Information management through large corporations expands and entrenches biopolitical governance through dependency on state controlled information

Second, biopower understood in its Foucauldian formulation as power over life and the species’ body is not the exclusive attribute of the state, but can be achieved anywhere by any organization through information gathering and data-management processes and tools. Indeed, in light of the current transformations occurring in the space of mobility as well as in the nature and the location of regulative powers, we witness a new modality of (bio)power. As societies become more dependent on information and communication technologies (ICTs) there is a change in power, intensity and scope. Becoming more and more hybrid, power deterritorializes and connects dots which are not in the first place designed to beconnected. Moreover, power is now exercised in non-traditional locations like datawarehouses, software, airline and phone companies. The actual holders of power are not exclusively states but private organizations like Google where information about billions of people is offered to everybody as material 38 for processing and assessing without limitation, hierarchical order and precise location. Hence the emergence of a new way of managing individuals, their life and living: an electronic and digitized (bio)power which is more open-ended, flexible and embedded in domestic life as opposed to the classical territorialized biopower of the nineteenth century which was the attribute of first the sovereign and then the market. This chapter shows how basic biological features of human beings such as their unchangeable body parts, their biometric features, behaviors and everyday life activities like moving, traveling, communicating and connecting, have become objects of surveillance. It will examine how surveillance becomes a biopolitical security and power technology and how its regulatory measures transform it into a technology of certainty (Ceyhan 2008) which is supposed to compensate for the loss of confidence generated with the transformations of late modernity. As Bauman contends in his series of books on “liquids,” the transformations of modernity generated new challenges for individuals and societies and also a loss of confidence on traditional regulative forces and institutions which are no longer capable of serving as a frame of reference for human action.