Facts in the machine: Systems of record and the performance of sociotechnical truth

Abstract

Information systems serve as the “source of truth” for much of social reality, from credit scores to eligibility for boarding an airplane to the current time. In contexts of practical consensus, the system makes it so. I label this phenomenon system-dependent truth. This paper advances a theory of performative truthmaking, wherein the agencies of giving as and taking as produce facts and truth as relations. I introduce the term systems of record to denote information systems that contain facts rather than propositions. I develop a suitable performative approach to the phenomenon of system-dependent truth by synthesizing John Searle's social ontology, an account of truth, facts, and social reality, with Karen Barad's agential realism, an onto-epistemology of human and nonhuman agency. Using several specific examples drawn from travel and migration contexts, including the US government's No Fly List, I show that system-dependent truth arises when an agent takes information from a system as fact during the performance of sociotechnical truth. I argue that the agencies of truthmaking and factmaking are a distinct form of power, that the coordination of these agencies constitutes institutional rationalities of potentially global scale, and that systems of record are therefore critical sites for justice-oriented information studies.