One of the greatest tensions in a contemporary governmentality is between a desire for deterministic systems built from
stable data, often supported by apparatuses like Facial Recognition Technology (FRT), versus the affective indeterminate bodies and populations that cannot be formed into the sort of recognizable and stable categories that the State can more easily control. Reconstructing and analyzing the moving images of FRT makes clear that contemporary governmentality very often leverages the power that big data collection and processing produces; this is possible, as this paper will explain, because data is not objective but, rather, shaped by the various forces and methodologies that gather, store, and process it. In this way, it is not simply the wielding of an FRT in the examples above that showcase the technologies’ problematics; FRTs’ dangers are also inscribed by the infrastructures that support its development and deployment, including data practices that value uniformity and standardization in deterministic systems.