ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the ideas of ‘new power’ and ‘old power’. It analyses how the global ‘data revolution’ that aims to link ‘the whole planet’ through its monitoring framework deploys both old and new power strategies to pursue its datafication and reform project. The chapter examines how these new monitoring frameworks and other inscription devices are both mobile and immutable, and how they produce material-semiotic practices which collapse scale and flatten ontologies. It explains the ways in which ‘old’ and ‘new’ power mechanisms are manifested in the Sustainable Development Goal 4 datafication project to produce ontological flattening through a collapse of scale. The chapter offers some speculative thoughts to start a conversation around the new forms of globalisation that appear to be developing in the pursuit of the Sustainable Development Goals. It draws on Latour and explores how the inscription devices of the monitoring and accountability mechanisms make the nations of the world mobile and immutable.
