At the turn of the 20th century, the anti-immigration and eugenics movements used data about marginalized people to fuel racial divisions and political violence under the guise of streamlining society toward the future. Today, as the tech industry champions itself as a global leader of progress and innovation, we are falling into the same trap.
On April 10th, Anita Say Chan, author of Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future (UCP 2025 and open access), joined Émile P. Torres and Timnit Gebru for a discussion of the 21st century eugenics revival in big tech and how to resist it in a conversation moderated by Trustworthy Infrastructures Program Director Maia Woluchem. Predatory Data is the first book to draw this direct line between the datafication and prediction techniques of past eugenicists and today’s often violent and extractive “big data” regimes. Torres and Gebru have also extensively studied the second wave of eugenics, identifying a suite of tech-utopian ideologies they call the TESCREAL bundle.
Purchase your own copy of Anita Say Chan’s book Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future: https://bookshop.org/a/14284/9780520402843.
Learn more about the event at datasociety.net (https://datasociety.net/events/resisting-predatory-data/).
