ABSTRACT
How should one conceive of the relation between government, politics and technology today? This chapter traces the ways in which government is concerned not just with the conduct of persons but with forging and managing arrangements or collectivities that include human and non-human elements, the latter encompassing both information and materials. Such arrangements are invariably more-than-local, forming extended technological zones of connectivity which may stretch beyond the territorial boundaries of the nation-state. At the same time, the constitution of such arrangements is often rendered political, becoming the focus of disagreement and controversy. The development of new technological arrangements can be inventive, opening up the space of possibility, but it can also have anti-inventive consequences, closing down that same space. On the one hand, politics in a technological society is commonly, and increasingly, focused on the performance and consequences of technoscientific industry; on the other hand, the conduct of politics also necessarily has a technical dimension.
