Guest host Meilin Obinata and local activist Reggie Meisler speak with Dr. Anita Say Chan, a professor at the University of Urbana-Champaign who recently published Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future, the first book to draw a direct line between the data-fication and prediction techniques of past eugenicists and today’s often violent and extractive “big data” regimes. This conversation spans topics such as the modern role of academia, the phenomenon of open source software in Brazil and grassroots data collection from activists in Chicago over 100 years ago.
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 multi-sited analysis of the relations of dispossession, mis-recognition, 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.
For more on the topic of eugenics and the historical development of Silicon Valley, see our past interview with Malcolm Harris, author of Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World.
Note: Malcom Harris will be at Bookshop Santa Cruz on April 24th at 7 pm, reading from his new book on climate: What’s Left.
