ABSTRACT
Let us start here with a technical argument. Traditional census was associated with the development of the Hollerith machine (a punch card machine similar to the devices that frustrated the recent presidential elections in the US). The calculus of probability has greatly benefited from the computer. The development we are discussing here, however, must not only be associated with the unprecedented volume and range of data contemporary IT can handle, nor with the speed with which they can be processed and analysed (Van Maarseveen 1999: 125); it should be associated most of all with the still quite unfathomable potentialities involved with their ubiquitous availability in real time. The latter, in particular, appears to reinforce the virtualization – this post-modern version of unaccountability – of the statistical infrastructure of such apparently stable entities as organizations and the social state.
