Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech & Our Fight for an Independent Future

About Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future

The insidious legacy of eugenics lives on in the algorithmic authoritarianism and data-driven discrimination of Big Tech. At the turn of the 20th century, eugenicists compiled harmful data about marginalized people, fueling racial divisions, anti-democratic fervor, and majoritarian paranoias under the guise of streamlining society toward the future. 

Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future draws a direct line between the datafication and prediction techniques of past eugenicists and today's violent and extractive "big data" regimes. This talk reveals how the AI-driven and market-based models of Big Tech are founded on methods that exploit women and immigrant groups, amplifying social hierarchies, suppressing diverse voices, and influencing AI's predictions of majoritarian outcomes as the most probable, likely, and “ideal” futures. 

But it also explores how it doesn’t have to be this way, illuminating the trailblazing efforts of feminist and immigrant activists from a century ago who resisted dominant institutional research norms through alternative data practices. By looking to the past to shape our future, this talk charts a path for an alternative historical consciousness rooted in global justice.

About Anita Chan

Anita Say Chan is an associate professor in the School of Information Sciences and Department of Media and Cinema Studies, as well as the director of the Community Data Clinic at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her first book, Networking Peripheries: Technological Futures and the Myth of Digital Universalism, explores the competing imaginaries of global connection and information technologies in network-age Peru and was published by MIT Press in 2014. She is a faculty affiliate with the Data & Society Research Institute and with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at Illinois. With colleagues in the computer science department at Illinois, she co-leads the Just Infrastructures Initiative. 

Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future is her second book.

About Design and Politics in Transition

Who should design serve? How does design work in a crisis, and also recognizing that some people have been living in crisis for hundreds of years? And how might we reimagine design as a radical discipline for dialogue and action? From reinterpreting legal histories and theories that enable the design of place, to redesigning food distribution systems around food and land justice, to transforming what it means to be family, design offers many ways to transform our relationships with ourselves, each other and our environment. Design and Politics in Transition offers inspiration, theory, and guidance on a variety of design practices and epistemologies that together help us transition toward different, more equitable worlds where all can thrive–even during historical moments of political and social strife.

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