Data, interface, security: Assembling technologies that govern the future

•Fire and Rescue Service (FRS) increasingly govern fire as a risk of the future.•Digital technologies relied upon to make sense of fire as a risk.•Relations between human and non-human agents involved conceptualised through interface.•Interface set trajectories for relations between human and non-human agents.

Over the last decade, fire governance practices in the British Fire and Rescue Service (FRS) have undergone fundamental transformation. Rather than just being responded to as and when they occur, the FRS have adopted a range of anticipatory governing strategies to govern fires in anticipation of their occurence. This turn towards anticipatory governance has been facilitated in no small part by the digital infrastructure now embedded in the FRS. Composed of data, hardware, software, fibre-optic cables along with human analysts and organisational processes, this infrastructure operates to make risk projections on fire which shape and condition strategic decision making. This paper explores the operation of this digital infrastructure through the notion of interface. Drawing on empirical material relating to processes of data sourcing and risk calculation, interfaces account for the sites, moments and experiences in which human and non-human agents relate to one another in making fire risk projections. Showing relations to exist spatially, temporally and sensually, I argue that interfaces are crucial to the operation of an anticipatory security apparatus which relies on digital devices.