Data Club

Data Club is a series of reading groups delivered in collaboration between The Other MA(TOMA) and The Old Waterworks and supported by Pluto Press and The Reading Room.

These sessions are open to all, no technical knowledge is necessary. Everyone who is interested in talking about, thinking about, and critiquing data and digital technologies is welcome.

Session One - Saturday 25 October 12-3pm

Session Two - Saturday 6 December 12-3pm

Session Three - Saturday 17 January 12-3pm

These sessions are prompted by two Pluto Press publications:

Data Power: Radical Geographies of Control and Resistance by Jim E. Thatcher and Craig M. Dalton

and

Digital Degrowth: Technology in the Age of Survival by Michael Kwet

Upon booking you will receive an email with details about the reading and about collection of your copies of the books. No prior reading is necessary.

About the sessions

Session 1- Data: Classify, Calculate, Control

In this session, we will investigate the symbolic and cultural understandings of data and ask ourselves if numbers really can speak for themselves. We will consider how the technologies of today are the latest manifestations of historically entangled systems of knowledge and control and how data acts as a form of power. We will end the session by creating new data imaginaries, or new understandings of data, to dismantle existing assumptions about it and make space for alternative ways of knowing to resist and reassert our shared humanity.

Session 2- Data: Earth, labour and business models of the “digital”

What are the material, technological, and economic structures that make the information age possible? Who owns digital technologies and the infrastructures that maintain them? What materials and resources do they need and use? Who makes these technologies work?

The digital economy, enabled by data-driven technologies, not only alters how we conduct our day-to-day lives, it also overheats the planet and increases inequality within and between countries. In this session, we will look at the environment and labour resources data-driven technologies need to maintain their functionality and their connection to already existing power imbalances. We will discuss how digital systems are used for the political, economic, and social gains of the most powerful, and who benefits and who is harmed by the pursuit of infinite growth.

Session 3- Data: Future visions for digital technologies and society

What is to be done to live with, not under, data-driven technologies? How can we use what we know about the present and sift through the past to help create alternative futures? How can we (re)assert our humanity within the socio-technical milieu in which we live?

In this session we will imagine alternative ways of knowing, seeing, and sensing beyond the binary logic of digital technologies. We will look at the future through a broad dialectic between hope for technology's role as liberator and fear of its domination of everyday life to consider how both can be and likely are true, but also that both are beside the point unless we radically reimagine the ways technological and social relations interact to reassert our humanity and build towards a just and sustainable future.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

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