  How should we understand the social and political effects of the datafication
of human life? This paper argues that the effects of data should be understood
as a constitutive shift in social and political relations. We explore how
datafication, or quantification of human and non-human factors into binary
code, affects the identity of individuals and groups. This fundamental shift
goes beyond economic and ethical concerns, which has been the focus of other
efforts to explore the effects of datafication and AI. We highlight that
technologies such as datafication and AI (and previously, the printing press)
both disrupted extant power arrangements, leading to decentralization, and
triggered a recentralization of power by new actors better adapted to
leveraging the new technology. We use the analogy of the printing press to
provide a framework for understanding constitutive change. The printing press
example gives us more clarity on 1) what can happen when the medium of
communication drastically alters how information is communicated and stored; 2)
the shift in power from state to private actors; and 3) the tension of
simultaneously connecting individuals while driving them towards narrower
communities through algorithmic analyses of data.
