Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent FutureThe first book to draw a direct line between the datafication and prediction techniques of past eugenicists and today's often violent and extractive "big data" regimes. Predatory Data illuminates the throughline between the nineteenth century's anti-immigration and eugenics movements and our sprawling systems of techno-surveillance and algorithmic discrimination. With this book, Anita Say Chan offers a historical, globally multisited analysis of the relations of dispossession, misrecognition, and segregation expanded by dominant knowledge institutions in the Age of Big Data.While technological advancement has a tendency to feel inevitable, it always has a history, including efforts to chart a path for alternative futures and the important parallel story of defiant refusal and liberatory activism. Chan explores how more than a century ago, feminist, immigrant, and other minoritized actors refused dominant institutional research norms and worked to develop alternative data practices whose methods and traditions continue to reverberate through global justice-based data initiatives today. Looking to the past to shape our future, this book charts a path for an alternative historical consciousness grounded in the pursuit of global justice. A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. |
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abortion actors AI-driven algorithmic amplify archive big data Big Tech channeled chapter Chinatown Chinese women classes cognitive elite critical cultivate data practice data-driven data’s datafication and prediction David Starr Jordan decades decolonial feminists developed diverse dominant knowledge institutions Downieville dysgenic economic Elon Musk emerge eugenic researchers eugenicists expanding Facebook feminist forms Futurama future Galton gender global growing Harry Laughlin historians households Hull House immigration impacts improbable worlds included individual infrastructures innovation intelligence investments knowledge economy knowledge practice labor Laboratoria Latin American feminists living logics Maps and Papers methods minoritized monitoring Myanmar organizations Peter Thiel platforms pluralistic political populations predatory data production programs promote race racial relations remind Shah smart city social media society streamlining studies scholars surveillance targeted techniques techno-eugenic temporal tion twentieth century underscored United users varied Vermilion Counties violence visual Western White