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 part of a long and pervasive historical legacy of scientific oppression, aggressive public policy, and the most influential political and economic institution that has shaped and continues to shape this country’s economy: chattel slavery. Algorithms and other data technologies are the engines that facilitate the ongoing evolution of chattel slavery into the Prison Industrial Complex, justify the militarization of schoolyards and borders alike, and continued the expansion of contemporary practices of peonage.

About the Speaker

Yeshimabeit Milner is the founder & executive director of Data for Black Lives. She has worked since she was 17 behind the scenes as a movement builder, technologist, and data scientist on a number of campaigns. She started Data for Black Lives because for too long she straddled the worlds of data and organizing and was determined to break down the silos to harness the power of data to make change in the lives of Black people. In two years, Data for Black Lives has raised over $2 million, hosted two sold out conferences at the MIT Media Lab and has changed the conversation around big data and technology across the U.S. and globally.

As the founder of Data for Black Lives, her work has received much acclaim. Yeshimabeit is an Echoing Green Black Male Achievement Fellow, an Ashoka Fellow, and joins the founders of Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street in the distinguished inaugural class of Roddenberry Foundation Fellows and most recently, was named one of Forbes 30 Under 30.

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, and accelerating political power. Anna deftly charts the tech industry’s shift from self-appointed world savior to democracy-endangering liability, alongside a personal narrative of aspiration, ambivalence, and disillusionment.

Unsparing and incisive, Uncanny Valley is a cautionary tale, and a revelatory interrogation of a world reckoning with consequences its unwitting designers are only beginning to understand.

This event is moderated by Data & Society’s Director of Creative Strategy, Sam Hinds. It was recorded at Data & Society on January 22, 2020. 

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, privacy, and security.

Dr. McNealy traces these conflicts to our perception of data as a singular piece of property. A better metaphor for data, she contends, would be that of a networked representation or observation in an ecosystem. Dr. McNealy argues that we require an ecological approach for understanding this era of emergent technology and data — both for creating adequate policy, and for protecting the vulnerable.

This event is moderated by Data & Society Director of Research Sareeta Amrute.

For more information about this talk and future events, visit datasociety.net.

This talk was recorded on January 8, 2020. 

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 2015 migrant crisis destabilized civil society, leading to the rise of the AfD in Germany, the Lega party in Italy, and allowed Viktor Orban to whip up anti-migrant rhetoric in Hungary. These conditions are a petri dish for conspiracy theorists, politicians, corporate interests, and especially, a boon for the rhetoric of extreme anti-migration factions pushing online disinformation.

This event is moderated by Data & Society founder danah boyd.

Recorded on December 4, 2019.

About the Speaker

Dr. Joe Mulhall is Senior Researcher at HOPE not hate, the UK’s largest anti-fascism and anti-racism organisation. He is a historian of postwar and contemporary fascism and completed his PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London. He sits on the Board of the UK Government funded Holocaust Memorial Day Trust. He has published extensively, both academically and journalistically, and appears regularly in the international news media and gives talks around the world about his research. He has two forthcoming academic books with Routledge in 2020 including The Alt-Right: Fascism for the 21st Century.

For more information, visit datasociety.net.

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 justice movement organizing online is much longer and varied than most people know. In fact, it spans nearly five decades and involves a varied group of engineers, entrepreneurs, hobbyists, journalists, and activists. But this is a history that is virtually unknown, even in our current age of Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Black Lives Matter. From the 1960s to present, the book examines how computing technology has been used to neutralize the threat that black people pose to the existing racial order, but also how black people seized these new computing tools to build community, wealth, and wage a war for racial justice.

This event was hosted by Data & Society Faculty Fellow Anita Say Chan.

Charlton McIlwain is Vice Provost of Faculty Engagement & Development at New York University, and Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU’s Steinhardt School. Dr. McIlwain’s scholarly work focuses on the intersections of race, digital media, and racial justice activism. He is also the Founder of the Center for Critical Race & Digital Studies, and in addition to "Black Software: The Internet & Racial Justice, From the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter" (Oxford University Press), he is the co-author of the award-winning book, "Race Appeal: How Political Candidates Invoke Race In U.S. Political Campaigns."

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 emerging technologies can reinforce White supremacy and deepen social inequity. Presenting the concept of “the new Jim Code,” she shows how a range of discriminatory designs encode inequity by explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies; by ignoring but thereby replicating social divisions; or by aiming to fix racial bias but ultimately doing quite the opposite.

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 staff attorney at the New York City’s Legal Aid Society, Special Litigation Unit, where she oversees the Cop Accountability Project and Database, leads impact litigation and law reform projects on issues involving policing, data collection, risk assessment instruments, and the criminal justice system generally. She has presented as a panelist and trainer at many national, New York state, and New York City venues on topics of police misconduct, technology in the criminal justice system, and risk assessment instruments.

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 specific and conscious effort to address race, we will certainly be recreating a high-tech Jim Crow: a segregated, divided, unequal future, sped-up, spread out, and automated through algorithms, AI, and machine learning."

Jessie Daniels, PhD is a Professor at Hunter College (Sociology) and at The Graduate Center, CUNY (Africana Studies, Critical Social Psychology, and Sociology). She earned her PhD from the University of Texas-Austin and held a Charles Phelps Taft postdoctoral fellowship at University of Cincinnati. Her main area of interest is in race and digital media technologies; she is an internationally recognized expert on Internet manifestations of racism. Daniels is the author or editor of five books and has bylines at The New York Times, DAME, The Establishment, Entropy, and a regular column at Huffington Post.

Her recent paper, "Advancing Racial Literacy in Tech," co-authored with 2018-19 Fellow Mutale Nkonde and 2017-18 Fellow Darakhshan Mir, can be found at http://www.racialliteracy.tech.

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 similar freedom through educating community members on how to safely navigate harmful surveillance technologies.

Jasmine E. McNealy is an assistant professor of telecommunication at the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications. She studies information, communication, and technology with a view toward influencing law and policy. Her research focuses on privacy, online media, communities, and culture.

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. During her fellowship at Data & Society, she worked to advance public understanding of and explore best practices for visual interpreter services as well as other technologies for accessibility whose implications resonate with the broader global conversations about digital equity, data ethics, and privacy. She proudly serves as the Vice President of the National Federation of the Blind of New York.