Data & Society

Big Data is more than a collection of technologies or a revolution in measurement and prediction. It has become a philosophy; an ideological regime that determines how decisions are made, and who makes them. It gives legitimacy to a new form of social and political control that takes the digital traces of our existence and then finds ways to use them to sort and manage populations. Big Data is par...

Data & Society welcomes writer Anna Wiener to discuss her debut book, Uncanny Valley , and experiences navigating the new digital economy. Part coming-of-age-story, part portrait of an already-bygone era, Anna Wiener’s memoir of working in Silicon Valley is a rare first-person glimpse into high-flying, reckless startup culture at a time of unchecked ambition, unregulated surveillance, wild fortune...

Data are currency. Data provide the fuel for decision-making and profit-making. Data offer evidence for enhancing health services, infrastructure, and zoning, and for addressing environmental concerns. But the collection and use of data is spurring conflicts between cities, corporate and civil society organizations, and constituents. These conflicts occur on the grounds of data ownership, access,...

Our planet is warming, our seas are rising, and while the human cost of this will be massive, the human cause of it is undeniable. Or at least, it should be. Rising sea levels and the desertification of already dry areas could see millions across our world being displaced. The climate crisis is a massive threat to quality of life, but for some people, it’s also an opportunity. Across Europe, the 2...

Charlton McIlwain, author of "Black Software: The Internet & Racial Justice, from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter," shares African Americans’ role in the internet’s creation and evolution, illuminating both the limits and possibilities for using digital technology to push for racial justice in the United States and across the globe. McIlwain's book shows that the story of racial ju...

Ruha Benjamin discusses the relationship between machine bias and systemic racism, analyzing specific cases of “discriminatory design” and offering tools for a socially-conscious approach to tech development. In "Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code," Ruha Benjamin cuts through tech-industry hype, from everyday apps to complex algorithms, to understand how emerg...

This past year, 2018-2019 Data & Society Fellow Cynthia Conti-Cook tackled an aspect of the criminal justice system lacking data: police misconduct. Her talk explores how this data gap came to be through police union claims to the Right to be Forgotten. This raises important lessons about how government actors exploit privacy rhetoric to cover up rights violations. Cynthia Conti-Cook is a staf...

2018-19 Data & Society Fellow Jessie Daniels offers strategies for racial literacy in tech grounded in intellectual understanding, emotional intelligence, and a commitment to take action. In this podcast, Daniels describes how the biggest barrier to racial literacy in tech is "thinking that race doesn't matter in tech." She argues that "without racial literacy in tech, without a...

2018-19 Data & Society Fellow Jasmine E. McNealy compares Cryptoparties to the goals and aspirations of the famous rent parties of the Harlem Renaissance. Both represent communities filling in the gaps in infrastructure to support each other. While the rent party helped pay rent through nights of celebration, jazz, and revelry, McNealy's research shows that the Cryptoparty strives for a simila...

Chancey Fleet, a Brooklyn-based accessibility advocate, coordinates technology education programs at the New York Public Library’s Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book Library. Chancey was recognized as a 2017 "Library Journal" Mover and Shaker. She writes and presents to disability rights groups, policy-makers, and professionals about the intersections of disability and technology....

Anthropologist Mary L. Gray shares her latest book, "Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass," a collaboration with computer scientist Siddharth Suri. "Ghost Work" is a necessary and revelatory exposé of the invisible human workforce that powers the web—and that foreshadows the true future of work. Hidden beneath the surface of the web, lost...

Shoshana Zuboff–Surveillance capitalism arrived on the scene with democracy already on the ropes, its early life sheltered and nourished by neoliberalism’s claims to freedom that set it at a distance from the lives of people. Surveillance capitalists quickly learned to exploit the gathering momentum aimed at hollowing out democracy’s meaning and muscle. Despite the democratic promise of its rhetor...

An Xiao Mina presents a global exploration of internet memes as agents of pop culture, politics, protest, and propaganda on- and offline. Based on her new book, Memes to Movements: How the World’s Most Viral Media is Changing Social Protest and Power (Beacon Press, January 2019), Mina uses social media-driven movements to unpack the mechanics of memes and how they operate to reinforce, amplify, an...

Historian Louis Hyman on the surprising origins of the “gig economy.” Hyman is joined in conversation by Data & Society’s Labor Engagement Lead Aiha Nguyen and Researcher Alex Rosenblat. Hyman’s latest book "Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary" tracks the transformation of an ethos that favored long-term investment in work (and workers)...

Data & Society welcomes The Workers Lab Co-Founder and CEO Carmen Rojas; Entrepreneur and Author Rachel Schneider; and Professor, Researcher, and Activist Tamara K. Nopper to discuss the intersection of fintech and credit and benefit systems for low-wage workers with Data & Society Labor Engagement Lead Aiha Nguyen. Rojas and Schneider both focus on the financial challenges facing precario...

Data & Society welcomes Mike Ananny and Tarleton Gillespie for a conversation with Kate Klonick about the underlying decisions that impact the public’s access to media systems and internet platforms. In "Networked Press Freedom: Creating Infrastructures for a Public Right to Hear," Mike Ananny offers a new way to think about freedom of the press in a time when media systems are in fu...

Journalist Sarah Kessler discusses her new book "Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work." Kessler shares her analysis of the perils and promises of the platform gig economy in conversation with Data & Society’s Alex Rosenblat, researcher and author of the forthcoming book "Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work" (October 23, 2018) and Aiha Nguye...

Claudia Haupt discusses competing frameworks for regulating speech on the web. Claudia Haupt is a 2017-18 Data & Society Fellow and a resident fellow with the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. She previously taught at Columbia Law School and George Washington University Law School. Prior to that, she clerked at the Regional Court of Appeals of Cologne and practiced law at the Col...

Matthew L. Jones speaks about key illiteracies surrounding metadata, the hacking of our court system, and the possibility of ethics at scale. Jones is a 2017-2018 Data & Society Fellow who studies the history of science and technology, with a focus on early modern Europe and on recent information technologies. He is completing a book on computing and state surveillance of communications and is...

Tamara K. Nopper's talk at Future Perfect explains how credit agencies such as FICO use narratives of credit as personal responsibility to justify increased data surveillance of consumers. Reasoning that sources of "alternative data" such as social network usage are a response to discriminatory practices, these agencies are selling financial freedom at the cost of racial injustice. Futur...

In "Algorithms of Oppression", Safiya Umoja Noble challenges the idea that search engines like Google offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities. Data discrimination is a real social problem; Noble argues that the combination of private interests in promoting certain sites, along with the monopoly status of a relatively small number of Internet search...

Cambridge Analytica and their parent company SCL Group hit the headlines recently when, after their work on the Trump campaign, reporting exposed misuse of Facebook data linked them to ‘Brexit’, unethical conduct in international elections, and revealed their relationship to defense contracting. Dr. Emma Briant has spent over a decade researching SCL and Cambridge Analytica. She drew on substantia...

Real Talk about Fake News | Nabiha Syed in conversation with Claire Wardle and Joan Donovan: "Fake news” isn’t exactly new: Tabloids have long hawked alien baby photos and Elvis sightings. Many have thus argued that fake news—propaganda, misinformation, and conspiracy theories—have always existed, and therefore requires no new consideration. When we agonize over the fake news phenomenon, thou...

Virginia Eubanks speaks about her most recent book Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor. Eubanks systematically shows the impacts of data mining, policy algorithms, and predictive risk models on poor and working-class people in America. The book is full of heart-wrenching and eye-opening stories, from a woman in Indiana whose benefits are literally cut of...

K Sabeel Rahman-The informational, economic, and political influence of the dominant tech platforms — Google, Facebook, and Amazon in particular — has become a central topic of debate. K. Sabeel Rahman argues that these firms are best understood as the core infrastructure of our 21st century economy and public sphere. The infrastructural power of these firms raises a range of policy questions. Wha...