In the context of continuing settler colonialism, “progressive” political movements are shaped around irresolvable tensions. These movements are often imagined and represented by colonists as an antidote to the violence of colonialism, and yet in practice, they are a crucial part of the settler colonial project. From invasion into the present, “progressive” reforms have been instrumental to laundering and legitimising the colony, particularly in moments of political crisis. They have worked, as Gomeroi poet and researcher Alison Whittaker puts it, by narrowing the terms of political debate so that “the answer is a more effectively-managed colony, not decolonisation”1. This careful reframing of “progress” in terms of efficiency, order, and good governance is essential to understanding the specific complicity of “progressive” political movements in what Amangu Yamatji activist and historial Crystal McKinnon terms the “settler colonial carceral continuum”2.
In this paper, we set out to examine these complex linkages of progressive politics and carceral state expansion through the example of the data-management software NationBuilder. NationBuilder is perhaps the archetypal “progressive” campaigning platform, used by political parties, community groups and campaign committees as a way to gather and analyse data on the communities they’re working with in order to streamline and improve political campaign tactics and strategies. Here, we use NationBuilder as an exemplar for a broader set of political relationships between surveillance, reform, and colonial expansion. In so doing, we hope to engage in critical reflection regarding the terms on which progressive political movements (including those the authors are/have been engaged with) engage in strategic compromises, and to historicise and contextualise those decisions within a broader context of “progressive colonialism” and the enrolment of progressive movements into carceral and settler-colonial complicity.