowing worker judgement and collective voice. The chapter contrasts critical research – viewing algorithmic systems as sociotechnical mechanisms that exacerbate power asymmetries – with managerialist accounts that frame algorithms as neutral efficiency tools. It examines augmentation (AI-guided enhancement of emotional, diagnostic, and decision capacities) as a form of control that individualises responsibility and weakens solidarity, and it recasts Taylor’s four principles as ‘digital Taylorism,’ where algorithms perform surveillance, task design, enforcement, and separation of conception from execution. The result is intensified work, reduced autonomy, precarity, invasive monitoring, and biased decision-making. Recognising algorithmic managerialism as political rather than technological opens space for democratic alternatives to algorithm design, deployment, and governance.

In Chapter 7, the objectification of humanity, resulting in the cataloging of humans through the means of science and technology, is addressed through the example of US sex offender registries and other criminal databanks. Human cataloging offers government a means to control society in the name of public order, but law reform offers feasible methods of resisting the encroachment on rights of privacy and liberty.

This chapter traces the forms of epistemic violence that asylum seekers are exposed to when using data from digital platforms to substantiate their claims for international protection. Drawing on a selection of decisions by the Upper Tribunal Immigration and Asylum Chamber in the UK, it challenges accounts of generalised digital surveillance by showing how asylum seekers are forced to engage in more and more data wrangling without resources, time or equipment. In so doing, asylum seekers do not just have to make themselves surveillable but are confronted with a demand to know the contours and limits of surveillance on digital platforms. By introducing the concept of platform power, the chapter shows that asylum seekers face an impossible demand to know the unknowable. Platform power undoes the binaries of privacy/publicity, transparency/opacity, openness/secrecy, and monitoring/indifference. It also obfuscates the attempts to ascertain the likelihood of digital surveillance.

This commentary engages with the three chapters in this section by exploring the intersection of algorithmic governance, violence, and power. It highlights the ways in which digital technologies, from biometric surveillance at borders to data-driven asylum court cases, perpetuate exclusionary practices rooted in racial, gendered, and classist structures. The commentary explores ‘truth’, ‘visibility’ and ‘fixation’ as conceptual connections between the chapters and deepens the conversation on histories of violence and dehumanization in digital governance. Deploying critical race theory, the commentary reflects on the growing academic debates that address the racialized and colonial contexts that shape digital infrastructures. Furthering these debates, the commentary calls for an “epistemological unfixing” and the need to center marginalized perspectives to resist the reproduction of oppressive systems in algorithmic decision-making.

The regulation of the night hours did not depend on public illumination. A symbol of political presence in Europe, streetlights would have been a sign of gross negligence in the combustible cities of early modern Japan. In their stead, legislative alternatives were put in place by shoguns and domain lords to keep the night in check. Their path toward the regulation of the night may have differed from that of their European counterparts, but the endpoint was the same: By controlling darkness, they demonstrated both around-the-clock presence and a commitment to order. The beliefs and practices of the urban residents for the most part aligned with the vision of rulers and administrators. Regulation, thus, came not just from above but also from below. The Tokugawa urban night, regulated from above and below, challenges triumphal rhetorics of luminous progress crafted by the Meiji ideologues first and picked up by modern historians later. More broadly, it shows how Tokugawa Japan participated in the global transformation of the night not by following a path traced by others but by charting its own.

Chapter 3 focuses on doing privacy by design for Clever Urban Computing systems, that is, interconnected physical sensors and AI-based data analytics embedded into buildings, streets, and wider-city infrastructures. Personal data is central to such systems, so accounting for privacy and data protection laws is critical. This chapter charts the emergence of Clever Urban Computing, from ‘smart cities’ towards AI urbanism. Examples show the problematic assumptions and problems underpinning many initiatives. ‘Smart buildings’ are analysed to foreground the longitudinal and infrastructural aspects of designing for privacy. Privacy by design and ‘data protection by design and default’ are analysed at length. Legal analysis concentrates on privacy as a value, alongside the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the EU Data Act 2023. New HCI-led approaches are proposed as examples of Accountable Design. This includes designing for consent through ‘consent trajectories’, developing a ‘privacy by participatory design’ approach, and user-centred data management. Empirical data from an expert interview presents why privacy is hard to design for.

Chapter 5 analyses how to design more trustworthy and safer Clever Biometric Computing systems, that is, sensor technologies that read and computationally interpret the human body using AI. The complex socio-technical histories around facial recognition technologies (FRT) and emotion recognition (ERT) are presented, as key examples of Clever Biometric Computing. Discussion focuses on why they are ethically, legally, and socio-technically problematic. The chapter then explores the EU policy landscape around trustworthy AI and the EU Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA). The AIA formal legal requirements for design of AI systems are comprehensively analysed, particularly the turn to design for regulating high-risk AI systems (HRAIS). Some requirements that are analysed include human oversight, fundamental rights impact assessments, data governance, record keeping, and transparency. Different examples are presented too, such as ERT for safety in cars, industrial workplaces, and law enforcement use of live FRT. Ways to overcome challenges of operationalising the HRAIS requirements from an Accountable Design perspective are a key part of this chapter.

Chapter 8 explores how the atomic dimension of the Cold War reshaped global politics and international law. The Cuban Missile Crisis serves as a focal point, illustrating the juridical patterning of the Amero-Soviet Cold War and the integration of nuclear weapons into geopolitical strategies. The chapter traces the evolution of anti-nuclear movements, from initial peace initiatives to the emergence of non-proliferation policies. It examines how the threat of nuclear annihilation created a new global consciousness, transcending traditional notions of sovereignty and national interests. The development of satellite surveillance systems is highlighted as a key factor in producing new forms of ‘planetary’ knowledge, contributing to advancements in earth sciences and environmental awareness. The chapter also discusses the paradoxical split between ‘peaceful’ and ‘aggressive’ uses of nuclear technology, as exemplified by the Non-Proliferation Treaty and the International Atomic Energy Agency. Ultimately, the atomic dimension of the Cold War is shown to have globalised the conflict, creating a "global civil war" that eroded distinctions between combatants and civilians. This new reality challenged existing legal frameworks and fostered the emergence of new global subjects, knowledge systems, and technologies that would shape the post–Cold War world.

Chapter 7 explores how the proliferation of intelligence agencies during the Cold War brought into prominence the practice of international espionage, surveillance and covert intervention. As the 1960 U-2 incident exemplifies such practices were often the subject of significant contestation as to their legality in time of peace. Whilst the practice of surveillance was encouraged by an expanded concept of ‘national security’ it was often accompanied by a paradoxical commitment to secrecy. As secrecy intensified, public awareness of covert activities grew, and alongside it, accompanying practices of plausible deniability and ideological disavowal that undermined trust not just in public knowledge but in the possibility of legal judgment. We recount how contestation over the legality of espionage led, not only to a blurring of the categories of peace and war, but to the formation of a new legal framework for outer space that provided legal cover for ongoing surveillance to be undertaken by the rival Cold War powers. These developments profoundly impacted international law, sovereignty concepts, and global surveillance practices, shaping modern notions of global policing through surveillance and leaving a complex legacy in international relations.

Romani people have been present in the United States since its earliest days, yet public awareness of Romani lives and experiences remains limited to episodic reporting often highlighting negative interactions with the public. Drawing upon two episodes of Romani interactions with non-Roma, separated by almost a century, this chapter argues that American Romani experiences, memories and kinship connections illuminate the complex character of American immigration controls for individuals who were often deemed to be “undesirable.” Moreover, this chapter highlights the power of strategic actions and claims of belonging by American Roma pursuing their dreams for a new home in the United States. Utilizing both archival documentation and oral history, this chapter shows how American Romani persistence and tenacity, built upon years of effort, have pushed new forms of kinship and social memory around the Atlantic.

In assessing the factors that led the British to ramp up surveillance across its colonies after WWII, historians have emphasized the role of the Cold War. Yet, the British investment in maintaining white supremacy and the use of the intelligence service to do so were as important as geopolitics. This chapter uses the surveillance of Rastafari between 1950 and 1961 to explore how and why colonial officials, law enforcement personnel and international observers saw Rastafari as a racial threat in Jamaica. In other words, it delves into the fallacy that Rastafarians created racial problems in Jamaica and explains the extent to which the issue of race instigated the measures British colonial officials took to monitor Rastafari. In claiming African heritage and celebrating blackness, Rastafarians disrupted the widespread denial about racial problems in Jamaican society. As government officials confronted their fears surrounding Rastafari, they revealed a profound investment in the idea of Jamaica as a racial paradise where the absence of de jure segregation inspired them to promote the idea of Jamaican exceptionalism.

This chapter examines the human rights framing for the governance of information from the 1990s to the early 2010s and argues that, overall, it did not fundamentally unsettle two basic logics of neoliberalism, namely, securitization and marketization. In commonplace positive narratives about technology, human rights were presented by policymakers and international technocrats as one benefit of new information and telecommunication technologies (ICTs), to justify the market-driven technological change. By contrast, negative narratives about technology focused on the social harms of new ICTs and invoked human rights to normatively ground technological development. However, human rights struggles in this period suffered from two processes of dilution – firstly, the proceduralization of human rights obligations of the state during the War on Terror years and, secondly, the narrowing down of a broad social programme into focusing only on classic civil and political rights in civil society campaigns – and were therefore unable to fundamentally reshape the governance of information towards more equitable distribution of power and wealth.