Look, But Don't Touch: Bureaucratic Vision and Administering the Margins

• In Event: Becoming “Data-Driven”: Burgeoning Data Cultures and Liminality in Civil Service - I

Abstract

A new system for policing illegal deforestation in Indonesia has been developed from drones and algorithms. Under a 2016 Presidential Decree, the National Mapping Agency enrolled teams of earth scientists, geospatial data technicians, and drone technologists to speed up the remapping of forest in Indonesia. Since then earth scientists develop algorithms to detect and predict illegal logging in areas too vast to patrol regularly. Such efforts to detect and predict illegal deforestation stemmed from the decree’s ambitions to remove human roles in environmental law enforcement. Earth scientists contrasted algorithmic judgment to human interpretation, which they argued impacted how illegal deforestation is detected and managed promptly. How has this algorithmic system developed across different sites of expertise? How have algorithms enabled Indonesian scientists to be involved in state policing activity while preserving their scientific objectivity? This paper draws from a year-long ethnographic project on the development of algorithmic systems and bureaucratic infrastructures for security interventions and policy against environmental destruction. It investigates how the earth and computer sciences are practiced for security functions in Indonesia, centering on how design and algorithmic bias impact the policing and regulation of illegal deforestation. In particular, the paper focuses on how a new policing network of experts that program code and implement software to pursue illegal deforestation cases in the name of anticorruption. Building on the core contributions of STS, I explore how the ideologies, practices, expertise, and materials of algorithms provide new bureaucratic roles for scientific actors in postcolonial Indonesia.

Authors

• Cindy Lin, University of Michigan, School of Information

• Leah Horgan, University of California, Irvine