THE TEMPORAL ORDER OF DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURE

From the mid-2000s onwards, pioneering states started to build comprehensive digital infrastructures for the efficient and cost-effective management of public services, and to overcome typical draw back of the paper bureaucracy. What is the characteristic this new digital bureaucracy? Through in-depth ethnography this article draws attention to the excessive dynamism of the system. First, hardware must be kept up to date, software patches and updates must be installed, while new digital tools are constantly being incorporated. Second, the material malleability of DPIs makes them susceptible to changes introduced in response to feedback from real–time monitoring, lobbying by stakeholders, or shifting political or fiscal priorities. As highly malleable tools, DPIs are caught in a chronic meantime. They are held in suspense, so that users, while they are engaged in everyday bureaucracy, must already remain alert, and to remain visible to the state, always ready to embrace the techno-policy’s next iteration.