Saturday October 23
2:00PM PST
In this talk, 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, November 2, 2021). Chun 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
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 Discriminating Data (forthcoming from MIT 2021) + 3 other books from MIT: Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media, Programmed Visions: Software and Memory, and Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics. She has been Professor and Chair of the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, where she worked for almost two decades. She has held numerous visiting chairs and fellowships, from institutions such as Harvard, the Annenberg School at the University of Pennsylvania, the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), the Guggenheim, ACLS, and American Academy of Berlin. She is also PI on several grants including one from the UK-Canada AI Initiative.
