Rethinking quantification amidst digital authoritarianism
Download PDFSpangler, Ian, Emory Shaw, Scott Markley, and Dillon Mahmoudi. 2025. “We can’t count our way out: Rethinking quantification amidst digital authoritarianism.” Dialogues on Digital Society, 5(1), 65-93. 29768640251375903.
doi.org/10.1177/29768640251375903.
Abstract
As digital infrastructures become increasingly central to statecraft, so too do the quantitative techniques that animate them. In this commentary, we contend that digital infrastructure, authoritarian politics, and postpositivist thinking coalesce in authoritarian counting, or ways of making evidence that couch projects of exclusion, expulsion, austerity, and violence in the aesthetics of objectivity. We argue that the ascent of authoritarian counting requires that we re-envision the goals, audience, and character of quantification. Confronting an antagonistic state forces us to reconsider who the audience for counter-data is and what its goals are. A core contribution of critical quantitative work must therefore be to conceptualize, as a central measure of quantification’s efficacy, whether counting with each other can engender forms of counting on each other.
Summary
Authoritarian counting reduces quantification to narratives that evacuate context and inhibit collective responsibility. The task ahead is to rebuild counting as a social relation—not a tool of oppression, but as a means to hold each other accountable.
Their numbers are chains; ours must be bricks.
Through various case studies, including tenant organizers combatting rent gouging and feminist activists building registries to address state failures, the commentary highlights grassroots forms of “counting with each other” and “counting for each other” as vital responses to digital authoritarianism. We call for a fundamental recalibration toward applied solidarity and relational legibility, urging critical quantitative scholars to build quantification from the ground up and in partnership with those affected by oppression.