The impact Turns Case – Companies only focus on commercial goals, and will not care about the public good

In this paper we have developed the concept of incidental governmentality as a way of interpreting some of the governmental ambitions of surveillance capitalists and emerging digital expression of liberal governmentality. Incidental governmentality is primarily characterised by the separation of governmental action from rationality. It is evident when corporations utilise the pretence of acting governmentally to primarily achieve commercial goals. As we have seen, in the context of responses to Covid-19 it can involve the exploitation of trusted state brands (such as the UK's National Health Service) to gain access to user's data, and the formation of partnerships with government agencies so that Big Tech can become permanently embedded within the digital architectures of the state. We claim that the identification of incidental forms of governmentality is important for two primary reasons: 1. because it is not accounted for fully within existing theories of surveillance capitalism; and 2. because it reflects an emerging form of (bio-corporate) power which simultaneously exploits the actions of government while undermining many of its moral forms. In the context of the examples of incidental governmentality we have considered in this paper, we have seen how corporations have been able to utilise the pretext of governing as a way of exploiting public trust and exposing new streams of commercially valuable digital data. While appearing to be governmental, however, incidental forms of government are marked by troubling epistemological tendencies (namely a focus on commercial learning as opposed to effective government), and democratic shortfalls (expressed in a lack of contestable reasons for governing).

The examples of incidental governmentality discussed above demonstrate two things. First, that the operational forms and underlying commercial models of surveillance capitalism means that Big Tech are particularly adept at the practices of incidental governmentality. The fact that such companies seek to perpetually monitor and learn from human behaviour means that it is relatively easy to promote a governmental goal and yet to be disinterested in the extent to which it is achieved. When observing the impacts of a behavioural prompt to action and training algorithms to learn from public data sets is the commercial bottom line of such companies, the contributions of these actions to the public good will always be a secondary consideration. While there are few corporate forms which facilitate the practices of incidental governmentality quite like Big Tech, it is clear that incidental governmentality can be part of non-digital governmentality, and indeed be practiced by the state for political gain.

Second, the examples we have explored demonstrate just how diverse incidents of incidental governmentality can be. In the case of the UK's digital track and trace system we see incidental governmentality emerging out of a partnership between public health authorities and Big Tech. In this context, the short-term governmental goal of supressing virus transmission appears to mask the longer-term corporate goal of infiltrating the state's digital infrastructure and generating digital surveillance revenues. In the case of the Data Store programme, we find the delivery of contracted services by corporations to the UK state obscuring the access which surveillance capitalists can get to protected governmental data on the health of the population while creating state dependencies on commercial platforms. Finally, the Data for Good initiative reveals a corporation seeking to act as a governmental actor in its own right while using that position to increase user engagement with a digital platform and increase surveillance capitalist revenues.

While taking different forms each of these modalities of incidental governmentality has one thing in common: they utilise governmental actions as a means of achieving legitimacy for the expansion of commercial activity more completely into the realms of the biopolitical. Of course, just because a governmental goal may be incidental to a bio-corporate rationality does not mean that incidental forms of governmentality will not be successful in addressing the pastoral goals of good government. Indeed, as Foucault recognised, it may be the efficacy of incidental governmentality which ultimately determines it legitimacy (). In drawing attention to emerging forms of incidental governmentality, it is necessary to ask what implications such processes may have for governmental accountability. In some ways, incidental governmentality can be thought of as an alternative form of the broader privatisation of government. But, at present at least, it appears to be a privatisation of public life that is not overtly regulated by state authorities (due to mutual dependency and limited technical capacity) or constrained by market forces (due to emerging monopolies). As with the applied utopianism of surveillance capitalism, it is project that neither asks for or expects consent, but rather innocuously proceeds to gather insights into and power over human experience. At the very least we should scrutinise emerging forms of incidental governmentality because they are inherently deceptive. At the very most, we may need to recognise it as the rise of an unaccountable bio-corporitzation of politics and life.