Wendy at DISCO Network

DSI & DISCO Network Book Talk | “Discriminating Data” with Wendy Chun in Conversation with Lisa Nakamura

Register for the event here.

In “Discriminating Data,” Wendy Hui Kyong 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.

DISCO Network is a new network of researchers, artists, technologists, policymakers, and practitioners that challenges digital social and racial inequalities. Racism and ableism are at the heart of digital industries and are taken for granted all through its development, implementation, and user culture.