Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future

In this troubling study, tech scholar Chan (Networking Peripheries) argues that the contemporary data economy, rather than being “inescapably evolutionary and progress driven” (as Big Tech would have it), is instead a direct product of the eugenics movement. The earliest population monitored via data collection, according to Chan, were Chinese residents of the California mining town of Downieville, who were surveilled from 1890 to 1930 because eugenicists in charge of public policy believed the community was “defined by hereditary vices.” She tracks how data surveillance and eugenics became inextricably linked at elite institutions like Harvard, Northwestern, and Berkeley, where eugenics developed into an authoritative field of study that rationalized immigration bans and forced sterilizations of so-called “dysgenic” populations. Chan connects this academic nexus to the same policies that inspire concepts like “smart cities” today, showing how eugenics was all about designing “purified” lifestyles for elites by removing “anomalies.” She also finds a connection between the eugenics movement’s zeal for IQ tests as an indicator that public education was a useless government expenditure—since the tests supposedly proved that low intelligence was an inherited trait—and similar anti-education rhetoric espoused today by Silicon Valley billionaires like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. It’s an illuminating and unsettling depiction of Big Tech as deeply enmeshed in an ethically compromised brand of social science. (Jan.)