Wendy Chun at Brown University’s COGUT Institute for the Humanities

Discriminating Data: A Conversation with Wendy Chun

Register for the event here.

In Discriminating Data (MIT Press, 2021), 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.

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is Simon Fraser University’s Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media and leads the Digital Democracies Institute. She is the author of several works including Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (MIT Press, 2006), Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (MIT Press, 2011), Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (MIT Press, 2016), and Discriminating Data (MIT Press, 2021).

The series “Democracy: A Humanities Perspective” is convened by Amanda Anderson, Director of the Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown University. Through both the format and the content, we aim to showcase the forms of layered understanding and analysis that humanities scholars bring to the study of democracy, with special emphasis on current challenges in the U.S. and abroad. The events are free and open to the public.