Review: “Predatory Data”
A book about eugenics and Big Tech has a chilling relevance
When you start writing a book about how the Internet disrupted science, you don’t go into it thinking that a big old bag of eugenics is going tumble out at some point during the research. But that’s exactly what has happened, much to our dismay.
This led to the discovery of a recent book about how a new techno-eugenics movement has crept into society through the platforms, people, and algorithms — Anita Say Chan’s book, Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future. It was published earlier this year by the University of California Press.
Chan frames her book in the following manner:
What would it mean to narrate the origins of our contemporary data economy not with the conventional knowledge centers, academic vanguards, and industry settings that have dominated explanations of the advance of our present information age, but with another kind of temporal setting? That setting is the racialized datafication fever that fed the rise of what was arguably the twentieth century’s first popular, globally expansive information movement when eugenic ambitions aimed to provide universal methods for predicting and perfecting the human race over a century ago.
Chan defines “predatory data” as “the habitual use of data and research methods that exploits the vulnerable and abuses power through datafication and prediction operations.”
Sadly, you don’t have to look far to see the eugenicists and their tendrils and feeders around us: