Wendy gives President’s Lecture at SFU

In this President’s Faculty Lecture, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (SFU’s Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media) will discuss themes from her forthcoming book Discriminating Data about how big data and predictive machine learning currently encode discrimination and create agitated clusters of comforting rage (MIT Press).

The lecture is free with registration, which you can sign up for here.

This lecture will explore how polarization is a goal—not an error—within current practices of predictive data analysis and machine learning for these methods 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. The predictive programs thus seek to disrupt the future by making disruption impossible.