Authoritarian tech, even in its computerized form, is not as new as you might think. This month, the journal Security Dialogue published an article that shows that. It’s called “Sensing, territory, population,” and it studies the deployment of something called the Hamlet Evaluation System (HES) in the Vietnam war. The HES was a kind of proto-big-data program, which let the U.S. military collect and aggregate data on small settlements (hamlets) around Vietnam, so that they could keep track of the war’s progress. The paper’s author wants us to think about what it meant for a complex, controversial war to be transformed into a series of data points:

“I argue that acts of translating the rich texture of hamlet and village life into an objectified information format constituted a unique form of ‘epistemic violence,’ rooted...in the pure abstraction of life into a digitally stored data trace.”

So, in 1967, the U.S. military was already doing something that we can now see as the “abstraction of life into a...data trace.” 

If this isn’t authoritarian tech, what is? That’s not a rhetorical question. We at Coda chose to create a channel called “Authoritarian Tech” because we think that something interesting is happening at the intersection of politics and technology. But what is that something, and is it a coherent phenomenon we can name? More and more, I think the “abstraction of life into a digitally stored data trace” is at the center of the answer.