Bio-corporatism has led to a framework for incidental governmentality – the government becomes aligned with Big Tech corporations that utilize technology to exert control over populations.

There is a significant body of work which considers the emerging implications of digital technologies for political life. Sadowski argues that related analyses can be broadly situated within a field of study known as technopolitics (Sadowski, 2020a: 4–5). The study of technopolitics emphasises the political nature of the technological and how the development of technology is shaped by political as well as commercial interests and imperatives (ibid: 5). In this paper we are interested in one aspect of emerging forms of technopolitics: the mixing of digital surveillance technologies and government practices in liberal democracies.1

As the urtext of digital surveillance in the modern world, Zuboff's (2019) book the Age of Surveillance Capitalism offers two broad perspectives on the technopolitical mixing of Big-Tech and government. First, Zuboff argues that liberal governments have been active accomplices to the infiltration of surveillance capitalist technologies into our lives—utilising Big-Tech as a context for expanding systems of state surveillance. Second, Zuboff suggests that surveillance capitalist systems have facilitated the emergence of systems of anti-liberal government and telemetric influence which were first envisaged by behaviouralists such as B.F. Skinner. While undoubtedly instructive, we argue that Zuboff's perspectives miss some of the more subtle, but arguably more profound, imbroglios of digital technology and government. These imbroglios are characterised by moments when surveillance capitalist corporations take on the actual role of governmental actors (either in isolation from, or loose partnership with, state organizations). In these instances, governments are not accomplices to Big Tech, nor the orchestrators of surveillance capitalism's vectors of behavioural influence, but are, instead, themselves contexts for the realization of corporate imperatives. There are a series of interpretative frameworks which offer insights into these particular combinations of surveillance technology and government. We briefly outline them below, before turning our attention to theories of governmentality.

The notion of corporate capture has been become a significant context within which to interpret emerging relations between governments and surveillance capitalist enterprises. Indeed, the idea that corporations are not merely surveillance collaborators with the state is central to Zuboff (2019) . Through forms of permissionless trespass into our private lives, and various anti-regulatory manoeuvrers, Zuboff claims that surveillance capitalists seek to supersede the jurisdictional control of states. The corporate capture of the state can be achieved through the direct lobbying of public officials by corporations and trade associations (see Miller & Harkins, 2010 ). But, according to Miller & Harkins, 2010 ), corporate capture is increasingly a complex process which involves controlling a series of domains which influence government policymaking. Corporations thus seek to capture governmental institutions through the allied capturing of science, media outlets, and civil society organizations (ibid). By influencing these broad domains corporations seek to control governments through the shaping of the informational regimes through which state officials make decisions.

The corporate capture of the state is clearly related to the incidental forms of governmentality we are interested in this paper, but it is also distinct. While both corporate capture and incidental governmentality seek to use, or circumvent, governments to achieve corporate ends, they do so in very different ways and with very different consequences. Corporate capture seeks to influence the decision-making of governments in order to best serve corporate needs (perhaps through anti-regulatory measures and supportive forms of legislation). But corporate capture seeks to influence government through the shadowy mechanisms of lobbying and the shaping of knowledge regimes within which the presence of the corporation is, often, obscured. Incidental governmentality neither seeks to control the decision-making apparatus of the state, or to hide the role of the corporation in public life. Instead, incidental governmentality mobilises and fabricates the power of government outside of the state and deliberately identifies the corporation as acting governmentality. The practices of corporate capture come closest to incidental governmentality when they prompt government action in support of corporate need. However, corporate capture is most different to incidental governmentality when it seeks to limit the actions of government. In this context, while corporate capture often negates government power, incidental governmentality sees governmental effects and practices as a productive resource.

Related interpretative frameworks for unpacking the mixing of surveillance capitalism and the practices of government have emerged within the geographical analysis of smart cities (see Rosen & Alvarez León, 2022 ; Sadowski, 2020b ). As relatively advanced territorial expressions of the governmental deployment of digital technologies, smart cities offer a productive context for theorising emerging expressions of the technopolitical. In their analysis of the emergence of so-called digital urban growth machines Rosen and Alvarez León (2022) describe how urban authorities are building political coalitions around the growth of digital economies. Rather than involving the corporate capture of government, digital urban growth machines are characterised by the strategic political alignment of the needs of local governments with those of Big-Tech. According to Rosen and Alvarez León (2022) , the governmental leveraging of tech-sector growth is nothing new, but within the era of surveillance capitalism this growth is not just related to investment in digital economic infrastructures (and the purported trickle down of digital revenues), but, also, to the use of digital tools to solve governmental problems.

According to Sadowski, the mixing of digital technologies and urban governance takes a series of sequential steps. First, is the process of outsourcing by which urban governments engage digital consultants to provide oversight and insight into how their cities work and where optimisations can be made. The second step involves Big Tech taking operational responsibility for the delivery of public services (as can be seen when public transport allowances can be used on Uber taxis or when Airbnb takes an increasingly important role in controlling the short-term rental sector). The final step in Sadowski's framework involves Big-Tech corporations assuming ownership over urban space (2021: 1737–38). Sadowski likens this step to a form of corporate sovereignty over metropolitan space in and through which surveillance capitalists can run commercial trials involving the provision of various infrastructures of governance in smart neighbourhoods and precincts (ibid). 2

Emerging theories of technological urbanism have clear parallels with incidental forms of governmentality. Indeed, the experimental processes that Sadowski identifies within the Big-Tech ownership of urban space are emblematic of incidental governmentality. However, neither the strategic partnerships of the digital growth machine and smart city, nor the urban sovereignty of surveillance capitalist zones captures the more subtle digital fabrications of government that are evident within the practices we are interested in here. These are expression of power which reflect the more diffuse and productive use of government that is captured within theories of governmentality. While these systems of incidental government can benefit from the material infrastructure of spaces of digital sovereignty, they do not require the control of territory to be governmental. In this context, while the work of Sadowski and others is interested in the normative quest of how to ‘exorcise capital from the body politic’ (ibid: 1740), we are more concerned with the impacts of the generation of governmental effects within the digital corporation.