Overpopulation and biopolitical frames

In the digital era, we open spread sheets generated by software architecture, and populate the empty forms with data sets. Numbers or symbols appear in rows and columns. The data is discriminated and arranged into categories determined by the functions and rules written into the application. We can then make comparisons between values, and perhaps look for anomalies; alternatively, we might scan across distributions and discern patterns, repetitions, and make predictions based on whatever assembly of values we raise into prominence. In this perspective, ‘population’ is understood as a figure integral to operations that proceed both before and after it, or, we might say, populations are within frameworks that are given before. A population in this sense is differentiated and available for analysis because domains of relevant differences have been set by knowledge demands, and the practices within which those demands are articulated. This epistemic sense of population displaces thinking population as simply that aggregate of beings disclosed in the world in advance of counting and understanding. Counting, we can say, is yet a writing of the world; the ‘kinds’ that can make sense to us are a codification of the sensible. Human population, counted, and evaluated, is no different: when we want to know populations, we find ourselves not only with a grid, but yet in a grid, participating in a certain frame from the outset, for we are both engaged in some sort of calculative discrimination, and then subject to it at the same time