Biopolitics, Algorithmic Governance, and the Digital Regulation of Bodies

The political body has long stood at the center of debates on sovereignty, discipline, and biopolitics. In the digital era, algorithmic governance extends these dynamics by continuously classifying, monitoring, and regulating human life. This article examines how state and corporate systems—China’s Social Credit System (SCS), India’s Aadhaar, U.S. predictive policing, and Amazon’s workplace surveillance—deploy legitimizing discourses of trust, modernization, efficiency, and integrity to normalize surveillance. Using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the study demonstrates how these narratives translate into behavioral mechanisms of compliance, avoidance, and resistance, revealing governance as both a structural imposition and a lived practice negotiated by individuals. The comparative perspective highlights that, while China’s SCS represents the most integrated model of algorithmic governance, parallel strategies of legitimization are evident across democratic and corporate contexts. To conceptualize this convergence, the paper introduces the notion of the algorithmically mediated political body , which captures how disciplinary and biopolitical logics are inscribed onto everyday practices through digital infrastructures. By synthesizing Foucauldian biopolitics with Zuboff’s surveillance capitalism, the study offers a theoretical contribution, showing how algorithmic dispositifs merge population‐level regulation with the commodification of behavioral data. The findings underscore that algorithmic governance is not confined to authoritarian regimes but constitutes a global pattern with profound implications for autonomy, inclusion, and resistance in the digital age. While the study includes a comparative discussion of Aadhaar, predictive policing, and Amazon’s workplace surveillance, primary data collection and discourse analysis were conducted solely for China’s SCS, with other cases examined through secondary academic and policy sources.