Writing about the historical rise of the filing cabinet, Craig Robertson (2021) introduces the idea that the collection and collation of information within an organisation gives a reassuring sense of ‘granular certainty’.
This echoes the neoliberal capitalist logic that increased knowledge about events and entities through ever more specific pieces of information lends an increased ability to control these events and entities.
This can be seen throughout the past 100 years of administration and bureaucracy – from the filing cabinets of the 1890s to the digital data dashboards of the 2020s.
Robertson, C. (2021). The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information. University of Minnesota Press.