The drive to collect everything simultaneously produces anxieties of surveillance and elaborations of vitality: at one and the same time we fear the forms of government of new and old collectivities being rendered possible by our accumulations and we insist on the impossibility of its power. We decry surveillance and intrusion, but we say: that body made of data is not me—I cannot be represented by a database no matter how total. And yet, I simply cannot function without it. The idea that the practice of governing might change in response to the availability of information is different from the accusation that power desires total information. The conspiracy theories by which privacy and surveillance activists attribute to government an unchanging desire to hoard and make secret implies a kind of sovereign power that is only part of how we govern through accumulation. But accumulations can also govern by producing new forms of discipline (Bowker,Poleykett et. al.), as well as by providing new resources for contestation, satire, resistance, or sabotage (Balasz, Previeux). They mutate the forms of government available to everyone, but never just in the way intended, and certainly not equally.

From: Preface: The Total Archive https://limn.it/articles/preface-the-total-archive/