Critical Tech Talk 2: Wendy Chun — Discriminating data

University of Waterloo – Thursday, February 10, 2022, 6 to 9 p.m. online in three parts | Register now

Have you ever observed a divisive, rage-fuelled fight online and wondered about the role technology played in the background?

In her most recent book, Discriminating Data (2021), Wendy Chun reveals how polarization is a goal—not an error—within big data and machine learning. These methods, she argues, encode segregation, eugenics, and identity politics through their default assumptions and conditions. Correlation, which grounds big data’s predictive potential, stems from twentieth-century eugenic attempts to “breed” a better future. Recommender systems foster angry clusters of sameness through homophily. Users are “trained” to become authentically predictable via a politics and technology of recognition. Machine learning and data analytics thus seek to disrupt the future by making disruption impossible.