The new hierarchies do not announce themselves. They are built into the classification systems.
Literal meaning: Informatics of domination is Donna Haraway’s term from the Cyborg Manifesto for the shift from an industrial order organised around hierarchies of production to a late-capitalist order organised around hierarchies of information — where control is exercised through the management of data, communication, and knowledge rather than through direct physical coercion.
Origin: Haraway introduced the concept in 1985 as part of her analysis of how the boundaries of capitalism were shifting. She identified a movement from “the comfortable old hierarchical dominations” to “scary new networks” — from familiar structures of class, race, and gender as explicit hierarchies to their reinscription in information systems, biotechnology, and communication networks. The domination is the same; the informatics is new.
Origin (contemporary relevance): The concept anticipated what Shoshana Zuboff would later call Surveillance Capitalism and what Kate Crawford describes in Atlas of AI — the systematic encoding of existing social hierarchies into data systems that then reproduce and amplify those hierarchies while claiming neutrality.
Haraway’s concept for the reinscription of domination through information systems — where hierarchy survives the shift from industrial to digital organisation.
The Appeal: Informatics of domination provides a historical framework: the technology is new, the power relations it serves are not. This prevents both technological determinism (the technology itself causes oppression) and naive optimism (technology is neutral, only use determines outcome). The framework says: existing hierarchies shaped the technology, and the technology now reproduces them.
The Friction: The concept connects directly to contemporary research. Joy Buolamwini’s work on algorithmic bias in facial recognition systems — documented in the film Coded Bias (2020) — is informatics of domination made empirically visible: training data reflecting historical racial disparities producing facial recognition systems that misidentify Black faces at higher rates. Algorithmic Violence — harm caused by automated systems — is one consequence. Digital Colonialism — data infrastructure in the Global South extracting value without local benefit — is another. Black Box is the technical mechanism: the hierarchy is encoded in processes that are not available for inspection.
Why This Matters: Informatics of domination names the continuity between old hierarchies and new systems. Once you see it, “the algorithm is neutral” becomes a political statement rather than a technical description.
Related terms: Situated Knowledge · Cyborg · Surveillance Capitalism · Algorithmic Violence · Black Box · Digital Colonialism · Cyberfeminism · Unblackboxing
Read more:
- A Cyborg Manifesto — Haraway, D. (1985/1991). Routledge
- Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence — Crawford, K. (2021). Yale University Press