Making a show of it: reading demonstrations of empty government innovation through the metaphor of façade

This paper examines meaning-making in governmental technology
demonstration, and its significance in the production of a durable artifice
of governmental innovation. STS literature has largely engaged with
technology demonstrations in the context of commercial technology
products, and through the lens of public knowledge-making: as events
which elicit credence in matters-of-fact. I contribute to this discussion by
turning attention towards a new context: governmental innovation and
approaching the format not through its epistemics but rather its aesthetic
and affective registers. Over the course of a project to build a
governmental software system called the AuroraAI Network for the
empowerment of welfare subjects, the Department of Government ICT at
the Finnish Ministry of Finance produced a series of four highly theatrical
events which sought to demonstrate technological innovation in the
public administration. Using social-semiotic performance analysis, I
analyse these events as a kind of governmental facade of innovation, one
which presents the trappings of technology demonstration, but rather
than advancing specific technical matters-of-fact, they produce a
complicitous affective and aesthetic sensibility of innovation. By
mobilizing the concept of façade, this research shows how emptiness in
innovation is made durable and successful.