Predatory Data
Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
The 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this troubling study, tech scholar Chan (Networking Peripheries) argues that the contemporary data economy, rather than being "inescapably evolutionary and progress driven" (as Big Tech would have it), is instead a direct product of the eugenics movement. The earliest population monitored via data collection, according to Chan, were Chinese residents of the California mining town of Downieville, who were surveilled from 1890 to 1930 because eugenicists in charge of public policy believed the community was "defined by hereditary vices." She tracks how data surveillance and eugenics became inextricably linked at elite institutions like Harvard, Northwestern, and Berkeley, where eugenics developed into an authoritative field of study that rationalized immigration bans and forced sterilizations of so-called "dysgenic" populations. Chan connects this academic nexus to the same policies that inspire concepts like "smart cities" today, showing how eugenics was all about designing "purified" lifestyles for elites by removing "anomalies." She also finds a connection between the eugenics movement's zeal for IQ tests as an indicator that public education was a useless government expenditure—since the tests supposedly proved that low intelligence was an inherited trait—and similar anti-education rhetoric espoused today by Silicon Valley billionaires like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. It's an illuminating and unsettling depiction of Big Tech as deeply enmeshed in an ethically compromised brand of social science.
