This article is part of the Global Perspectives , Media and Communication special issue on “Media, Migration, and Nationalism,” guest-edited by Koen Leurs and Tomohisa Hirata. In line with the focus of this issue, we are interested in the ways in which open data is progressively used to construct indicators of the state’s performance in the form of race-ethnic categories. These data initiatives are typical for the ongoing quantification and datafication of society. Through APIs (application programming interfaces), both governmental bodies and third parties are given direct access to data, as well as the ways in which these data are structured. This infrastructure affords the appropriation of statistics concerning the national origins of Dutch citizens for new purposes. Through this data, race-ethnic categories are repurposed to measure the living conditions in the Netherlands, effectively keeping people with non-Dutch roots in the migrant category for up to three generations. To show how this process unfolds in the Netherlands, we investigate two web applications, the Allochtonenmeter and the Leefbaarometer, that make use of race-ethnically constructed data. We will argue that for a more complete understanding of the processes at play in the Dutch “data assemblage,” we need to enrich critical data studies with a postcolonial perspective. In this article, we consider race to be a verb rather than a noun, signifying a process or an action, as this takes away the necessity to communicate a nonessentialist perspective on what is raced, since the object of racing can be different in each new location, situation, and technical context. Our focus is therefore on how human characteristics such as nationality, ethnicity, or class are raced through data-driven processes and in relation to a particular history and culture in the Dutch context. In this light, we find that datafied systems do not merely report on particular groups in society but rather actively produce hierarchical distinctions between these groups.

This paper focuses on virtual reality (VR) engagements of migration in reference to the Girardian notion of mimetic desire and the embedded notion of rivalry, which are considered as informing possibilities for intimacy in virtual worlds. Possibilities for intimacy, in terms of turning to another and transcending the conditions of one’s existence, are here considered as becoming transformed by the digital. VRs subjected to analysis, by means of virtual cartography, consist of The Displaced (2015) and The Fight for Falluja (2016), produced by the New York Times . I argue that, while expressing something that cannot really be talked about is specifically enabled by discursive, affective, and corporeal experiences of VR, “the unspoken” at the same time eliminates the possibility of transcendence for various subjects involved in the making of a “reality.” The “political” in VR most visibly manifests itself in terms of rivalry over how to attain and behold the desirable, which becomes normalized beyond mores; inequalities thus produced are not rendered as constituting an injustice to any significant degree. This article is part of the special issue “Media, Migration, and Nationalism” of the journal Global Perspectives , Media and Communication, guest-edited by Koen Leurs and Tomohisa Hirata.