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DRAWS A DIRECT LINE BETWEEN THE DATA AND PREDICTION TECHNIQUES OF PAST

CHAN
EUGENICISTS AND TODAY’S OFTEN VIOLENT AND EXTRACTIVE “BIG DATA” REGIMES

Predatory Data illuminates the connections between the nineteenth century’s

anti‑immigration and eugenics movements and today’s sprawling systems of techno‑
surveillance and algorithmic discrimination. Historical and globally multisited, the
book examines how dispossession, misrecognition, and segregation are being magni‑
fied by dominant knowledge institutions in the Age of Big Data.
Technological advancement has a history, including efforts to chart a path for
alternative futures. Anita Say Chan explores these important parallel stories of
defiant refusal and liberatory activism, such as how feminist, immigrant, and other
minoritized actors worked to develop alternative data practices. Their methods and
traditions, over a century old, continue to reverberate through global justice‑based

predatory
data initiatives today. Predatory Data charts a path for an alternative historical con‑
sciousness grounded in the pursuit of global justice.

“Anita Say Chan highlights the power of community‑based alternatives to extractive data
that are rooted in feminist, people of color, and Indigenous perspectives. An essential book

DATA
for anyone looking to envision more equitable technological futures.”—SHAKA M c GLOTTEN,
author of Virtual Intimacies
“An essential retelling of how data happened that also rethinks whose futures really matter in
the worlds that data and AI are now building.”—NICK COULDRY, coauthor of The Costs of
Connection
“Chan inspires us to understand the power and politics of data, and how to fight for an inde‑
pendent and inclusive future without compromising our humanness.”—MARY L. GRAY,
MacArthur Fellow and coauthor of Ghost Work
“Predatory Data is the framework that we have been waiting for—to refuse, resist, and reimag‑
ine new possibilities as a part of decolonizing algorithmic and data practices.”—NISHANT
SHAH, Associate Professor and Director of the Digital Narratives Studio, Chinese University
of Hong Kong

ANITA SAY CHAN is a feminist and decolonial scholar of science and technol‑
ogy studies and Associate Professor of Information Sciences and Media Studies
at the University of Illinois Urbana‑Champaign.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, WWW.UCPRESS.EDU
Cover design: Lia Tjandra.

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Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.
ISBN: 978-0-520-40284-3
Cover illustrations, top to bottom: mid‑1920s interactive eugenics exhibit by the American Eugenics

ANITA SAY CHAN

Society (Science Photo Library/Alamy Stock Photo); wage map of Chicago’s West Side, published
in the Hull‑House Maps and Papers volume in 1895 (Newberry Library); view of Futurama’s stream‑
lined world (General Motors, New York World’s Fair/Manuscript and Archives Division, the New
York Public Library). Author photo: College of Media, University of Illinois Urbana‑Champaign. 9 780520 402843
 Luminos is the Open Access monograph publishing program
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Predatory Data
 The publisher and the University of California Press
Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support
of the Anne G. Lipow Endowment Fund in Social Justice
and Human Rights.
 Predatory Data

Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight

for an Independent Future

Anita Say Chan

university of califor nia pr ess

University of California Press
Oakland, California

© 2025 by Anita Say Chan

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) license.

To view a copy of the license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses.

Suggested citation: Chan, A. S., Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech

and Our Fight for an Independent Future. Oakland: University
of California Press, 2025. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/luminos.215

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Chan, Anita Say, author.

Title: Predatory data : eugenics in big tech and our fight for an
independent future / Anita Say Chan.
Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2025] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2024026598 (print) | LCCN 2024026599 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780520402843 (cloth) | ISBN 9780520402850 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Technology—Social aspects. | Discrimination in
science—History. | Eugenics—Moral and ethical aspects—History. |
Quantitative research—Moral and ethical aspects. | Big data—Moral and
ethical aspects. | BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Technology Studies |
SOCIAL SCIENCE / Discrimination
Classification: LCC T14.5 .C44 2025 (print) | LCC T14.5 (ebook) |
DDC 005.7—dc23/eng/20240809

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024026598

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024026599

Manufactured in the United States of America

33 32 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Mari and Lina, and other beautiful improbabilities.
 Con t en ts

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Predatory Data: Civic Amputations

in the Global Data Economy 1
1 • Immigrant Excisions, “Race Suicide,” and the Eugenic
Information Market 29
2 • Streamlining’s Laboratories: Monitoring Culture
and Eugenic Design in the Future City 61
3 • Of Merit, Metrics, and Myth: Cognitive Elites
and Techno-Eugenics in the Knowledge Economy 84
4 • Relational Infrastructures: Feminist Refusals
and Immigrant Data Solidarities 111
5 • The Coalitional Lives of Data Pluralism:
Intergenerational Feminist Resistance to Data Apartheid 140
6 • Community Data: Pluri-Temporalities
in the Aftermath of Big Data 162
Conclusion: Data Pluralism and a Playbook
for Defending Improbable Worlds 187

Notes 209
References 219
Index 243
 Ack now le dgm en ts

Thanks enough cannot be said for varied community leaders, partners, and
experts in East Central Illinois, some of whose work was featured in chapters
of this project. The tireless commitments of Chaundra Bishop, Stephanie
Burnett, Lynn Canfield, Danielle Chynoweth, Kimberly David, Julie Pryde,
Shandra Summerville, Karen Simms, and Janice Walker provide enduring
models of the kind of conscientious knowledge practice that emerges when
compassion and care work are centered in daily practice. I remain in awe of
their brilliance and boundless energy as architects in community service,
support, and organizing—and I’m so grateful to have been able to work in
communion with them and to get to learn from their loving dedication and
wisdom across so many venues.
I’m enormously indebted too for exchanges with colleagues in recent
years whose work vitalized this project. I couldn’t ask for better and warmer
collaborators than Paola Ricaurte, Nick Couldry, and friends of the Tierra
Común network; Yousif Hassan and Chamee Yang as co-conveners of a
series of conversations and collections on Decolonizing Data Infrastructures
at the 2023 and 2024 4S Conferences and the journal Science, Technology,
and Human Values; Patricia Garcia as a coauthor for a chapter on commu-
nity data being prepared for the forthcoming SAGE Handbook of Data and
Society: An Interdisciplinary Reader in Critical Data Studies; Marika Cifor,
Patricia Garcia, T. L. Cowan, Jasmine Rault, Tonia Sutherland, Jennifer
Rode, Anna Hoffman, Niloufar Salehi, and Lisa Nakamura as collaborators
for the Feminist Data Manifesto-NO project; Karrie Karahalios and Indy
Gupta as partners in the Just Infrastructures Initiative; and Tracy Smith,
Karen Rodriguez’G, Paul Schoeder, Mazie Hough, Penny Hanna, Vern Fein,
and Jeff Glassman as partners of the Community Data Clinic. The network

ix
of researchers, fellows, and staff at the Data & Society Research insti-
tute—especially Sareeta Amrute, Dan Bouk, Michelle Gilman, Rigo Lara,
and Shaka Mcglotten—and the conversations that unfolded with Andres
Lombana Bermudez, Juan Ramos, Carolina Botero, and Julio Gaitan fol-
lowing my visit as a Fulbright specialist to Bogota, Colombia, sharpened my
thinking on a number of fronts for this project. The generosity of their work
in and beyond academic settings offers bold testaments to the potentials for
building new infrastructures that defy institutional or disciplinary conven-
tions. And the diverse insights, wit, and humor that they lent throughout
the various stages of this project were the kind of sustaining gift that every
scholar dreams of.
The critical input of colleagues from the University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign (UIUC) enriched this project in innumerable ways. The network
of colleagues engaged with the Cybernetics Research Cluster of Illinois’s
Humanities Research Institute—Bethany Anderson, Kevin Hamilton,
Brian Jefferson, Charles Roseman, and Lou Turner; and the varied interdis-
ciplinary faculty collaborators with the Community Data Clinic—Donna
Cox, Amy Leman, Kora Maldonado, Rachel Magee, Lisa Mercer, Karen
Rodriguez’G, Gilberto Rosas, Katie Shumway, and Sharifa Sultana—were
elevating forces throughout various stages of this project. And I count myself
as so very lucky to have been able to benefit from the warm friendship and
sage advice of colleagues like Angela Aguayo, Antoinette Burton, Cliff
Christians, Amanda Ciafone, CL Cole, Norm Denzin, Brooklyne Gipson,
James Hay, Emily Knox, Derek Long, Rachel Kuo, Cameron McCarthy,
John Nerone, Safiya Noble, Jenny Oyallon-Koloski, Veronica Paredes, Linda
Smith, Paula Treichler, Julie Turnock, Nikki Usher, Anghy Valdivia, and
Martin Wolske at the Institute of Communications Research and School of
Information Sciences.
Varied conversations across gatherings have also shaped my work over the
past few years. Discussions and feedback during the Science and Technology
Studies as Critical Pedagogy Workshop that Emily York, Shannon Conley,
and Angela Okune organized at James Madison University; the Center
for Advanced Research in Global Communication’s Turning Points: The
Internet and the Long 1990s Symposium that Aswin Punathambekar,
Jing Wang, Kinjal Dave, Ignatius Suglo, and Devo Probol organized at the
University of Pennsylvania; the Networks of Dispossession, Networks of
Solidarity: Labor and Technology panel organized with Cassius Adair, Ivan
Chaar Lopez, Erin McElroy, Andrea Miller, and Jacqueline Wang at the

x • Ac k now l e d g m e n t s
American Studies Association 2023 Conference; the Universal Ambitions
of Computing Workshop that David Ribes and Francis Lee organized at
the 2023 Society for the Social Studies of Science Conference; the Levels
of Access: Bandwidth, Translation, and Virtual Spaces panel that Fraser
McCallum organized at the University of Toronto’s Blackwood Gallery;
and the Artificial Intelligence and Social Responsibility 2022 Symposium
at UIUC’s Coordinated Science Lab that Michael Loui spearheaded with
Sanmi Koyejo, Hanghang Tong, Lav Varshney, Yang Wang, and myself
as co-organizers, all generated fruitful debates that I benefited from. And
the students and colleagues who offered incisive questions during talks
at Virginia Tech’s Science and Technology Studies Seminar Series; the
Harvard Technology Review Summer Fellows Workshop; the University of
Toronto’s Department of Arts, Culture and Media; the University of Texas,
Dallas’s School of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication’s Dean’s
Lecture Series; the University of Chicago’s Center for Latin American
Studies; the Universidad de las America’s International Symposium on
Connected Communities; and New York University’s Media, Culture, and
Communication Department’s conference on Decolonial Computing all
helped push ideas for this project forward.
My enormous thanks to the project managers Julian Chin, Evan Allgood,
and Jorge Rojas; graduate assistants Kainen Bell, Gowri Balasubramaniam,
Clara Belitz, Muhammad Hussain, Jiwon Oh, and Ebubechukwu Uba;
and undergraduate researchers Kaylee Jakanos, Mahnur Khalid, Sara Kiel,
Madisen Leshoure, Aisaiah Pellecer, Lauren Ravury, Will Schermer, and
Harshitha Vetrivel, whose work has sustained the varied community part-
nerships and initiatives with the Community Data Clinic. A very special
added thanks is owed to Jiwon Oh for also finding a means—among all else
that she does—to lending her invaluable support and her keen, incisive eye
to editorial assistance for this project. It has been such a pleasure to be able to
work with them and to learn from the diverse talents they bring. The depth
and range of their creative spirits expands my hope and excitement evermore
for what the next generation of civic scholars will generate.
It must be said that this book wouldn’t have been possible without
the editorial support and guidance of Michelle Lipinski and the wonder-
ful editorial and production team at the University of California Press.
Michelle’s enthusiasm for the project was present when the project chapters
existed only as mere outlines—and her sustained belief in it helped it gain the
form and body it has today. Jyoti Arvey and the dedicated staff at the UCP

Ac k now l e d g m e n t s • xi
brought an indispensable patience and dedication to their support of this
project that made all the difference. And I’m especially grateful for the input
of the blind reviewers, whose generous and constructive feedback brought
new and elevating dimension to the chapters’ content. The care and craft they
bring to their work has been a joy to witness and a privilege to be a beneficiary
of, and I cannot imagine this journey without them.
And finally, to Adoni. As much as this book came together in the spaces of
official scholarly and research exchange, it also came together in much more
informal ways—in the unplanned, in-between spaces and casual exchanges
that unfolded over long afternoon walks and midnight fruit salads. Adoni
was present and faithfully attentive throughout, offering unconditional sup-
port and a constant reminder to do what we too often feel unauthorized
to do: to simply trust in our intuition. For being a bounty of patience, and
a daily refuge of laughter and love that made this project and so much else
possible, my devoted thanks.

xii • Ac k now l e d g m e n t s
 I n t roduct ion

Predatory Data
Civic Amputations in the Global
Data Economy

This project begins with a proposition. What would it mean

to narrate the origins of our contemporary data economy not with the con-
ventional 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 data-
fication fever that fed the rise of what was arguably the twentieth century’s
first popular, globally expansive information movement when eugenic ambi-
tions aimed to provide universal methods for predicting and perfecting the
human race over a century ago.
To suggest that we expand how we locate the origins of our contemporary
data economy, and to pin its growth around eugenics’ segregationist history,
is to not only decenter the dominant narrative of the information age from
the familiar cast of Western technological heroes, genius male disruptors,
and enterprise-seeking rebels that have been popularly celebrated as dar-
ing visionaries of a new computational future. It is to give name also to the
political violences and explicitly raced, gendered, classed, and geopolitical
dispossessions of the information age that, even while largely unspoken,
have laid long and deep at its very foundations. Necessarily then, it is to call
for the need to dislodge the monofuturist temporal lenses that have power-
fully framed the ascendance of artificial intelligence and big data systems as
the now singular culmination of technological “genius.” Such lenses have
insisted on information industries’ principal protagonism in the course of
history, drowning out all other alternative paths for future worlding against
the percussive imperative for technological “revolution.” They have not only
cast the roots of our information past in a raceless and genderless shroud of
innocent discovery and innovation-seeking ambition, but have ensured that

1
the overriding trajectory of the contemporary data economy remains per-
ceived as inescapably evolutionary and progress driven. In doing so, they have
seen to an intensification of anti-pluralist appetites, such that broadcastings
for radical civic dissolution and necropolitical nationalist extermination are
now mundane features of the informatic every day.
Against such a backdrop, eugenics’ turn-of-the-century disinformation
age and the conditions that allowed its violent advance over the course of
half a century indeed bear new resonance. Over a century ago, eugenics
researchers in the West—anxiously facing globalization’s modern advent and
growing independence and abolition struggles around the world—seeded a
cross-continental movement to “optimize” society in the image of White
Western elites and knowledge classes. They developed and promoted a suite
of data-driven evaluation techniques and surveillance instruments to p­ revent
what they projected as the “degeneration” of Western nations’ genetic
futures. While often dismissed today as a fringe movement or pseudoscience,
eugenics was once a powerful global force in which prosegregationist visions
and targeted extermination campaigns gained prominence far beyond Nazi
Germany. This included the founding of research and information infra-
structures to measure and market claims around essential human inequality
and the risk of living in pluralistic societies where democratic freedoms could
be broadly extended. Indeed, well before the start of World War II, eugeni-
cists in the United States had institutionalized historic policy gains spanning
the establishment of racialized immigration bans and quotas, forced steriliza-
tion of “dysgenic” populations, and the normalization of predictive uses of
intelligence tests to promote and sustain the segregation of a “cognitive
elite” from “degrading” populations. First promoted by male scientific elites
and patrician classes in the United Kingdom and United States, eugenics
advanced a monocultural, Western supremacist agenda. This was done by
leveraging “rational,” data-driven techniques to address and predict the “prob-
lems” of globally pluralizing societies. By eugenicists’ account, such problems
were spurred through the rise of international migration and the spread of
new political imaginaries that seeded new potentials for social change at the
turn of the twentieth century, when diverse classes, races, political collectives,
and their own dreams of freedom had more mobility than ever before.
Predatory Data brings together the globally mediated dimensions of
that information past with our data-driven present to underscore eugenics
as an overlooked forerunner to contemporary operationalizations of what
this project frames as predatory data. Drawing together such cross-temporal

2 • I n t roduc t ion
developments underscores predatory data as not merely a distinctive symp-
tom of the contemporary. It highlights instead the persistent continuity
of predatory data methods across generations, drawing attention to how
the targeted monitoring and dispossession of minoritized populations
were not merely incidental outcomes of data economies. They were, rather,
essential consequences of dispossessive and profit-generating knowledge
regimes that demanded the instrumentalization and continuous profil-
ing of vast ­populations. From their earliest efforts, eugenicists targeted
minoritized populations in particular to generate the excess of data and
evaluation techniques that conditioned the rise of new classes of informa-
tion elites. Predatory Data highlights the history behind such political and
economic profiteering through data practice, attending especially to the
knowledge work developed by eugenicists and contemporary data enterprises
that remade and reprogrammed research infrastructures into instruments
for political and economic stratification. The efforts of eugenicists and con-
temporary data enterprises would not have become so impactful without
the data collection methods and global research and information infrastruc-
tures they extended to publicly mediate, authorize, and defend their efforts
as rationally justified and fundamentally knowledge based. This was despite
the dehumanizing acts of political violence and appetites for civic excisions
and amputations that both forces normalized.
This project thus draws a through line between the present and past inter-
national movements for eugenics that were able to gain significant cultural
and political prominence in contexts such as the United States by the first
decades of the twentieth century. Such gains were accomplished by growing
research architectures to informatically monitor and assess human popula-
tions and to differentiate “deserving” classes from the physically, morally,
and mentally “unfit.” This project thus underscores how eugenics researchers
enthusiastically and often obsessively channeled their ambitions through the
frenzied development of varied new data methods, population monitoring
techniques, and instruments for identifying and predicting degeneracy in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These included biometric
databases for criminals and immigrants, composite portraiture and intel-
ligence metrics to predict future behavior, IQ exams, civic literacy evalua-
tions for immigrants and people living in poverty, and morality and genetic
surveys of the poor and broad classes of the “unfit” (Black 2003; Okrent
2019; Stern 2005) that allowed eugenicists to justify broad applications of
surveillance techniques across democratic publics. Even while they argued

Pr e dat or y Data • 3
for the suspension of basic liberties and rights of “contaminating” minority
populations who could threaten the survival of more worthy classes, data-
driven practices allowed eugenicists to define and promote their efforts as
fundamentally evaluative, with their advocacy based in objectively derived,
knowledge-based findings (Bashford and Levine 2010).
While the power and influence of US eugenicists have been most clearly
tracked through their success in policy gain, this project highlights the boom
in eugenics’ profit-making information market, exploring how a golden
age in eugenics publishing, the growth of a popular new intelligence test-
ing industry, the spread of varied and widely selling eugenics information
resources, and an explosion of hundreds of courses and lectures offered in
some 350 US universities (Kevles 1985, 89) worked to broadly amplify and
mainstream eugenics’ radically segregationist arguments to general audi-
ences. Such data-based, consumer-facing products worked to cultivate new
appetites across an emergent information class for surveilling populations to
assess their social value. By 1928, historians noted that some three-quarters
of US universities had introduced courses on eugenics, most of them using
best-selling texts such as The Passing of the Great Race by the leading US
eugenicist, Madison Grant, that popularized disinformation around “race
suicide” and the threat of “Nordic races’ extinction” from the growth of
global migration (Hothersall and Lovett 2022).
Moreover, US eugenic researchers used design spectacles, data visualiza-
tions, interactive exhibits, local fairs, and urban museums as market-based,
media tactics to strategically extend their “science” and technical methods.
Through exploiting consumer markets that increasingly offered information-
based goods, they channeled their ambition to seed a culture of self- and
population-monitoring through promoting habits of surveillance and exami-
nation as everyday habits for ordinary publics that extended well beyond pro-
fessional “expert” practitioners. Together, such forms of eugenic data work
could come to be imagined as vehicles to correct the errors of democratic
societies and institutions, where data-extractive surveillance instruments
were promoted as a means to protect society’s most deserving and excep-
tional classes from the threat of degenerating forces. Eugenic promotions of
authoritarian policies for population monitoring could thus be argued for as
a means to truncate the excesses of democratic choice exercised by growing
“deviant” classes and a necessary path to prevent the threat of an openly
pluralistic society.

4 • I n t roduc t ion
 This project builds from such developments to explore the long history of
predatory data—the habitual use of data and research methods that exploits
the vulnerable and abuses power through datafication and prediction opera-
tions. Today, that has become a defining part of global debates around big
data and artificial intelligence (AI)–driven systems. This follows growing
reports of US Big Tech companies’ central roles in automating discrimina-
tion and amplifying a global resurgence of authoritarianism and political
violence targeting minoritized populations around the world. Such impacts
draw focus to how the profit-making commercial research and communi-
cations infrastructures that have grown around predatory data today have
allowed for the mass amplification of conspiratorial logics around a pending
threat of majority populations’ extermination and the urgent need to limit
pluralistic living. This project argues that we cannot grasp the contemporary
ramifications of such dynamics in the age of big data and AI without recog-
nizing the longer legacy of predatory data practices and without grappling
with the contemporary data economy’s imbrications with an earlier forerun-
ner in predatory data—eugenics. To attend to such lineages and their chan-
neling into techno-eugenic logics of assessment in today’s data economy is to
recognize the double face—and “nocturnal,” necropolitical twin (Mbembe
2003, 2019)—that underpins predatory data’s growth. Such intertwined
architectures are what allow big data and AI industries to operate—on the
one hand, as official and even preeminent engines of innovation working
under the guise of Western liberalism’s highest promise, and on the other
hand, as entities that can profit by economizing global progress and security
for only those deemed most worthy. They do all this while instrumentalizing
global crises into “opportunities” for Western technologists to continue to
build more product solutions and ensure, as the billionaire venture capitalist
and libertarian activist Peter Thiel wrote in the years following his invest-
ment in Facebook and co-founding of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, that
“the world [is made] safe for capitalism” (Thiel 2009).1
The pages that follow thus insist that we unfix our imaginaries from the
frameworks of progress and “evolved” futuristic living and labor that have
overdetermined our contemporary understandings of the information age.
Predatory Data addresses sites and temporalities beyond the data-driven
products and architectures of Western innovation centers that have too often
been protagonized as explanatory agents, as if the most pressing questions
of the contemporary were ones of how to sustain unparalleled economic

Pr e dat or y Data • 5
growth and technological revolution, and not ones of collective pluriversal
living. The chapters that follow prompt us to move beyond the familiar trap-
pings of such a master narrative and ask us to recognize instead how much
techno-eugenic dictates for amnesia and amputation, and predation and
parasitism, have been a part of the information age’s organizing strains. They
underscore, with other justice-based accounts, how much other overlooked
counter-strains have pressed for futures where restoration and recovery could
be organizing forces instead. The forces of monoculturalist stratification and
prediction that reverberate through the past and present of today’s infor-
mation economy have not been inevitable. However, to steer toward other
possible futures requires accounting for more than the stunning novelty and
optimization conventionally promised in dominant forms of digital knowl-
edge practice. It also requires confronting how much social disintegration
and violence—alongside economic and technological processing—can find
new forms of speed and scaling in the age of big data.

Techno-eugenic Formations

By the time the two Facebook researchers ran their experiment in February
2019, investigations into how the company’s products fueled twenty-first-
century campaigns of genocide, mob lynchings, and human rights violations
in a range of global contexts far outside the company’s Silicon Valley head-
quarters had already begun. By then, there were signs that the fantasy of
digital universalism (Chan 2014) had begun to fray. That fantasy had once
cast Western information technology firms and the digital markets they
extended as shining exemplars of liberalism and engines for the advance-
ment of global connection, individual freedom, and rational enlightenment
in the contemporary age. Still, the brutal spectacle the Facebook researchers
witnessed for weeks across their screens went beyond anything they were
prepared for. This included an unrelenting torrent of hate-based imagery and
polarizing content.
In the months leading up to India’s general election, the pair had traveled
to the South Asian nation as part of a company fact-finding team. They had
created a test account of a twenty-one-year-old woman residing in North
India to understand how Facebook’s recommendation algorithm shaped the
experience of a new user in India, the company’s largest national market in
the world, where some 420 million of Facebook’s nearly three billion active

6 • I n t roduc t ion
users lived at the time.2 With the test account programmed to simply fol-
low Facebook’s recommended pages and groups without any added direc-
tion from the user, the researchers watched as the account grew increasingly
filled with pronationalist propaganda and anti-Muslim hate speech (Raj
2021). Graphic depictions of targeted violence that were perversely framed as
a tribute to a “Hindu India” and a defense against its supposed extermination
from the “threat” of ethnic and religious minorities in the country streamed
across the site. In less than a month, an account that had started with a con-
ventional newsfeed became flooded with what researchers described as “a
near constant barrage of polarizing nationalist content, misinformation, and
violence and gore” (Iyengar 2021). “These are pakistani dogs,” one caption
read beside a photo of dead bodies on stretchers. “300 dogs died now say
long live India, death to Pakistan,” read another post over a background of
laughing emojis.
The memo the researchers pulled together to report their findings to
company leadership came with a title that stressed the urgency of the matter
in the months before the largest national elections on the planet were to be
held: “An Indian Test User’s Descent Into a Sea of Polarizing, Nationalistic
Messages.” It was likely one of the last things they had expected to find at the
company whose founder, just two years ago, had loudly professed “building
a global community” to be its driving principle.3 Calling the test account
an “integrity nightmare,” the authors aimed to find language for the inde-
scribable scale of violence that few (if any) training programs in data sci-
ence would have prepared them for. One researcher reported starkly that,
because of their test, “I’ve seen more images of dead people in the past 3 weeks
than I’ve seen in my entire life total” (Iyengar 2021). The researchers’ memo
came to public light in late 2021, over two years later, as part of the tens
of thousands of Facebook internal documents leaked to the US Securities
and Exchange Commission and the Wall Street Journal by data scientist and
Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen (Purnell and Horwitz 2021). The
exposure underscored what human and civil rights advocates, reporters, and
industry experts both in and outside of the United States had been sounding
as reports of political violence and life-threatening impacts of the platform
and of the wildly deficient “security” operations across social media more
generally amassed. Particularly for minorities and historically marginalized
populations, new forms of political targeting and racialized profiling on
algorithmically driven platforms were being seen at unprecedented rates and
increasingly with deadly ends.

Pr e dat or y Data • 7
 The 2021 Facebook document leak also underscored how, even despite
social media’s growing profits from global markets and the company’s
explicit development of varied products (from Free Basics to Facebook Flex
and Facebook Zero) targeting the Global South, the vast majority of the
company’s budget to protect user safety and fight misinformation (84%) had
remained focused on just one country: the United States. Even while less
than 10 percent of Facebook’s daily active users (some 240 million accounts)
were in the United States,4 and despite its growth largely being driven by
countries far beyond its Silicon Valley headquarters, just 16 percent of its
safety and misinformation budget was reserved for what the company
categorically labeled the “rest of world” (Horwitz and Seetharaman 2020;
Zakrzewski et al. 2021).
Indeed, years earlier, global human rights workers and scholars had already
begun flagging the implications of such disparities and reporting the disturb-
ing spread of viral messages that warned not only of the alleged “existential
threat” to and “replacement” of majority populations by minorities in various
nations around the world, but that magnified calls for political violence. By
2017, distressing signs had heavily mounted around the central role that social
media played in an epidemic of xenophobic mediated conspiracy theories, the
rise of antidemocratic parties, and political violence in varied international
contexts, including sites as diverse as Ethiopia, Myanmar, Hungary, and the
United States (Akinwotu 2021; Mozur 2018a, 2018b; Stevenson 2018a, 2018b;
Taub and Fisher 2018; Vaidhyanathan 2018). Observing a parallel surge of
heightened polarizing online content circulation decrying the complicity,
weakness, or unwillingness of democratic institutions to prevent the suppos-
edly impending destruction of majority populations, human rights advocates
and scholars called attention to the pattern of authoritarian fervor embraced
in the name of racial and national “preservation” escalating in site after site
around the world. Not since the international rise of fascist parties in the
decades leading up to World War II had calls to dismantle pluralistic, demo-
cratic societies seemed to find so many ready champions around the world
(Brown 2019; Bashford and Levine 2010). And not since the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries’ global spread of eugenics movements – that
turned calls for the forced exclusion, segregation, and sterilization of so-
called “unfit” ­populations into national policies for racial betterment – had
a politics of nationalist xenophobia seemed so widespread and so widely tied
to information-based practices. Cameroonian political philosopher Achille
Mbembe thus described the global intensification of il-liberal, anti-pluralistic

8 • I n t roduc t ion
politics in the twenty-first century as “the desire for an enemy, the desire
for apartheid (for separation and enclaving), [and] the fantasy of extermina-
tion” (2019, 43). These have become unavoidably mainstream elements in
and beyond the West and even in the world’s largest and oldest democracies.
In India, reports of platform-amplified political violence that had been
documented since 2014 (Banaji and Bhat 2019; Mukherjee 2020; Shah
2022) began to draw international attention after the growing circulation of
recorded murders and mob killings began to break records in digital traffic—
all the while, with minimal intervention from tech companies. In most cases,
victims were members of minority Muslim and Dalit communities and had
been attacked after the online spread of Islamophobic conspiracy theories
around “Love Jihad,” “Corona Jihad,” and Hindu child kidnapping (Saaliq
and Pathi 2021). In one viral video case in 2017, a forty-eight-year-old Muslim
migrant worker had been brutally murdered by an assailant who was inspired
by the widespread circulation of nationalist politicians’ online propaganda
videos (Dey 2018). The entire crime was uploaded to YouTube with a series
of sermons against “Love Jihad” and what the killer called the “entrapment” of
Hindu women by Muslim men (Mankekar 2021; Mirchandani 2018). The
same year, “WhatsApp lynchings” would begin to regularly appear in news
headlines as multiple nationalist mobs’ assaults on victims occurred after
false accusations of kidnapping, theft, and local crime had quickly spread
over the Facebook-owned social messaging platform. Violence would gain
renewed force as images of victims’ bodies—some as young as twelve years old
(Mukherjee 2020)—circulated with impunity on Hindu nationalist social
media channels (Anwar 2018; Human Rights Watch 2019). Researchers
would later uncover that several of the documented attacks between 2009
and 2018 had involved hired professional video makers (Mukherjee 2020).
About 90 percent5 of the hundreds of assaults were reported after the Hindu
nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) party came to power in May 2014
with social media leveraged as an unprecedented part of its political machin-
ery. By 2017, the BJP could champion Narendra Modi as “the world’s most
followed” international political leader on social media (Sinha 2017).6 As the
party continued its “multi-media carpet-bombing” strategy (Sardesai 2014)
without deterrence, tens of thousands of daily messages saturated social
media and public space alike (Jaffrelot 2015).
By 2018, human rights advocates could formally tie social media giants to
official accounts of political violence and genocide. It was that year when the
UN Human Rights Council released its report on a fact-finding mission in

Pr e dat or y Data • 9
Myanmar that stressed Facebook’s role in twenty-first-century political cam-
paigns directed toward what the UN High Commissioner called an “unprec-
edented” intensity of violence against Muslim minorities (2018). The UN
mission’s investigation, which began in early 2017, had been spurred by an
emergency study undertaken in 2016. Evidence of scorched earth campaigns
in hundreds of villages (some 354 known by the end of 2017) (UN 2017a)
and mass atrocities against Rohingya Muslims at the hands of Myanmar’s
Buddhist nationalists began to accrue (Amnesty International 2017; Human
Rights Watch 2017; UN 2017b), with survivors reporting mass graves and
rivers filled with evidence of atrocities as they were forced to flee. When the
UN’s official report on the crisis was released in October 2018, they docu-
mented evidence of “gross human rights violations” and numerous links and
references to social media, with Facebook described as the primary means for
receiving information (UN 2018).7
Separate sections in the report were dedicated to the role of social media
platforms and Facebook in particular, and included a glossary of themes,
lists of specific social media accounts, and ethnic slurs commonly used by
public figures and established political leaders to promote extermination
campaigns online. Many of those campaigns were reported to still be live
posts on the platform, even at the time of the report’s publishing. Countless
messages—from known Buddhist extremist groups and religious and politi-
cal authorities alike—circulated unimpeded around themes of a “Muslim
threat” endangering the “Buddhist character” of the nation. In such posts,
Rohingya Muslims were repeatedly described as “illegal invaders” that posed
an existential threat to Burmese racial purity justified taking whatever means
needed to protect “race and religion” in the country. “Our country, race and
religion can only survive, if we defend [the nationalist forces],” one post cited
in the report said, with a warning that the mistaken application of “human
rights” in the nation would “turn Myanmar into a Muslim country” (UN
2018, 326). The UN report stated too that Facebook had ignored reports of a
growing crisis across nearly half a decade, despite the company’s targeting of
Myanmar as an early market for its Free Basics product in the same period.8
And it decried Facebook’s “ineffective content moderation” as enabling
extremist groups’ popularization and an escalation of their calls for ethnic
cleansing and political violence.
The UN’s 2018 report also referenced vocal pushback from civil society
organizations in the Global South, who cited not only the exploitation of
their labor for content moderation by social media companies, but also

10 • I n t roduc t ion
c­ ritiqued how companies’ business practices actively amplified the precarity
of their work to defend human rights. That same year, multiple Myanmar-
based civil society organizations had come together to issue a letter to
Facebook decrying its continued lack of Burmese-speaking staff 9 and the
sweeping failure of its detection systems in the growing crisis. It stated,
“We believe your [detection] system, in this case, was us—and we were far
from systematic . . . . Though these dangerous messages were deliberately
pushed to large numbers of people . . . [and despite] all of [Facebook’s] data,”
Facebook’s teams failed to “pick up on the pattern” (Phandeeyar et al. 2018).
The UN report further cited its own research team’s experience of “inef-
fective response” from the company after one of its own locally contracted
workers began to receive repeated death threats online for his work: “As long
as we are feeling sorry for them, our country is not at peace. These dogs need
to be completely removed”; “If this animal is still around, find him and kill
him”; “Don’t leave him alive. Remove his whole race. Time is ticking.” The
threats followed a widely circulated post that targeted and identified
the UN worker as Muslim and a “national traitor” for collaborating with the
UN mission. Although Facebook was alerted about the death threats in four
separate reports, after each one, the response received was that the company
had determined that the post “doesn’t go against one of [Facebook’s] specific
community standards.” As the UN report noted, the company’s inaction
meant that weeks and months after the original post went online, the worker
and his family “continued to receive multiple death threats from Facebook
users, warnings from neighbors, friends, and even taxi drivers that they had
seen his photo and the posts on Facebook” (UN 2018).
By mid-2018, Facebook, the company that made “move fast and break
things” a Silicon Valley mantra, publicly admitted that it had been “too
slow” in responding to the growing humanitarian crisis in Myanmar (Roose
and Mozur 2018) and commissioned its own internal report. Released in
November of that same year, the sixty-two-page independent study from
the nonprofit organization Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) found
that Facebook had become a “platform to undermine democracy and incite
offline violence.” It asserted that more needed to be done to enforce its exist-
ing policies on hate speech, fake accounts, and human rights abuses, not only
in Myanmar but in the “multiple eventualities” it stated were certain to arise
around the world (Business for Social Responsibility 2018). In a company
blog post accompanying the report, Facebook’s product policy manager,
Alex Warofka, promised to take the “right corrective actions.” But he also

Pr e dat or y Data • 11
insisted on projecting Big Tech companies as defenders of Western liberal
frameworks whose technology products in fact made them the best func-
tional stewards of human rights in many contexts. Reminding publics of
Myanmar’s own lack of formalized universal human rights principles, then,
he assured readers that Facebook’s own “human rights standards” (2018)10
would be reinforced through improved “tools and technologies” (Su 2018)11
and more extensive applications of AI in detection systems.
The multiple global “eventualities” that the BSR warned of, however, had
already begun to manifest. Two years earlier, the 2016 presidential elections
in the United States and the infamous Cambridge Analytica scandal had
put Facebook under heightened scrutiny for intensifying antidemocratic dis-
information campaigns in the West. Rising concerns around “xenophobia”
and “post-truth” that same year had even led Dictionary.com and the Oxford
English Dictionary to declare them words of the year for English-speaking
publics, as the sites noted spikes in their searches online (Dictionary.com
2017; Steinmetz 2016a, 2016b). Attempting to allay growing concerns of
political fragmentations and to cast Facebook as a defender of liberal com-
mitments around the world, Facebook extended increasingly familiar prom-
ises to dedicate new investments into varied “technological fixes” (Benjamin
2019; Hoffman 2021) that it claimed would enhance existing ethics checks
and “global safety infrastructure.” In a nearly six-thousand-word “Building
a Global Community” letter that Mark Zuckerberg issued in early 2017—
which later was referred to as the “Facebook Manifesto”—he reminded audi-
ences of what he saw as the elevated stakes surrounding Facebook’s growth
worldwide. This involved nothing less than “humanity’s” shared benefit in
a “Global Facebook” that would combat the polarizing filter bubbles that
fragment “common understanding.” As Zuckerberg argued in the mani-
festo, “Progress now requires humanity [to come] together not just as cities
or nations, but also as a global community.” He made no direct mention
of the growing violence around the world that was being directly tied to
social media, and Facebook’s platform specifically, or to the escalating death
and hate campaigns waged by vigilante “truth” and neofascist networks and
online radicalization, including in the West.
Such omissions were glaring. By the time Zuckerberg posted his mani-
festo, extremist calls in the United States were already reported to be driv-
ing ever-larger online traffic patterns and mainstreaming alt-right themes
of “White genocide,” “White sharia,” and “death of the West” (Southern
Poverty Law Center 2017, 2019). By early 2017, as far right groups in the

12 • I n t roduc t ion
United States too were visibly organizing across Facebook and other online
platforms to prepare for the deadly August 2017 Unite the Right Rally in
Charlottesville, Virginia, Facebook groups such as Alt Reich: Nation and
pages for far-right politicians in the United States and Europe were being
flagged as active sites of radicalization. An alarming rise in national hate
crimes made headlines that year as a twenty-seven-year-old shooter killed
six Muslim worshippers in a January 2017 attack on the Islamic Cultural
Centre of Quebec City, and a twenty-two-year-old killed a young African
American army lieutenant at a bus stop at the University of Maryland. By
summer 2019, deadly hate crimes rose further with new mass minority-
targeting killings in El Paso, Texas, with twenty-three murdered in the
largest anti-Latino attack in recent US history, and with fifty-one murdered
in Christchurch, New Zealand, in an assault on two mosques. Reports later
revealed how the massacre in New Zealand, which had been live streamed
on Facebook by the shooter, had been an inspiration for the El Paso shooter’s
plan (Southern Poverty Law Center 2019). Moreover, national reports dem-
onstrated a continuation of the trend even after a new presidential admin-
istration replaced Donald Trump in the White House. The FBI reported in
2023 that US hate crimes rose in 2021 to the highest level since the federal
government began tracking the data more than three decades ago, with the
10,840 bias-motivated crimes reported demonstrating a nearly 25 percent
increase from 2020 (Nakamura 2023).
In the face of such developments, Zuckerberg’s manifesto asserted an
explicitly Silicon Valley–centric worldview that not only conspicuously
“forgot” and excised any mention of the growing violence linked to it and
other social media platforms, but projected elite, Western data scientists’
and Big Tech companies’ exclusive right to continuously build. Indeed, so
firmly did he defend the ultimate virtue of companies’ technological designs,
whatever the evidence of their impact, he continued to insist that they were
the best solutions for a “free society.” He would take until the end of the
over twelve-page letter to admit to “making mistakes,” only euphemistically
calling the company’s errors “operational scaling issues” born out of growth
that had outpaced its “social infrastructure.” He blithely acknowledged that
Facebook might have been challenged to respond to populations who “do
not share its vision of global connection.” But he asserted that “in times like
these, the most important thing we at Facebook can do is develop the social
infrastructure to give people the power to build a global community that
works for all of us.”

Pr e dat or y Data • 13
 In the wake of the globally escalating tallies of victims tied to the epidemic
of mediated hate hosted on Big Tech platforms, Zuckerberg’s manifesto
coached audiences that the right step forward was to continue to build new
tools. Those tools, he attested, should not merely be “focused on connect-
ing friends and families,” as the company had been doing, but should scale
up for “developing the social infrastructure for community.” He framed
Facebook’s recommendations system—the very feature that civil society
groups had reported as a radicalization tool for hate groups—as instead a
“design opportunity.” He wrote, “More than one billion people are active
members of Facebook groups, but most don’t seek out groups on their
own. . . . If we can improve our suggestions and help connect one billion
people with meaningful communities, that can strengthen our social fab-
ric. . . . [T]here is more to build.” Insisting too that new “civic engagement”
tools on Facebook would “help establish direct dialogue between people and
our elected leaders,” he likewise inverted the critiques of human rights groups.
He reframed the same signs they had flagged as media manipulation practices
by authoritarian political parties as indicators of Facebook’s success in global
markets instead. In perhaps the most direct affront to the concerns of human
rights groups in India, he even proudly referenced Facebook’s ties to India’s
nationalist BJP party and Prime Minister Modi. He added, proudly attesting
to the global political power of Facebook, “In recent campaigns around the
world—from India and Indonesia across Europe to the United States—we’ve
seen the candidate with the largest and most engaged following on Facebook
usually wins.”
In a striking reification of Western Big Tech monofuturism, Zuckerberg’s
post was quickly framed within hours of its posting in English-language
news headlines as a “manifesto to save the world” (Guynn 2017; Kosoff 2017).
News outlets extolled it as a “plan [to] to fix humanity” (Levy 2017), and a
“letter to the world” to “reboot globalization” (Ahmed 2017), written with
presidential overtones (The Guardian 2017). While the news accounts of
Zuckerberg’s letter and the cascade of press interviews that accompanied its
release echoed Facebook’s professed mission to newly center “building global
community,” they made no reference to the various human and civil rights
groups around the world pushing to reform the company, particularly in the
Global South. Unsaid too were how the letter’s presumptions around broken
governance systems in the rest of the world—and of the unique capacity, and
even authorized duty, of Western Big Tech to intervene—reanimated colo-
nial frameworks around Western supremacy. Zuckerberg largely rechanneled

14 • I n t roduc t ion
unapologetically ­universalist projections around the evolutionary thrust and
progress-enhancing, civilizing impacts of platform technologies. The official
story that circulated faithfully through news accounts amplified narratives
of Facebook as filling a void in the “global community” around the world—a
global community that would presumably cease to exist without it. In the lan-
guage of Western Big Tech futurism that Zuckerberg channeled and that the
mainstream English-language press endorsed, US Big Tech companies didn’t
merely provide the “tools” for user “freedom.” They could now be imagined
as providing the basic structures and logics to “fix” global governance and a
broken global “humanity.” In such a world, companies were not only inno-
cent, external observers to human and institutional errors that multiplied
around them, but were beneficent tinkerers who could convert crises into
opportunities for tech development and data solutions. They were entities,
moreover, for whom remaking the “social fabric” was primarily a question of
designing meaningful user engagements with the right technologies.
In the midst of growing global reports that Western social media platforms
were becoming authoritarian regimes’ favored tool for nationalist media
manipulation, xenophobic fearmongering, and techno-eugenic–styled cam-
paigns against pluralistic societies, Zuckerberg’s missive projected a starkly
Silicon Valley–centric conceit and existential logic that flatly negated the
gravity of what was unfolding beyond its walls. More than simply channeling
Silicon Valley’s familiar “game” of promissory digital “hype”—a language
that works to generate the present to enable the future to emerge, according
to anthropologist Kaushik Sunder Rajan (2006, 34)—Zuckerberg’s mani-
festo and his rewriting of past records betrayed a much darker message. By
insisting that the issue of highest import for Big Tech companies and the
public was to ensure that there remained “more to build,” he sent a clear
message on the significance of the mass political violence and minority-
targeting hate campaigns that human and civil rights groups were reporting
from around the world. He implied that such costs could be an expendable,
collateral sacrifice for an ultimately greater good and an optimized future
driven by Western Big Tech companies. Newly economized, progress in such
a future could emerge as a thing to be concentrated and filtered through a
logic of exception that operated not toward a common good, but toward an
explicitly differentiated good that prioritized security for those deemed most
worthy of investment. It was a projected future that framed Western Big
Tech and its cognitive elites’ continued dominance as a genuine virtue that
could guarantee there remained “more to build” at whatever cost.

Pr e dat or y Data • 15
 Techno-eugenic Markets

This project pushes back on such pernicious logics of “expendable” life, and
the “imperative to build” in the name of Western Big Tech and its future
of optimized, techno-eugenic progress and economized security. It aims to
diagnose a global condition where, in the face of a global epidemic of anti-
pluralistic authoritarianisms and politics of xenophobic segregation directly
tied to Western platform technologies, Big Tech firms and the growing AI-
and big data-driven economy can still perversely be promoted and framed
as uniquely scalable engines of global salvation. These are engines whose
­algorithmic accelerations are not only projected as best suited to “fix human-
ity,” but whose designs can be celebrated as optimizing fixes that “reboot
­g lobalization.” This project aims to decenter digital technology and the
data economy’s contemporarily dominant narrative as preeminent forces
of Western innovation and global evolution. It brings focus to the accounts of
violence and necropolitical disintegration that underpin the growth of expan-
sive infrastructures for datafication and prediction that have arisen in their
wake. Their life-negating impacts reverberate in embodied, material forms
throughout a widening ecology. Such violence is evident not only through the
forms of distant suffering that are architected, scaled, and maintained by Big
Tech firms in accordance with their assessments of global priority valuations
and market calculations. It’s notable too through the voracious systems of
datafication designed to claim that human ­experience around technology use
can be converted into perfectly predictable, statistically probabilistic forms of
activity. Through such functions, the data economy’s globally extractive data
mining infrastructures and algorithmically scaled calculations can drown
out all other alternative voices that aim to speak for data practice, research,
and knowledge on the possibilities of human experience. All this, while they
rationalize their own calculations around “reasonable” loss when it comes to
some global user populations and the differentiated cost of human security.
This project underscores the striking resurgence and accelerated spread
of eugenic logics and popular methods for predicting the differential value of
life and promoting segregationist policies as central to an explicitly techno-
eugenic turn. I underscore this as a techno-eugenic logic to stress its insepa-
rability from global data-driven technologies and research infrastructures
that power today’s data economy. Moreover, the explosion around the world
of explicitly authoritarian, anti-pluralistic, and xenophobic movements dem-
onstrates the enduring resonances of eugenic mobilizations that, far from

16 • I n t roduc t ion
disappearing following World War II, instead transformed through market-
based methods and applying techniques to economize users, products, and
producers. These methods, even if no longer explicitly adopting the language
of racial hygiene and cleansing through national policy, were nonetheless
invested in quantifying, modeling, and predicting the differential values of
human attributes as market-based assets and racialized economic functions.
Indeed, varied historians have documented how eugenics never truly dis-
appeared from research cultures, either. Such work has mapped eugenics’
enduring impact on a range of contemporary domains where its techniques
have long defined foundational practices as they developed in the twentieth
century. This includes in modern genetics (Cowan 1969; Kevles 1985; Stern
2005; Subramaniam 2014), criminology (Maguire 2009), population sciences
(Ramsden 2002), education (Jacoby and Glauberman 1995), industrial design
and urban planning (Cogdell 2004), and contemporary statistics and data
applications (Chun 2021; Cowan 1969; Mackenzie 1981). Alongside these
developments have been market-based stratifications that continue to draw
from the above and that culminate today in the rapid growth of AI- and
data-driven economies.
Seriously regarded in its day, eugenics spread internationally among the
lettered “information” classes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries through the resources extended across research and communica-
tions infrastructures. Led and promoted by prominent scientific and research
authorities, its leading voices and figureheads included Sir Francis Galton,
eugenics’ founder and a cousin to Charles Darwin, as well as academic, medi-
cal, and political leaders in institutions of the highest prestige—from the
University College London to Stanford University and Harvard University,
among others (Black 2003; Okrent 2019; Stern 2005). Obsessed with data
collection (Cowan 1969) and fixated on enhancing the survival of those
classes, eugenics promoted a program to predict and ensure the best physi-
cal, mental, and moral “fitness” for human futures. Eugenicists thus adopted
sweeping strategies to promote the outputs of their research centers and to
saturate the information channels of the day with the messages of what they
aimed to be a new science-based “religion” (Kevles 1985) for the wholesale
transformation of society. So successful were they in exploiting information
markets and seeding a profitable, information-driven movement in “vogue”
(Kevles 1985, 59) with lettered publics around the world—most notably in the
United Kingdom and United States, where the movement first took root—
that its leaders came to be regarded as a “priestly” class (Kevles 1985, 69). It

Pr e dat or y Data • 17
was a class, moreover, that proved itself as able to reshape US national and
state policies around human migration, segregation, and sterilization in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Through such efforts, eugenics researchers mainstreamed experimental
infrastructures that promoted extremist policies for restricting democratic
norms, expanding data collection on broad populations in efforts to engi-
neer optimized societies. They also saw to—in the United States alone—
the ­historic expansion of national immigration restrictions and steriliza-
tion policies targeting the “unfit” in over thirty-two states, where victims
were disproportionately women of color identified as poor, immigrant, or
disabled. By the early twentieth century, eugenics’ communications and
research infrastructures had enabled a “shared language and ambition”
(Bashford and Levine 2010, 2) to develop worldwide, uniting the United
Kingdom and United States and an array of distinct global locales. Those
included Northern and Western Europe (Sweden, Norway, Denmark,
Finland, France, Italy, Spain, Switzerland), Eastern Europe (Czechoslovakia,
Yugoslavia, Hungary, Turkey, Latvia, Russia), the Americas (Canada, Cuba,
Mexico, Brazil, Puerto Rico, Argentina), Asia and Australia (New Zealand,
Japan, Hong Kong, South Asia, Singapore), Africa (Kenya), and Germany
(Adams 1990; Bashford and Levine 2010).
To attend to the global reverberations of techno-eugenics is to thus
recognize the underacknowledged ecologies of illiberal violence and anti-
pluralist, xenophobic terrains—sites where “death has nothing tragic about
it” (Haritaworn, Kuntsman, and Posocco 2014; Mbembe 2003, 2019)—as
necessary for the growth of contemporary data economies and AI-driven
systems. Scholars of necropolitics have recognized such death terrains, as
well as the maintenance of economic “production” spaces where the given-
ness of individual rights could be officially suspended, as foundational to
the growth of modern orders. They have thus underscored the inseparability
of the growth of Western liberalism with the extension of global systems of
imperialism and terrains of settler colonial dispossessions that decolonial,
critical race, and feminist and queer scholars have long explored (Azoulay
2019; Byrd 2011; Cacho 2012; Hartmann 1997; Mbembe 2003, 2019; Rosas
2019). Achille Mbembe wrote of how such spaces of political exception—­
central among them, the colony and the plantation—functioned as the
“nocturnal face” of liberal states (2003, 2019) that could be architected away
from official sites where civil peace needed to be formally maintained. In such
remote sites of exception and profit-generating ­production, conditions of

18 • I n t roduc t ion
“unregulated war” and violence—exercised outside normative conventions,
and “obey[ing] no rule of proportionality” (2019, 25)—could give rise to the
organized destruction of necropolitical “death worlds.” The full function-
ing of these death worlds first requires, however, as Mbembe specified, “on
the one hand, a generalized cheapening of the price of life and, on the other,
a habituation to loss” (2019, 26). Mbembe thus reminds readers how often
necropolitical sites have emerged, not as the antithesis or limit of liberal
democracies but as their hidden twin and underacknowledged double. Ever
latent within liberal political orders, they can emerge and come to dominate
not merely once the world can be segmented into realms of the biopolitically
“useful” and “useless” but once a generalizing acceptance of and “habituation
to loss” has been conditioned.
Read through such a lens, the sacrificial economy that contemporary big
data and AI-driven systems have amassed in the wake of their era-defining
expansions emerges not in spite of, or as the exception to, the data economy’s
growth. It emerges instead as its offspring, developing as necessary exten-
sions of technological and economic “production” cycles through remote
and seemingly disconnected “sites of experimentation.” In the name of pre-
serving data firms’ profitability and growth and sustaining an official narra-
tive of Western technology (and big data and AI systems, especially) as the
twenty-first century’s consummate force of progress, innovation, and high
enlightenment, security and civic viabilities for minoritized populations are
rendered into expendable resources that are most “value” generating in their
very expendability.
Predatory Data builds upon and complements scholarly developments
around racial capitalism and the data economy to underscore eugen-
ics’ ­continued hauntings in our information present and to excavate the
­explicitly informational and data-engaged aspects of our eugenics past that
remain largely overlooked. This is despite the breadth of the data collec-
tion practices and research infrastructures that were directed toward broad
public outreach to cultivate “eugenic-minded” populations (Kevles 1985, 60)
and despite the enduring reverberations of eugenics methods across a span
of contemporary knowledge practices. I underscore, then, how the expansive
infrastructures for research and communication that eugenicists first devel-
oped in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—spanning labs,
record-keeping offices, professional societies, and education networks cross-
ing a vast array of knowledge institutions and universities—were dedicated
even a century ago to dispossessive forms of data collection, surveillance,

Pr e dat or y Data • 19
and ­experimentation. They also coordinated efforts toward the mainstream-
ing and marketing of eugenics practices, and the spread of a range of modern
documentation and assessment techniques. Such techniques, generations
before the rise of today’s data economy, shaped an emergent class of informa-
tion consumers. And their appetites for self- and social-monitoring might
be expanded, eugenicists recognized, even as the contours of an information
age had yet to be fully defined.

Data Pluralist Futures

Despite its growth, the contemporary data economy’s projected occupation of

global knowledge futures and the expansion of techno-eugenic logics through
research infrastructures and data economies is far from inevitable. However
much Big Tech firms have saturated information channels with insistences
of technological supremacy and an ascendent big data and AI-driven epoch
that stifles any versions of potential future otherwise, information futures
and global “progress” do not rest on their continued dominance. Various
research-engaged actors continue to refuse the monofuturist projections of
AI and big data temporalities, pressing for an alternative version of knowl-
edge futures and drawing from a range of justice-oriented global traditions
to articulate new, data pluralist solidarities. Working to expose the deadly
contradictions within Western Big Tech’s calculations for an optimized
global progress, such actors press for the value of heterogeneous knowledge
infrastructures to diagnose and document oppressive systems within diverse
local contexts.
Moreover, their commitments to possibilities of futures resonant with
data pluralism begin with recognizing the irreducibly varied methods, for-
mats, tempos, and histories long cultivated by a multiplicity of practitioners
across local worlds. They work to call out the false conceit of big data and
AI’s projected universalism, taking seriously not only the assertion of Yanni
Loukasis (2019) that all data are local, but reminding of us too of the situated
nature of any justice-oriented data practice. That is, seeing data from “below”
and in context and rejecting what Donna Haraway (1988) called the “god’s eye
view from nowhere” is an ethical stance that is our best bet for allowing rela-
tions of accountability to develop across the diverse local worlds of data work.
Today’s data pluralists thus build on the legacy of varied justice-oriented
traditions and past and present abolitionist actors, who, in the age of

20 • I n t roduc t ion
e­ ugenics, brought together feminist, immigrant, and anti-racist research-
ers to speak for and develop data practices in explicit refusal of dominant
models. Pushing beyond liberal and professional social science research
norms that were becoming institutionalized in the nineteenth and twenti-
eth centuries, they underscored the fuller possibilities of research experience
and agency exercised by nontraditional researchers. This applied to poor
and marginalized populations and methods that extended from alternative
research infrastructures to confront the complexities of dynamic, globalizing
change. Their data and documentation work thus distinctly drew attention
to structures of deadly oppression whose local manifestations—in urban
sweatshops, racialized ghettos, and exploitative tenement and residential
housing systems—were readily evident in turn-of-the-century US cities.
Seeding early articulations of what I call “relational infrastructures,” they
cultivated knowledge practices oriented toward other ends than the forms
of market innovation, freedom, or growth projected by classic liberalism,
contemporary neoliberals, and digital libertarians alike as universal goods.
Explicitly grounded in the aims of global justice-based reforms of historically
marginalized and vulnerable communities, the relational infrastructures of
data pluralists today bring focus as much to the stakes around an underac-
counted for past as to a fetishized future. The methods and orientations to
knowledge work they cultivate thus center conditions of local restoration
and healing, “situated” knowledge engagements, and data solidarities over
extractivisms as pathways to accountable local empiricisms (Haraway 1988).
Predatory Data thus builds on the work of critical data and technology
studies scholars who, alongside community-based organizers, have high-
lighted the violent and dispossessive impacts of a big data and AI-driven
economy to counter their continued legibility as high forces of liberal knowl-
edge production, technological development, and economic advancement.
Such work has critically explored the means by which the politics of race,
gender, class, and nationality fundamentally drive the global market pursuits
of Silicon Valley’s tech companies (Irani 2019; Lindtner 2020; Vora 2015).
Such work has exposed Big Tech’s reliance on hidden networks of global
“ghost workers” (Gray and Suri 2019), who are hired and exploited to filter
vast scales of “unsafe” content online and who intentionally maintain in Big
Tech’s “shadows” as an informalized force of contract labor (Roberts 2019;
Raval 2019; Wan 2021). Critics of “surveillance capitalism” further decry the
routine violation of seemingly sacrosanct liberal ideals around privacy, free
will, rational choice, and “the moral integrity of the autonomous i­ ndividual”

Pr e dat or y Data • 21
(Zuboff 2019) that transpires through Western Big Tech companies’ expan-
sive applications of user surveillance, prediction, and behavior modifica-
tion techniques (Ortiz Freuler 2022; Ridgway 2023). Likewise, critical data
scholars have explored the radically fragmenting, antisocial impacts of big
data platforms, underscoring how they have dissolved the modern liberal
promise of information-engaged audiences and the connective power of
public discourse (Vaidhyanathan 2018). Big Tech companies, such critical
accounts have found, instead foment the explosive rise of disinformation
dynamics and intensify political extremism and violent nationalist organiz-
ing in the United States (Donovan 2020; Donovan and Wardle 2020; Krafft
and Donovan 2020; Markwick and Lewis 2017).
In conversation with feminist, anti-racist, and decolonial critical data
scholars who explore the rise of algorithmic violence (Onuoha 2018),
data violence (Hoffman 2021), data necropolitics (Pele 2022), and data
colonialism (Couldry and Mejias 2019b), Predatory Data similarly pushes
beyond liberal frameworks to draw focus to the data economy’s routiniza-
tion of violence and erosion of everyday securities for vulnerable populations
both in and outside the West. It thus builds on intersectional scholarship
from North America that draws focus to the means by which contemporary
data economies have disproportionately amplified the insecurity and scale
of harms to historically marginalized peoples (Amoore 2013; Broussard
2018; Buolamwini and Gebru 2018; Cifor et al. 2019; Costanza-Chock 2020;
Cox 2023; Crawford 2021; D’Ignazio and Klein 2019; Eubanks 2011; Ganesh
and Moss 2022; Gurumurthy and Chami 2022; Kuo and Bui 2021; Lewis
et al. 2018; McGlotten 2016; McIlwain 2020; Morales and Reilly 2023;
Precarity Lab 2020; Shah 2023). Such analyses have placed critical spotlights
on the growing patterns of social stratification, segregation, and discrimina-
tion that have been driven by the predictive applications of Big Tech com-
panies and that have oversurveilled and overcriminalized people of color
and those living in poverty under digital systems. These systems, as justice-
oriented US critical data scholars put it, fundamentally increase inequal-
ity and punish the poor (Eubanks 2019; O’Neill 2016) with “algorithms of
oppression” (Noble 2018).
The continued reproduction of unequal and often violent relations in
spite of Big Tech companies’ expansion of “data ethics” plans has thus led
Anna Lauren Hoffman (2021) to call attention to the forms of “discursive
violence” enacted by Big Tech. Hoffman likewise underscores the means by
which liberal frameworks around inclusion can be used as a decoy, cover, or

22 • I n t roduc t ion
means to prevent deeper reforms from being enacted, as companies “work to
scatter opposition to structural inequality, reinforce unequal relationships,
and maintain data science and technology’s potential for violence” (Hoffman
2021, 2). Similarly, Ruha Benjamin (2019) has unpacked how liberal claims of
heightened “objectivity” and prodiversity “colorblind” designs allow US tech
companies to promote their technological solutions even when they reflect or
amplify existing inequities and extend logics toward a new “era of Jim Code”
in the United States and a “digital caste system” globally.
Predatory Data thus builds on recent work by feminist and critical race
data studies scholars who have explored the historical linkages between big
data’s discriminatory impacts and past techniques developed to maintain
White supremacy—from racialized surveillance and forms of policing
rooted in slavery (Browne 2015) to eugenic methods for metricizing differ-
ence through research (Chun 2021). Building on histories of science that
explore the methodological roots of contemporary statistics with the tech-
niques of correlation and linear regression developed by the British biostat-
istician and famed founder of eugenics Francis Galton (Cowan 1969; Kevles
1985; Mackenzie 1981), Wendy Chun emphasized data science’s methodologi-
cal roots in eugenics. She demonstrated how an unquestioned reliance on
statistical methods by data professionals today (O’Neill 2016) reproduces
deterministic, fundamentally undemocratic worldviews rooted in Western
eugenics (Chun 2021). Highlighting the research claims of contemporary
data scientists around machine learning and AI-driven applications—from
facial recognition to digital matchmaking—Chun demonstrated how today’s
data science applications have come to not merely automate “the mistakes of
a discriminatory past” shaped by popular forms of eugenics and “race sci-
ence,” but reproduce once debunked eugenic claims around physiologically
readable and “signaled” forms of human difference. While separated by a
century, eugenics and contemporary data science continue to amplify the
others’ projects. Both, she writes, “frame the world as a laboratory (most
explicitly through their surveillance of the most impoverished communities);
both seek majorities by propagating ‘nonnormative’ traits; and both promote
segregation as the ‘kindest’ solution to inequality (segregation as a training
program for racism)” (2021, 23).
Predatory Data builds from such critical interdisciplinary work to explore
the central role of Big Tech and AI-driven systems in the global expansion
of assaults on pluralism, democratic dissolution, and the parallel amplifi-
cation of economies of insecurity driven by logics of “reasonable” loss and

Pr e dat or y Data • 23
c­ alculations of “worthy” living. I explore here how eugenics’ shared lineages
with big data cultures today continue to reverberate not only among data
science professionals and their routine uses of datafication and prediction
methods. Eugenics’ impacts continue to be visible through an array of
­cultural and information-based practices that continue to sow appetites
for population monitoring and for the targeted surveillance of minoritized
populations in particular to enhance security for “deserving” populations.
I explore how such eugenic norms continue to get mobilized through the
globally expansive data infrastructures that scale out evaluative operations
for the differential value of life. Interweaving between multisited scenes from
our eugenic past and data present, the chapters of Predatory Data explore the
resonances across the two movements’ interlinked “revolutions.” Through
such analyses, the chapters aim to dislodge our imaginaries from a fixation
on our data present and from the percussive insistence of an evolutionary arc
when it comes to framings of the information age.
Drawing from mixed qualitative methods in science and technology stud-
ies (STS), cultural history, digital studies, critical theory, and ethnographies
of data cultures that place the present in necessary conversation with the
past, Predatory Data reminds us how far the techno-eugenic underpinnings
and impacts of our information age have traveled. Blending ethnography
with historical and archival study, and multisited in terms of both explora-
tions of the past and present, and of locales across the global Americas, this
project highlights its own adoption of pluralistic data practices. Such mixed
methods enable me to trace the diverse means by which eugenics continues
to haunt our data present and to likewise follow the varied contestations that
have emerged globally to resist it.
Spanning multiple generations of predatory datafication and prediction
work, Predatory Data reminds us of the varied means by which dominant
dispossessive logics around data practice were refused and of the diverse
­techniques and temporal interventions that were cultivated collectively to
speak for other forms of shared information futures and research infrastruc-
tures oriented toward justice-based data pluralisms. Readers will also note
that I’ve deferred from trying to compress or abbreviate the literature reviews
covered in the chapters that follow. Recognizing the interdisciplinarity of
this project, I’ve aimed instead to highlight the diverse global debates, schol-
arly traditions, and literatures that have informed this study across varied
disciplines. Making these pathways explicit does multiple things. It firstly
aims for accessibility and inclusivity, and veers away from the assumption

24 • I n t roduc t ion
that familiarity with disciplinary debates or disciplinary expertise should
be privileged. Making explicit the diverse traditions I draw from and
situate myself within —whether STS, feminist, critical race and decolo-
nial theory, critical data studies, or global studies—also voices a commit-
ment to intersectionality, allowing readers to see how an interweaving of
such work was foundational to the development of this project. Finally,
this approach to citation as an intentional and inclusive practice furthers
a feminist and decolonial project, making explicit the voices and struggle
of others who made this one possible. As the feminist practitioner Sarah
Ahmed writes, “Citation is how we acknowledge our debt to those who
came before; those who helped us find our way when the way was obscured
because we deviated from the paths we were told to follow” (2017, 17).
Recalling and documenting the diverse genealogies that ground this work
honors that record of critical practice and commitment to more just forms
of knowledge production.
Chapter 1, “Immigrant Excisions, ‘Race Suicide,’ and the Eugenic
Information Market,” thus takes readers back to the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries to explore the explosion of data collection and archival
practices set off by the eugenics movement in the United States, when eugen-
ics’ global developments first found its loudest champions. The chapter cov-
ers how varied reports, surveys, and studies were undertaken by emergent
information classes across the country to advance eugenic theories for popu-
lation-based prediction, prevent the risk of “race suicide” of well-born White
American populations, and promote the excision of racialized immigrant
groups who posed the greatest threat to well-born classes.
Chapter 2, “Streamlining’s Laboratories,” places global “smart city” scenes
in the present day in dialogue with early twentieth-century streamline
designers’ Futurama prototype that marketed eugenically “purified” lifestyles
and consumer goods as designed ideals at the 1939 Chicago World’s Fair.
Showcasing a future world of driverless traffic controlled from a distance by
engineers who removed chaos from users’ unpredictable decision-making,
streamliners’ Futurama exhibited the seductive potentials of merging indus-
try-led innovation with eugenic efforts to identify and eliminate “dysgenic”
excess, “parasitic drag,” and inefficiency in new consumer markets. Such
developments are reminders of the enduring obsession within data-driven
enterprises of monitoring performance in efforts to eradicate even minute
inefficiencies and to cultivate a mindset of self-optimization among the ideal
workers and residents of smart cities.

Pr e dat or y Data • 25
 Chapter 3 unpacks the emergence of cognitive elites as a modern
­counterpart to the “undeserving poor,” tracing the classification of “cogni-
tive elites” to eugenics researchers’ promotion of hereditary intelligence and
IQ tests as predictive measures of individuals’ future worth and economic
value in the early twentieth century. Such efforts to economize life have
been ­sustained and bolstered into the new millennium, I argue, through
intertwined ­developments. The first is the growth of discourse around the
new knowledge economy, which focused attention around the driving force
of knowledge classes and information producers and the outsized value of
their cognitive and intellectual labor, while marginalizing a parallel focus
on workers and classes beyond such domains. The second is what I describe
as the rise of contemporary strains of techno-eugenics among leading voices
in Silicon Valley, who project the risk of Western technology stagnation
as rooted in an undervaluing of the innovative capacity of the cognitive
elite. Echoing eugenicists of earlier decades, techno-eugenicists amplify
dystopian disinformation messages, insisting that the regulatory tendencies
of ­democratic states pose an existential threat to Western supremacy and
technological capitalism as its highest order.
The subsumption of global imaginaries to eugenic logics are far from
inevitable, however. Chapters 4 to 6 thus turn us toward imaginaries for
new knowledge futures by historically marginalized communities. Such
­a lternatives have persisted in making space for new freedom dreams by
­refusing the imperatives for technological revolution and profit-drive
imposed by the dominant data economy. Chapter 4 reminds audiences of
the growth of relational infrastructures as alternatives to dominant infor-
mation and research cultures over a century ago. It explores how critical
approaches emerged to challenge the forms of anti-pluralist eugenic research
and ­objectivist social science current at the turn of the twentieth century.
Tracing the data collection, and visualization techniques developed by
women, queer, and immigrant researchers organized around Chicago’s Hull
House in the late nineteenth century, the chapter excavates how researchers
developed community-based and community-driven data infrastructures in
relational methods that centered repair and equity-driven reform as assets to
knowledge practice.
Chapter 5, “The Coalitional Lives of Data Pluralism,” takes us into
the cross-national, intergenerational networks of intersectional feminist
organizers in Latin America that have, against the odds, galvanized new

26 • I n t roduc t ion
c­ oalitions to attain the legalization of abortion access in several countries.
While growing restrictions around reproductive rights in the United
States have brought renewed attention to pro-choice advocacy, Latin
American ­organizers underscored how the recent gains were part of ongo-
ing ­mobilizations that for nearly two decades had drawn together diverse
social justice actors across continents. In some contexts, these had grown to
include varied ­organizations bridging reproductive rights advocates, anti-
gender violence and LGBTQ organizations, unions and labor organizations,
Indigenous groups, student organizations, and others, working together in
an active, pluralistic coalition.
Chapter 6 brings us back into the present day and reviews the growth of
contemporary data initiatives that center situated data practice and justice-
based approaches, and that I argue collectively articulate a critical framework
for community data. Often based outside the mainstream academy, and
independent from corporate technology spaces, community data practitio-
ners push back on dominant logics of data practice that have normalized
hypersurveillance of, and data extractivism from, poor and marginalized
populations. The diversity of relationalities represented across community
data projects’ multisited, multimethod research practices is a ready indication
of the data pluralism that I underscore as inherent in all community data
projects and that has long been silenced by the dominant data economy’s
monofuturist projection.
Together, these chapters argue that we can still disrupt predatory data’s
expansion, but to do so requires bringing our present and future forecasting
into new conversations with the past. Indeed, we understand the impacts of
predatory data in our present information age only dimly without a consider-
ation of the history of eugenics and how its specter has fundamentally shaped
the master narrative of knowledge work and technology in the twenty-first
century. Alongside the work of other critical data studies scholars, this study
prompts us to draw out our research lenses to other terrains beyond the con-
ventional corporatized sites and familiar computational infrastructures that
have come to define contemporary writing and studies of the digital. To steer
away from the disintegrating impacts of predatory data toward other knowl-
edge futures is to seek other forms of pluralistic covitality. It is to cultivate
modes of relational accounting and justice-centered practices that promote
healing, restoration, and solidarity through data work, rather than merely
projecting growth and wealth creation as the lone ambitions or natural

Pr e dat or y Data • 27
trajectories of the digital. It is to foster forms of relating around data that
enable creative agency and credit to be redistributed to actors long silenced
and marginalized across space and time. And it is to enable, then, a recogni-
tion of how long alternative futures have indeed been pressed for, and so too,
how much the ever-narrowing terms of the data economy’s ­monofuture have
been contested.

28 • I n t roduc t ion
 ON E

Immigrant Excisions, “Race Suicide,”

and the Eugenic Information Market

Their gazes stared back at me through the camera. Row after

row of standardized square photographs of Chinese residents, all framed
like mug shots, filled the 160-page paper ledger—an artifact that had been
assembled by law enforcement officials in Downieville, California, across
four decades ­following its boom as a nineteenth-century US mining town.1
Each ­black-­and-white photo had been carefully annotated with the specific
identification details and metrics the examiner had taken of each resident,
including, in most cases, the name, site of residence, age, height, occupation,
and body markings that an interrogation and visual scan had captured. Some
photos included a history of movement into and out of Sierra County, and
sometimes “back to China.” The inscriptions “miner,” “cook,” and “house-
keeper” appeared alongside each photo, as unadorned indices of the kinds of
work that had been common for many Chinese residents in California’s min-
ing towns. Other details, such as “sear on left side of neck” and “second fin-
ger of right hand off at first joint,” flagged distinctive markers and reflected
the kind of routine dangers such labor entailed. Even packaged as it was,
in the veneer of what today might have innocently passed as a portable photo
album, its careful study tells enough to enable a contemporary viewer to sur-
mise this much: that this is what the contents of a nineteenth-century US
criminal databank looks like. And it channeled all the aims of heightening
scrutiny over the “probable” lawlessness of the bodies and faces it amassed.
In its finding aid, the California Historical Society, which recently
displayed the archive publicly for the first time in a 2022 exhibition on
­exclusion-era photographs, gave clues of the unusual efforts taken to organize
its contents. They specified that it was maintained for nearly half a century
(1890–1930) by the Downieville justice of the peace and former sheriff,

29
Figure 1. Pages of the 1890 archive maintained by the justice of the peace in Downieville,
California, until 1930 to monitor Chinese residents’ movements. (Courtesy, California
Historical Society, Vault 184_001)

John T. Mason, who recorded data on over 320 Chinese residents in Sierra
County. This included 176 residents for whom identification photos had been
collected in a single month in 1894. What is clear is that to have produced
this kind of visually forensic, anthropometric archive in the late nineteenth
century, and to have maintained it as an active surveillance architecture with
careful additions of movement history and geocoded information taken
and entered over years, required more than an ordinary sense of duty from
local officers.
What is also clear is that women were not excluded from criminal pro-
filing. If anything, the archive’s gendered classification indicated Chinese
women as subjects of special scrutiny. Beyond the standard data collected,
the entries produced demonstrate the importance the examiner placed on
tracking Chinese women’s local relations. Si Nun was labeled as “Jo Wah’s
woman,” Ung Gook as “China Susie,” and Maw Gook as “Female Laborer,”
but with the word female conspicuously underlined and the entire phrase
framed emphatically in hand-drawn brackets as if to encode other meaning.
Updates were added on the women’s movement history, including “Gone to

30 • c h a p t e r ON E
China to never return,” “Gone to China for good 1900,” and “Went to China
July 1907.” Reading through the entries, it is difficult not to be unsettled by
the quiet zeal channeled through the compact notations and the punctuated
disdain in the inscription “gone for good.”
It is difficult to not be frustrated by how little the archive speaks for the
subjects captured, how much it allows the final testimony to remain that
of the examiner’s contempt, and how many more questions arise than are
answered, given all the rows of carefully compiled data and the work to cre-
ate what critical data scholars today would call “data doubles” of residents.
Foremost among those questions are: Why maintain a device like this for
decades when, by the ledger’s own account, no apparent crime had actually
been committed by any of the Chinese residents in its pages? What varied
ambitions compelled such pitched investments from local officials, when,
despite the growing exclusion-era laws passed to surveil Chinese migrants
before and as they crossed US borders, local officials had no requirement
to track migrants once inside national borders? What do such dynamics
reveal about the continuity of data practices that, beyond simply heightened
scrutiny of targeted classes of individuals, created the conditions for the
emergence of a newly specialized information class? Such a class came to see
social monitoring and a newfound capacity for surveillance as new means to
authorize and deepen social hierarchies around race and gender.
This chapter focuses on the long history of predatory data as a means
to explore answers to such questions. While critical data scholarship has
valuably drawn attention to the forms of algorithmic discrimination that
have globally scaled through contemporary surveillant assemblages, grow-
ing work by feminist and critical race scholars underscores how a legacy of
segregating information practices—and the use of data resources to exploit
marginalized populations and expand dispossessive and segregationist data
infrastructures—stretches back centuries. As I explore here, this is accom-
plished through information professions’ shared roots in racial sciences and
eugenics that seeded growing movements in the United States and Western
nations at the end of the nineteenth century. New international interests and
enthusiasm for eugenics thinking worked fervently to convince publics that
certain races and populations were innately disposed to criminality, poverty,
disease, and intellectual as well as physical and moral unfitness. They inspired
an explosion of data collection and documentation and archival practices
to channel their convictions around racialized others. Various reports, sur-
veys, and studies were thus undertaken to advance eugenic techniques for

I m m ig r a n t E xc i s ions • 31
p­ opulation prediction and the so-called racial improvement of future societ-
ies through the excision or segregation of undesirable classes.
Across the United States, especially, new labs and centers of research, as
well as hundreds of classes in virtually all the nation’s most prominent insti-
tutions of higher education, were established in the early 1900s to promote
eugenics. They were preceded decades earlier by varied museum exhibits,
public lectures, best-selling publications, and popular news columns that had
been launched to popularize eugenics to general audiences and to generate
mass legibility in a turn-of-the-century disinformation boom. Far from a
fringe practice or pseudoscience, eugenics was in fact a powerful global move-
ment that from its earliest days was enthusiastically promoted by Western
elite and lettered classes. Even while eugenics targeted broad classes of social
deviance for invasive forms of surveillance and intervention, it remains
inseparable from the founding of basic information practices around data-
fication, prediction, and probability still commonly used in liberal societies
and markets today. From the uses of AI-driven bio- and psychometric and
criminal databases, to passports and border surveillance techniques, to IQ
tests and intelligence exams, to predictive methods through statistical regres-
sion now applied by contemporary data scientists, eugenic ambitions drove
varied developments to classify and manage populations still in use today.
Such developments were undertaken in the name of optimizing futures,
with eugenics’ specter still reverberating through the foundations of
­datafication and prediction functions that today lay at the heart of modern
data practice and the shaping of information classes.
The Downieville archive as a nineteenth-century channel of predatory
data reminds us that eugenic pursuits sought to do more than merely con-
trol deviants and prevent them from “contaminating” and “degenerating”
genetically superior White and Western elites. Indeed, eugenics’ data-cen-
tered practices provided a means for individuals and expanding professional
classes to see themselves as uniquely well-informed and empowered rational
­subjects—ones who were members of an emergent information class inter-
related through their shared capacity to possess and manage data. Moreover,
they could empiricize their propriety as subjects entitled to full legal privi-
leges and freedoms that authorized them to manage not only their own
futures but the futures of “inferior” others. Downieville provided us with a
snapshot of how eugenicists saw and dissected those classes they argued were
not deserving of full autonomy. It provided a glimpse too at how they chan-
neled such a vision through varied data-centered products that cultivated a

32 • c h a p t e r ON E
possessive r­ elation to data. Those included self-managed archives, best-selling
books, news publications, museum and fair exhibits, commissioned studies,
and coded maps of ethnic neighborhoods.
Looking through the rows of stolen portraits in the Downieville archive,
I am reminded of visual historians’ observation that in the nineteenth cen-
tury growing movements in the United States, as well as new international
interests in eugenics, worked fervently to normalize the use of photographic
archives to document and regulate classes deemed dangerous. This coincided
with experiments in facial imaging and archival techniques by eugenicists
via new uses of mug shots, composite photos, and recording systems to
document bodily measurements, all collected to metricize, track, and gauge
probabilities for and ultimately predict the criminal “type” (Maguire 2009;
Sekula 1986). Like the criminal identification system developed by French
criminologist Alphonse Bertillon in 1879, each of the Downieville records
contained a mug photo with a catalog of varied physical measurements
and distinctive physical features. Like the composite portrait technique
promoted by British eugenics founder Francis Galton, who blended facial
photographs to render predictive composite portraits of criminal, healthy,
and Jewish types (1883, 1884) as an early eugenic identification method, the
explicitly racialized portraits of Downieville’s criminal types were likewise
presented as side-by-side comparative images. Unlike either system, however,
Mason’s ledger also documented individual travel, employment history, and
links to social associations, with each entry annotated with numeric codes
that cross-referenced single records to others with whom the interrogator had
deemed them associated.
In the United States, expanding eugenic arguments in the late nineteenth
century swirled around the Chinese, whose racial character was projected as
defined by hereditary vices. Rhetoric that framed the “entire Chinese com-
munity [as] engaged in criminal activities” (Pegler-Gordon 2006, 57) would,
by the 1870s, lead to the first—and what US historians today recognize
as still among the most radical—immigration policies with the Chinese
Exclusion Acts. The series of acts, which began with an 1875 ban, became
the first laws implemented to prevent all members of a specific ethnic or
national group from immigrating to the United States (Chan 1991a, 1991b;
Lee 2010; Lee 2019; Peffer 1986, 1999). While concerns around labor com-
petition from working class Chinese men arose in the mid-1800s, growing
studies documenting Chinese subjects’ innate “habits and manner of life . . .
[that] breed and engender disease wherever they reside”—and that warned

I m m ig r a n t E xc i s ions • 33
of how Chinese ­immigration would lead to the “Physiological Decay of a
Nation” from the poison of “bad blood” from the inferior “Mongolian”
race (Stout 1862)—spurred middle- and upper-class Americans to call for
state and national laws to expel the Chinese danger. Tellingly, this began
with broad exclusions applied first to Chinese women rather than male
laborers through the 1875 Page Act. Advocates for exclusion argued that
without extreme measures for segregation or expulsion, “[s]ome disease of
a malignant form may break out among them and communicate itself to
our Caucasian population” (Shah 2001, 27), as San Francisco’s health officer
predicted in 1869.
The efficacy of such arguments to project and racially “dataify” the
Chinese as uniquely virulent sources of moral and physical contamination
that put healthy, civilized White natives at risk also turned the Chinese into
what historians today describe as the most closely observed, documented,
and photographed immigrant group in the United States of the day (Pegler-
Gordon 2006, 2009; Shah 2001). The 1875 Page Act’s requirement of pho-
tographic documentation for Chinese women, and its expansion in 1882 to
require that all Chinese laborers in the United States register for certificates
of residence proving their right to remain in the country, put in place the
first photographic documentation requirement of its kind. For decades,
the Chinese would remain the only immigrant group in the United States
for whom such identification was required for entry into the nation. The case
set a precedent for eugenicists’ advocacy and future success in expanding
legal requirements for photographic documentation for expanding immi-
grant classes—including Latinos in 1917, and all immigrants in 1924—to
enter the country (Lytle Hernández 2022; Pegler-Gordon 2006).
Historian Anna Pegler-Gordon noted that the “racial dimensions of pho-
tographic regulation” (2006, 58) during the era were further underscored by
the San Francisco Police Department’s creation of a discrete mug book col-
lection for Chinese arrests shortly after it began to use photographic archives
for criminals in the 1850s, and that was kept separate from its general mug
shot collection until the 1940s. In an era marked by the complex global trans-
formations brought on by rapid industrialization, migration, and national
independence and abolition movements, the pitched anxieties of native-
born Whites surrounding immigration broadly, and Chinese immigration
in particular, allowed eugenic researchers and xenophobic political leaders
to gain ground for testing new datafication and prediction instruments to
enforce segregation and to justify the dispossession and excision of particular

34 • c h a p t e r ON E
residents. This also allowed the measure and consumption of difference to
become the key metric to stabilize the propriety of White, native-born popu-
lations. In the process, White dispossessors could become legible too as a
new information class, whose membership relied upon routines of managing
information resources, the cultivation of newly possessive relations to data,
and tolerance for growing forms of political violence.
In the 1880s, as legislative action passed to completely ban the immigra-
tion of almost all classes of Chinese men and women from entry into the
United States—and as states expanded anti-miscegenation laws between
Whites and Blacks to outlaw relationships between White and Chinese
individuals, too2 (Curry 2021; Shah 2001)—at least thirty-four towns in
California and several others in Oregon, Nevada, and across the Western
states saw Chinese residents systematically attacked and violently expelled,
with “millions of dollars of Chinese property damaged or destroyed” in the
assaults (Francisco 2018, 974). News outlets such as Harpers Weekly dubbed
discrete events a “massacre of the Chinese” (1885) by Whites. The develop-
ments ensured for the next century that Chinese settlements all across the
United States remained largely defined as immigrant bachelor societies with
few children to extend families or future generations (Curry 2021; Peffer
1986). For over half a century, it ensured that the birth of Chinese American
citizens would be largely precluded.
Such stakes cross my mind as I considered the data amassed in the
Downieville ledger and the technological architecture required to assem-
ble it. For all the new legal instruments that had been put in place in the
late nineteenth century to obligate Chinese immigrants’ documentation,
local officials themselves had not yet been required to track or document the
Chinese inside national borders (Luo 2022; Pegler-Gordon 2006). Taking
on the challenge independently, as the Downieville justice of the peace did,
required substantial labor to find and gather resources to scale and centralize
a visual archive on local populations. Mason was motivated enough to mount
such an effort and to build his archive with enough information to make it
a viable tracking device for the county’s Chinese population (Luo 2022). He
called upon his son-in-law, a photographer with a studio in Grass Valley,
Nevada County, to travel to Downieville in early 1894, just months after
the national photography requirement for the Chinese became official. He
summoned hundreds of local Chinese residents across the county to comply
with the new registration and photo requirements, orchestrating mass travel
into Downieville during the ten-day window when recording took place.

I m m ig r a n t E xc i s ions • 35
He reerected a photo studio in Downieville months later to continue data
collection for his archive. Historian Erika Lee commented on the anomaly of
Mason’s efforts as a local law enforcement official who would go to such ends
to construct his surveillance instrument for immigrants. Far from upholding
any legal rationale, she observed, above all, “This is a form of racial control
and terror” (Luo 2022).
Whatever Mason’s presumed justifications to save Sierra County from
the specter of immigrant crime and contamination, his archive and profil-
ing instrument must have failed in at least one key expectation. Reading
his ledger today, the most conspicuous detail is how Mason maintained it
for forty years without apparently attributing a single criminal incident to
Chinese residents. Mason’s xenophobic experiment to prove that his led-
ger could keep Downieville’s native residents safer from immigrant crime
might not have been conclusive, but that didn’t keep it from being effective
in other ways. In scanning the ledger’s pages, it is notable how frequently
the lone inscription “Dead” appears alongside many of the photos. Also
notable, in just a few cases where Mason elaborated, were reports of more
unsettling fates—including “burned” and “froze to death on Lost Creek
Feb 1895”—that Chinese residents suffered. They tell enough, however, to
warrant another line of questioning. The question was not whether the ledger
kept Sierra County’s White, native-born residents safer. The question instead
was whether the ledger, with its collection of visual and written data compila-
tions, fostered a version of possessive relations that authorized its owners to
enact new forms of control—even violence—upon the Other they labored
so intently to document. In other words, if the ledger had functioned as a
kind of prediction machine, how might it have foretold probable harm to the
Other whose excision it had been programmed for all along?

Bodies in the Archives and the Possessive

Affect of Evaluation

Security and violence as twin operations of modern knowledge architectures,

of course, have long been recognized and critically mapped by historians of
modernity (Foucault 1977; Trouillot 1995). In describing the significance
of nineteenth century visual practice and the rise of a new modern culture of
archiving in the West, photographer and historian Allan Sekula wrote
of the dual operations of “pleasure and discipline,” and honor and repression,

36 • c h a p t e r ON E
that the possibility of visually capturing and “arresting” the body within
the archive made available for the first time to mass publics (1986).
I cannot look at the Downieville ledger without being reminded of Sekula’s
prescient observations, without seeing the interlocking symptoms of plea-
sure and discipline that extend from big data ecologies and their vast scales
of information records and endlessly expanding repositories. And I cannot
consider it without seeing at once all the pitched euphoria and anxieties
of the age of eugenics that, in the decades of the ledger’s keeping nearly
a century before the explosion of digital media we are witnessing today,
paralleled big data’s contemporary hope and hype engine. Sekula under-
scored how deeply the body of the Other and the history of metrification,
documentation, and informatic violence around human difference still
haunts contemporary archival techniques and ambitions. Writing that “we
understand the culture of biometric archives only dimly if we fail to recog-
nize the enormous prestige and popularity of a general eugenic paradigm
from the 1870s onward,” he would go on to observe that “especially in the
United States, the proliferation of archival techniques and eugenics were
quite coincident” (Sekula 1986, 12).
Tailored for a new age of heightened global migration, the Downieville
ledger reads as a testimony to predatory data practice and what an archive
for xenophobic racial profiling and engine for dispossession looked like in
the early decades of the American eugenics movement. It was the seed of
what would become, a century later, more expansive techno-eugenic archi-
tectures for generalized surveillance that later expanded beyond immigrant
classes. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the movement’s infamous
obsession with the concepts of “racial hygiene” and “race betterment” drove
its fevered pursuit of novel data collection and prediction methods in the
United States (Black 2003; Okrent 2019), with the immigrant and criminal
body—and the Chinese, who were understood to merge both—as objects
that especially energized eugenic fervor. Social monitoring experiments on
such classes would seed eugenic pursuits in the United States in its earliest
years, before their aims later expanded to arguments for increasingly radical
solutions that targeted ever-larger classes of “unfit” populations. While in
popular memory eugenics is often recalled as a bygone remnant of a fringe
racial science that only gained significant influence in Nazi Germany, eugen-
ics was in fact driven by an expansive global network of elite and professional
knowledge classes who were searching for universal laws of population bet-
terment and who powerfully influenced Western imaginaries in their day

I m m ig r a n t E xc i s ions • 37
through their instruments and experiments to prevent race degeneration
(Kevles 1985). From their vantage, the data-driven methods they developed
were the basis of new scientific techniques for the control and perfection of
populations in the face of modern uncertainties that stroked the anxieties
of White elites. Seeded in an age when rising global migrations, abolition,
and independence movements from Western colonization shaped new
hopes and anxieties among elites around freedom and equity as exercised
by new global and domestic agents alike, eugenics held the promise of
­conserving racial orders and social hierarchies by classifying, tracking, and
segregating those who were predisposed to degenerating forms of physical,
mental, and moral fitness. Notably, too, eugenics made the most prominent
gains not only in Britain and Western Europe, where it began, but in the
United States, where the growth of immigration could be leveraged as a dis-
tinctively visible target. This is also where expanding circles and resources for
eugenics’ promotion became the infamous envy of eugenicists worldwide,
including in the Nazi regime (Bashford and Levine 2010).
This chapter maps the overlooked history of predatory data by bringing
together the interdisciplinary threads of critical data studies and histories
of eugenics in the United States, where the movement found its largest base of
national support in the decades prior to the rise of Nazi Germany. It
highlights the archival politics and information-based techniques around
datafication and prediction that mobilized predatory data’s segregating
and dispossessive impacts over generations. Over a century ago, they also
enabled eugenicists to advance their radical reform arguments among lay
and lettered audiences alike. In particular, I build on the work of other
feminist, critical race, and STS scholars who have demonstrated how
eugenic techniques for racial betterment and the control of unfit masses lay
at the foundation of varied techniques in modern sciences and professional
knowledge practice still used today. These include statistical sciences (Cowan
1969; MacKenzie 1981), methods of correlation and linear regression used
in contemporary data science professions (Chun 2021), genetics and evolu-
tionary biology (Stern 2005; Subramaniam 2014), criminology (Maguire
2009), education (Brown 1992), architecture and urban planning (Cogdell
2004), and visual documentation. In conversation with such scholarship, I
explore how eugenics seeded a culture of predatory data through populariz-
ing new practices of archival and information management centered around
the monitoring and “metricization” of diverse, globalizing populations.
Access to eugenics data resources, that is, allowed native-born Whites to

38 • c h a p t e r ON E
s­ elf-recognize as part of a new kind of worthy, proper information class, while
rendering racialized others into objects of informatic possession. Through
its social experiments, eugenics constrained liberal principles of individual
­self-possession, autonomy, e­ quality, and inclusion. And much like datafica-
tion and AI-driven prediction regimes today, it turned foreclosures of liberal
promises that allegedly only occurred in exceptional cases into generalized
public rationales necessary to maintain social order.
Central to eugenics’ growth was not only the development of methods
relevant for scientific disciplines and professionals. As critical was its opera-
tionalization of predatory data through the seeding of an information mar-
ket that could empiricize a threat to social order through affective uses of
data. Via market-based approaches, it could amplify broad public appetites
for increasingly radical population management techniques. The research-
driven methods and data collection instruments eugenics deployed were
not merely relevant for growing professional networks invested in research
practice, but were imperative for allowing eugenic-age conspiracy theories
around race, class, and gender contamination to circulate and be perceived
as fact by general publics. In the United States, such work would empower
eugenicists’ policy gains with historic immigration bans, the introduction of
national immigration quotas, and the implementation of intelligence exams
to ensure adequate mental fitness of entrants (Black 2003; Okrent 2019). And
eugenicists later passed sterilization laws in thirty-two states targeting the
unfit and saw to the sterilization of tens of thousands of individuals who
were disproportionately poor, disabled, and minority women (Andrews 2017;
Hawkins 2021; Kaelber 2011; Ladd-Taylor 2017; Mizes-Tan 2021; Stern 2005;
Zhang 2017). While varied actors at the turn of the century publicly critiqued
eugenicists for promoting ever-widening violations of democratic political
norms, eugenicists advanced techniques for using predictive resources that
could both rationalize and rally popular support. Such work in eugenics’
earliest decades, however, was especially energized by targeting non-Western
immigrants’ movement across national borders—and for the Chinese, even
within national borders. Such monitoring techniques enabled eugenicists
to continue to expand categories of social threat to codify as principle
the notion that only society’s empirically worthy could be entrusted with the
privilege of self-possession and autonomous choice, particularly related to
movement, migration, and marriage.
Diversely oriented for the enrollment of everyday individuals, profes-
sional classes, and social institutions alike, eugenicists needed to popularize

I m m ig r a n t E xc i s ions • 39
not only the general idea that individual identity was based on fixed and
thus predictable traits that social mechanisms could track in order to opti-
mize. They needed to generate acceptance, too, for graduated suspensions
around liberal personhood and individual liberties—and their foundation
in principles of equality, possessive individualism, and autonomy—in the
interest of advancing social optimization and ensuring White supremacy. As
global independence movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
underscored the promise of liberal ideals around freedom and equality and
the possibility of self-government by rights-bearing individuals around the
world, eugenicists actively worked to constrain and invert such possibilities.
They did this by amplifying doubts around whether all classes should be
allowed full autonomy and questioning whether all classes had the inher-
ent capacity to self-govern, be soundly informed, or make the choices of
proper self-possessing individuals. Allegedly, when in proximity to White
lettered classes, the most mundane forms of free choice when exercised by
“inferior” classes threatened to contaminate “well-evolved” populations.
Eugenic information techniques thus entailed not only extending to profes-
sional classes the capacity to metricize and empiricize the threat of the unfit,
but extending new possibilities for publics to self-recognize as part of a mod-
ern information-engaged class, capable of managing eugenics’ ­knowledge
resources and worthy of the privilege to self-rule.
Sekula thus noted that the visual and archival methods developed in
the late nineteenth century by Galton and Bertillon for tracking anthro-
pometric measurements for criminal identification were significant for
more than merely introducing new classificatory methods relevant for law
enforcement officials. They were significant, rather, for expressing a new
general “culture of biometric archives” that, in the inclusion of standardiz-
able photographic documentation, promised to translate a messy disordered
world of real bodies into a form of measurable, fungible data that reduced
nature to “its geometrical essence” and converted “all possible sights to a
single code . . . grounded in the metrical accuracy of the camera” (Sekula
1986, 17). In creating a standard physiognomic gauge of the body—and of
the socially deviant body in particular—the culture of biometric archives
that emerged in the late nineteenth century was marked by new understand-
ings of how to see and read bodies in a world where it was newly possible
to assign each recording, criminal or otherwise, “a relative and quantitative
position within a larger ensemble” (Sekula 1986, 17). Such expanded poten-
tials for comparative, hierarchical assessment through a­ rchival systems

40 • c h a p t e r ON E
extended powerful new habits of social calculation for those classes with
the privilege of archival access. This offered them a distinct “social calculus
of pleasure and discipline” that turned on the ability to self-recognize, and
to both look up at one’s betters and look down at one’s inferiors. As bod-
ies marked with global difference were increasingly targeted for tracking,
such forms of archival assessment offered White native viewers new means
to invest the exercise of evaluation with distinct worldly dimension.
Techniques advanced by eugenicists for archiving information to track
and measure migrants and criminals—and that developed into contem-
porary standards in the use of visual databases in law enforcement and
­immigration—thus promised to index social deviancy as much as they
allowed social virtue to become measurably recognized at a global scale
(Maguire 2009). In the hands of eugenicists, such techniques quickly
expanded to include the first uses of intelligence tests, civic literacy
­evaluations, and IQ exams (addressed in a future chapter) to classify and
filter out the unfit. They were first primarily used to target immigrants at
the border, and in later decades, increasingly used with other categories of
social deviants (Black 2003; Okrent 2019).
Over a century before online social media databases and internet search
functions would massify comparative modes of seeing the self and others
within a spectrum of documented others, new potentials for late-nineteenth-
century information practice projected possibilities too for assessment
against a general, all-inclusive universal archive. Such an archive, ideo-
logically eugenic from its seeding, “sought to encompass an entire range of
human diversity” (Sekula 1986, 11) that contained “both the traces of the
visible bodies of heroes, leaders, moral exemplars, celebrities” as well as “those
of the poor, the diseased, the insane, the criminal, the nonwhite, the female,
and all other embodiments of the unworthy” (1986, 10), who endured forms
of structural inequalities. Importantly, too, the archive offered concrete
means for new kinds of information-empowered classes to metricize devi-
ance, increasingly marked as global in form. In the same turn, it measured
and empirically affirmed the respectability, worth, and value of elites. In
the context of Western nations’ nineteenth-century reshaping through new
global migration patterns and struggles for postcolonial independence, it
could assure the White viewer of their own rightful status, privilege, and
entitlement to possessive relations. And it could do all this while opening
the question of the appropriate means and scale for the control of perceived
social deviants among the native-born and foreign alike.

I m m ig r a n t E xc i s ions • 41
 “Bad Blood” and “White Suicide”
in the Information Market

Eugenics doesn’t have to appear once in the Downieville ledger to see

that its imprint is all over its pages. In the 1860s, English geographer and
­mathematician-turned-biostatistician Sir Francis Galton asserted in his
first work the founding principles of eugenics, which began a movement
among global researchers for decades. Penned in 1864—the same year the
US Civil War entered its final stages, following the Haitian Revolution,
the 1857 Indian mutiny, and independence uprisings across European colo-
nies—Galton’s “Hereditary Character and Talent” asserted an aggressively
anti-egalitarian, hereditarian vision for conserving Western-driven progress.
With it, he provided a program for maintaining Western dominance over
broad global populations and so-called unfit classes. Published after Galton’s
own two-year mapping expedition in southwest Africa had earned him
recognition among Western researchers “as an expert on geography, travel,
and m­ eteorology” (Fancher 1983, 67), the essay planted Galton’s bold vision
for controlled race improvement and social engineering pinned around the
controversial assertion that individual character, talent, and intellect were
incontrovertibly hereditary.
Countering liberal enlightenment thinking of the time around the
possibility of educating and civilizing bodies, his argument for the innate
nature of the character and intellect of different races set Galton “apart from
the mainstream of thought in Britain in the middle of the 19th Century”
(Cowan 1969, 20). Galton struggled, however, to illustrate his argument
through data. Drawing from selected portions of five biographical dictionar-
ies—four English and one French3—he attempted to convince his audience
that such a body of data was representative of “the chief men of genius whom
the world is known to have produced” (1865, 159). He thus used statistical
analysis to insist that “abundant data” supported his claim that “everywhere
is the enormous power of hereditary influence” (1865, 163). He also credited
his prior “ethnological inquiry” abroad with seeding his ideas for not only
“hereditary genius,” but his belief in the “mental peculiarities of difference
races” (Galton 1869). He asserted in his 1865 article that, in fact, broad pecu-
liarities of character, too, including “craving for drink,” “pauperism,” and
proclivities to “crimes of violence” and “fraud,” were all inheritable. Galton,
a cousin to Charles Darwin who had voraciously read On the Origin of the
Species after its release in 1859, further used his eugenic model to launch a

42 • c h a p t e r ON E
critique of national welfare policies as artificially preserving the lives of the
weak and “deteriorat[ing] the breed” (Galton 1865, 326). If social elites could
be empowered to build what he projected as a social “utopia,” where elite
knowledge classes were charged with the assessment of populations and
enforcement of a regime of controlled, selective breeding, he enthused, what
“prophets and high priests of civilization” and “what a galaxy of genius might
we not create!” (1865, 165).
Published in the distinguished London periodical Macmillan’s
Magazine—whose contributors included prominent scientists of the day,
including Thomas Henry Huxley and Charles Lyell, and poets Alfred
Tennyson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Gillham 2001)—Galton’s
1865 manifesto set him and fellow converts on a mission to mainstream
eugenics, starting with lettered classes. While it was not until the release of
Galton’s Natural Inheritance in 1889 that the academic world became ener-
gized by his cause (Cowen 1969), Galton and his protégés remained steadfast
in their work to not only amass the necessary data and methods to authorize
eugenics as a knowledge practice, but to translate their vision for the broad
reshaping of social institutions and public understandings of self-government
alike. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, Galton and his support-
ers thus saw to the founding of a biometric laboratory at University College
London that invited participants to be measured and examined to “gain
knowledge” on themselves for a small fee. They collected questionnaires from
families asked to record their physical characteristics (such as height, weight,
and lung power), and offered cash rewards for more granular family histories
(Black 2003; Cowan 1969; Kevles 1985; Orkent 2019). They likewise designed
and constructed machines to measure and test human attributes. Αnd they
published prolifically on experiments with composite photography and por-
traiture of genetic and criminal types that would advance law enforcement’s
documentation methods (Maguire 2009; Sekula 1986). Their work allowed
the collection of thousands of profiles and “large amounts of data about the
characters of parental and filial human populations” (Cowan 1969, xi), whose
analysis would lead Galton in this period to discover the statistical phenom-
ena of regression and correlation that remain foundational to data science
practice to this day (Chun 2021; Cowan 1969). Such gains allowed eugenics’
growing influence to be visibly institutionalized in England by the beginning
of the twentieth century, with the 1901 founding of the Eugenics Education
Society in London (that grew to include various respected members of the
scientific and political elite of the turn of the century, including Winston

I m m ig r a n t E xc i s ions • 43
Churchill and Charles Darwin’s son, Leonard Darwin), the endowing
of the Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics at University College
London, the addition of new research fellowships in eugenics there, and the
founding of the eugenics journal Biometrika. It was in the United States,
however, where eugenics’ policymaking ambitions gained larger ground and
where data-centered techniques—specifically, “visibilizing” the threat to
White lives and the survival of society’s worthy classes—were leveraged
to expand eugenics audiences and advance its cause.
As in Britain, in the United States eugenicists rapidly developed research
infrastructures to grow their movement. This spanned the United States’
Eugenics Record Office (ERO), the Galton Society, the Race Betterment
Foundation, and the American Eugenics Society, with its twenty-eight state
committees and even a specific Southern California branch. Eugenics’ leader-
ship and promoters included some of the most distinguished scientists and
professionals of the day. University presidents (e.g., Stanford’s first president,
David Starr Jordan), countless professors (e.g., Harvard’s Charles Davenport
and Yale’s Irving Fisher), famed inventors (e.g., Alexander Graham Bell),
medical professionals (e.g., John Kellogg), cultural leaders (e.g., H. G. Wells
and Henry Fairfield Osborn, the president of the American Museum of
Natural History), and even noted progressives (e.g., Margaret Sanger)
championed the eugenics cause. Eugenics research centers such as the ERO
gained prominence by gathering data on the genetic backgrounds of local
­households to advance research and develop aggressive, often invasive, tech-
niques to collect family details and compile dispersed datasets scattered
across the country.
However, unlike in Britain, eugenicists in the United States quickly
came to recognize and leverage growing patterns of non-White, racialized
immigration to empiricize the rising threat to White families and wor-
thy social classes. And it would be the “factual” matter of ever-widening
immigrant contaminations that they used to awaken public consciousness
to the even broader threats of social degeneration posed by “unfit” classes.
Leveraging data-driven methods thus enabled US eugenicists to gain broad-
ening support—not merely from nationalist and xenophobic politicians,
but “respectable” knowledge classes, professionals, and liberal reformers of
the Progressive Era (Cogdell 2004; Leonard 2016), as well as popular classes
and ordinary families. If in the late nineteenth century arguments of con-
taminating non-Western immigrants and the need to intensify monitoring
and suspend democratic liberties were levied most loudly against Chinese

44 • c h a p t e r ON E
immigrants, by the twentieth century US eugenicists warned of threats from
broader “degenerate” classes. These spanned southern and eastern European
immigrants, US-born minorities, and poor and disabled citizens, all deemed
too unfit to shape a modern society’s future.
Eugenics’ growing influence among American researchers was already
evident in the late decades of the nineteenth century. Published accounts
characterized the kinds of appeals made to research classes at the time.
One example was Frederick Wines’s “Report on the Defective, Dependent
and Delinquent Classes of the Population of the United States,” a special
schedule commissioned for the 1880 US census that used census and medical
data to project the growing numbers of immigrants and “defective types of
humanity” and that calculated the tax burden imposed on civilization by
such dependents (Ladd-Taylor 2017, 29). So too were texts like The Races of
Europe, an 1899 publication that was based on a lecture series at Columbia
University by the economist William Z. Ripley—later a professor of econom-
ics and political economics at MIT and Harvard—that based his argument
of different European “races” on anthropometric measurements. By the
turn of the century, US eugenicists would build on such techniques with
growing attention to forms of popular, market-friendly communication
that could extend literacy of their movement beyond established research
circles. Key to this was leveraging information resources to visibilize—and
amplify—the “reality” of the pending threat of growing immigrant classes,
whose excessive freedom threatened to contaminate the bloodline the ideal
“American race.” Such developments allowed the movement to at once pro-
mote imaginaries around “racial preservation” to broader White “American”
classes. US historian Nancy Ordover underscored the significance of this
“creative visualization” work around racial purity that the movement
advanced, writing that “[t]he eugenics project revolved around imagining the
nation: what it was (now threatened) and what it might be (with and without
government and medical intervention)” (Ordover 2003, 7).
Such visualization work incorporated the use of images as well as “vis-
ceralizing” narratives to project future degeneracy and translate visual and
numeric data for broad publics. American eugenics leaders exploited such
predictive, future-making techniques as they tailored education materials
for students at university and college campuses. Davenport thus authored
a textbook, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics (1911), shortly after founding
the ERO to promote eugenics to American higher education institutions.
Countless institutions, including Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, Brown,

I m m ig r a n t E xc i s ions • 45
Wisconsin, Northwestern, and Berkeley, offered popular courses in eugenics
(Kevles 1985). Published by Henry Holt & Company, Davenport’s textbook
warned against the effect of growing classes of new immigrants of bad blood
and invited readers to imagine how, without greater restrictions, America
would “rapidly become darker in pigmentation, smaller in stature, more
mercurial, more attached to music and art, more given to crimes of larceny,
kidnapping, assault, murder, rape and sex-immorality” (Black 2003, 41). The
Davenport textbook’s conclusion that “immigrants are desirable who are of
‘good blood’; undesirable who are of ‘bad blood’” repeated arguments around
race suicide that other American eugenicists invoked. Writing in an 1896
Atlantic Monthly article titled “Restriction of Immigration,” former Census
Bureau Director Francis Walker lamented the statistical imbalance between
America’s traditional Anglo-Saxon settlers and the new waves flowing in
from southern Europe that he warned would inflect “vast throngs of foreign-
ers . . . and persons, deaf, dumb, blind, idiotic, insane, pauper, or criminal,
who might otherwise become a hopeless burden upon the country” and
would risk national “degradation” (Walker 1896).4
Eugenicists were keenly aware of the growing channels for information dis-
tribution and promotion that late-nineteenth- and e­ arly-twentieth-century
markets in the United States made available to lettered classes. These
included not only journal and academic publications and curated museum
exhibits (Black 2003), but explicitly commercial and popular outlets, includ-
ing magazines and news articles, films (Pernick 1996), book publications,
urban expos, and rural fairs (Cogdell 2004), that targeted broad consum-
ing classes. American eugenicists thus actively cultivated relationships with
heads of leading cultural institutions, filmmakers, and journalists. By the
early twentieth century, they had developed relations with several of
the nation’s most powerful publishing houses that yielded a host of publica-
tions in international circulation. Such global visibility demonstrated their
success in negotiating market-based information channels during what his-
torians would later call “the golden age of eugenics publishing” (Regal 2004,
319). Varied eugenics books were released between the 1890s and the 1920s,
from authors such as David Starr Jordan (1902 and 1909), Luther Burbank
(1907), C. W. Saleeby (1911), William Castle (1912 and 1916), Robert Yerkes
(1915), Havelock Ellis (1916), and Margaret Sanger (1917), by respected pub-
lishing houses, from G. P. Putnam’s Sons to Henry Holt & Company, the
Macmillan Company, and Scribner’s. The 1856 book Moral and Intellectual
Diversity of Races, by France’s Arthur de Gobineau, whom contemporary

46 • c h a p t e r ON E
critics recalled “as undoubtedly the most influential academic racist of the
nineteenth century” (Gould 1981, 379), was reissued by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in
1915 with a new, inciting title: The Inequality of Human Races (Regal 2004).
Recognizing the high sales eugenics’ baiting sensationalism and alarmist
frameworks fostered, many of America’s leading publishing houses sidelined
any misgivings they had about amplifying and authorizing the disinforma-
tion and lack of scientific foundation by such texts and actively sought out
eugenics authors to promote and amplify such work (Regal 2004). The Passing
of the Great Race by Yale University–trained lawyer, conservation advocate,
and Immigration Restriction League vice president Madison Grant played
a key role in solidifying such coproductive dynamics. Grant’s 1916 text, that
twentieth-century natural historian Stephen Jay Gould later described as
“the most influential tract of American scientific racism” (1991, 145) for its
role in instituting historic immigration restrictions, also popularized White
genocide conspiracy theories through its authoritative use of coded maps and
visual data to represent European migrations. Grant’s viscerally cinematic
descriptions of “alien invasion,” “mongrelization,” and racial “extermina-
tion through immigration” (Regal 2004 , 319) to complement his published
visualizations helped center and ignite eugenic concepts of race suicide and
racial conflict in the public imaginary. His promotion of Nordic theory that
elaborated on nineteenth-century models of racial difference5 built on earlier
works, such as Ripley’s 1899 Races of Europe. However, Grant’s text animated
the theories for new audiences, unlike those of others before him. He would
use it to further his critique of changing patterns of American immigration
in the early twentieth century, which saw increased numbers of southern
and eastern European immigrants, and to elevate Nordic races as the height
of White civilization. Across the text’s pages, Grant projected apocalyptic
images to urge audiences to beware of “the invasion of America by lesser
tribes [that] had placed the blade of a knife against the Nordic throat . . .
[and] are beginning to take his women.” He decried misguided democratic
values around the brotherhood of humanity that had allowed a suicidal eth-
ics to be put in place via US immigration policies that enabled the “native
[White] American” to see to the “exterminati[on of] his own race” (Okrent
2019). While anthropologist Franz Boas lambasted Grant for “inventing a
great race” in a book that was built on “fallacies,” “faulty” use of evidence,
and “fanciful” and “dangerous” historical reconstructions (Okrent 2019,
401), its reputed publisher, Scribner’s, continued to promote it. In the first
five years after its publication, its popularity in the United States drove its

I m m ig r a n t E xc i s ions • 47
sales through eight new editions, with translations into multiple languages
and promotional materials emphasizing its credibility as a “scientific” history
of Europe “which may be traced back to the teachings of Galton” (Okrent
2019, 397).
Scribner’s editors later credited Grant’s anti-immigrant volume as
“undoubtedly one of the most successful books” they had published that
year (Okrent 2019, 403), and it solidified for the publishing house how prof-
itable packaging and amplifying eugenics disinformation could be. In the
years following The Passing of the Great Race, Scribner’s grew its reputation
“as the publishing home for many of America’s leading proponents of sci-
entific racism” (Okrent 2019, 403). It released eugenics volumes, including
Seth K. Humphrey’s Mankind: Racial Values and the Racial Prospect (1917),
Charles W. Gould’s America: A Family Matter (1920), William McDougall’s
Is America Safe for Democracy? (1921), Edward M. East’s Mankind at the
Crossroads (1923), Ellsworth Huntington’s The Character of Races (1924), and
Charles Conant Josey’s Race and National Solidarity (1922). The publish-
ing house’s investments culminated in the release of Stoddard’s The Rising
Tide of Color, whose targeting of popular audiences quickly drove it to
become a bestseller. It swept through fifteen separate printings in four years
and received visible public endorsements from the New York Times, who
called the text in an editorial “a new basis for history.” Even US President
Warren G. Harding’s 1920 campaign emphasized the slogan “America First”
(Okrent 2019). Charles Scribner, the head of Scribner’s publishing, later
cited how Grant’s book had been “a pioneer” that allowed US publishers to see
how much “the race question has now become a favorite” among American
and international audiences (Regal 2004, 332).
Contemporary historians credit Grant’s text—and the flood of eugenics
publishing that came with it—for helping to harden a vision of “White sui-
cide” into empirical fact in the year leading up to the historic 1917 and 1924
Immigration Acts. It further worked to produce a wave of support necessary
to pass them, despite three presidential vetoes over concerns for the political
precedents they would set (Black 2003; Okrent 2019). Indeed, the 1917 Act
broke ground for imposing the first national test—a literacy exam designed
by eugenicists to set minimum standards for adequate character and stan-
dards for new entrants into the United States. Decades of active political
advocacy by US eugenicists around immigration quotas to limit entry of
migrants from undesired nations finally came to fruition with the passing
of the 1924 Immigration Act. The act drastically reduced immigration via

48 • c h a p t e r ON E
a “national origins quota” (set at 2% of the total number of people of each
nationality as of the 1890 US national census). It ensured that the largest
number of slots were reserved for what promoters framed, in direct consulta-
tion with US eugenics leaders, as Nordic races (Spiro 2009). To ensure its
passing, Harry Laughlin, ERO superintendent, lined the walls of the US
congressional hearing room with large maps of European migration from
Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race “for a grand visual effect.” Laughlin
further presented the committee with a variety of tables and statistics,
drawn from his study of populations at 445 public institutions classified by
ethnicity, to establish the fact of degeneracy among specific immigrants.6
The evidence, he argued, demonstrated that such degenerate classes would
dangerously “dilute the bloodstream of America.”
Today, more than a century after its original publishing, Grant’s work
continues to gather global audiences, being commonly invoked by alt-right
figures in the United States and Europe in contemporary anti-immigration
formulations of xenophobic Nordic and White genocide conspiracy theo-
ries. US White nationalist Richard Spencer, in the introduction to the 2013
republication of Grant’s 1933 The Conquest of a Continent, reminded readers
of the long threat of a “miscegenating” US nation that would destroy the
“White America that came before it” (Serwer 2019). Emphasizing the plight
of White races, such invocations omit mention of how in the years immedi-
ately following the 1917 and 1924 immigration bills’ passing, Grant’s work
and US eugenicists’ tactics to visualize the fact of non-Nordic degeneracy
had earned the admiration of antidemocratic political parties around the
world. They leave unmentioned, too, how Grant’s first book grew to become
a global bestseller, which came to be considered essential reading by German
race theorists, including Adolf Hitler, who notably called the US text “his
Bible” (Regal 2004).

Disinformation’s Eugenic Age

While the US eugenics movement’s strategic exploitation of information

channels, and the convergence of interests they found in American pub-
lishing circles and marketing operations, are remembered for their role in
mobilizing legislators and publics toward the historic 1917 and 1924 immi-
gration acts, US eugenicists drew from a record of past decades of tactical
successes and experiments in communication to make such policies. In the

I m m ig r a n t E xc i s ions • 49
late nineteenth century, the anti-Chinese immigrations acts installed the
first national immigration policies, whose racialized restrictions energized
eugenicists across half a century. The 1917 and 1924 immigration acts were
indeed culminations of American eugenicists’ sustained efforts to expand
restrictions around so-called “unfit” classes. They invigorated the movement
to persuade publics of the need to not only protect the nation from degenera-
tion through the entry of unfit non-Western populations, but of the risk that
eastern and southern European immigrants posed to the nation’s valuable
Nordic race (Spiro 2009). With the immigration acts newly secured, eugeni-
cists could turn their attention in the next decade to new classes of the unfit,
beyond immigrants. The same year that Laughlin presented the ERO’s data
on degenerate immigrants to the US Congress, he also completed writing
for a new work, “Eugenical Sterilization in the United States,” that occupied
him for the next decade. The text, which penned a model for sterilization law
for the unfit, eventually influenced new laws that passed in thirty-two states
in the early twentieth century (Okrent 2019; Stern 2005).
Before such advances, however, US eugenicists had to repeatedly contend
with prominent political critiques, including from US presidents Grover
Cleveland, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson. Dismayed over
immigrant scapegoating and political precedents that were set by closing
“the gates of asylum which have always been open to those who could find
nowhere else” (Wilson 1915), the three presidents issued a series of vetoes
to immigration restrictions proposed between 1897 and 1915 (Black 2003;
Okrent 2019). To overcome such critiques, eugenicists drew from earlier
models of racializing difference, and empiricized harms to White natives
from the racialized bodies of the Chinese in particular, to effectively close
borders. No other immigrant group more concretely facilitated an intensi-
fication of “fear about the future of white lives” (Luibhéid 2002) at the turn
of the century than the Chinese. And more than any other group, it was
Chinese women specifically who first enabled such fears to readily be shaped
into hardened facts about the danger posed to White society, the need for
growing surveillance and monitoring, and eventually, the need for outright
exclusion of targeted classes.
Sponsored by California Republican Horace Page, the 1875 Page Act was
the first national act designed to “end the danger” of “immoral Chinese”
(Peffer 1986). Targeting Chinese women specifically, it set in place not only
the first significant US immigration restrictions, but the first laws pre-
venting members of a specific ethnic or national group from immigrating.

50 • c h a p t e r ON E
Leveraging eugenic arguments of an innate “Chinese racial character” that
claimed criminality and immorality were unique “hereditary vices” (Shah
2001), the Page Act barred women immigrants from “any Oriental coun-
try” from entry into the United States based on their presumed criminal
status as prostitutes. While not all Chinese women immigrating at the time
were prostitutes, and while the Chinese were not the only immigrant group
involved in prostitution (Luibhéid 2002), the act nonetheless justified the
broad classification and exclusion of Chinese women specifically from seek-
ing entry as “immoral labor” for over half a century. Historian Nayan Shah
noted that the “queer domesticity” (2001) Chinese immigrant households
often exhibited at the time routinely entailed multiple women and children
living in a female-dominated household or without the presence of a male
head. Such household models, that included cohabitating communities of
men and common-law marriages of Chinese men and “fallen” White women,
were a stark departure from White American notions of respectable domes-
ticity. As one author of an 1885 report by a Special Committee of the Board
of Supervisors of the Chinese in San Francisco stated, it made it impossible to
tell “where the family relationship leaves off and prostitution begins” (Shah
2001, 41). The Page Act nonetheless established a powerfully influential
model for enabling the expanding exclusions of broader categories of unde-
sired populations by demonstrating how readily discriminatory data, and
the markings of marginalized difference, could be hardened into objective
public fact about the dangers posed by racialized and sexualized others. By
branding Chinese women as prostitutes and restricting the immigration of
Chinese women, “lawmakers were able to control the formation of families
and birth of Chinese American citizens” (Curry 2021, 15). With revised anti-
miscegenation laws outlawing relationships between White and Black and
White and Chinese residents (Curry 2021; Shah 2001), the effect was to radi-
cally delimit Chinese American citizen births in ways that eugenicists hoped
could eliminate the Chinese, and eventually other inferior populations, from
the United States altogether.
Indeed, historians have noted that the decades prior to the Page Act’s pass-
ing saw the “systematic surveillance” of the Chinese grow across the West
Coast, where the “technologies of liberal security” (Shah 2001, 46) via munic-
ipal reports, health surveys, and geographic mappings intensified the targeted
inspection of Chinese bodies, and their places of residence and work. The
“extensive data” (Shah 2001, 46) such a regime generated worked to empi-
ricize the menace of the Chinese into given fact that would extend across

I m m ig r a n t E xc i s ions • 51
decades (Shah 2001, 37)—so much so, that by the beginning of the twentieth
century in cities such as San Francisco the monitoring and control of the
“Chinese race [had] become inseparable from the operation of [the city’s]
public health systems” (Shah 2001, 48). Reports by medical, public health,
and municipal officials during the period repetitively represented the “entire
Chinese community” as not just a danger for being categorically “engaged
in criminal activities” (Shah 2001). Such accounts projected the Chinese
as posing a “social, moral and political curse to the [White] community”
(Trauner 1978, 70) and festering a “laboratory of infection” and contagion
that threatened native-born Whites. Beyond San Francisco, too, Chinese
settlements were blamed for disease outbreaks—from smallpox to cholera
to the bubonic plague—that were alleged to spread due to the Chinese popula-
tion’s racial preposition to criminal behavior and virulent disease.7 Municipal
reports throughout the 1860s and 1870s, such as Chinese Immigration and the
Physiological Causes of the Decay of a Nation (1862) and Impurity of Race, as
a Cause of Decay (1871), written by prominent San Francisco physician and
member of the California Board of Health Dr. Arthur Stout, echoed eugenic
warnings of the racial degeneration and “self-destruction” that would befall
the “Caucasian race—the race created with the highest endowment and
greatest aptitude” (Stout 1862, 6)—from the infusion of bad blood from infe-
rior Eastern Asiatics. Such immigrants threatened to “poison” the “manifold
beauties” and “mental and physical energies” of the nation unless measures of
“self-preservation” were taken (Stout 1862, 9).
With the full authority of leading medical researchers and public health
officials behind them, municipal examiners repeatedly invaded Chinatowns
of the West Coast in the late nineteenth century, subjecting residents to
violent inspections that routinely resulted in expulsions, the destruction of
buildings, and the dispossession of residences as alleged “sources of disease.”
One case was Honolulu’s Chinese quarter, where forty-five hundred residents
lived in 1899; the entire Chinese quarter was burned to the ground after
two cases of bubonic plague were reported (Trauner 1978, 77). Widespread
publicity was generated from the inspection theater,8 as routine news reports
of “periodic public health investigations—both informal midnight journeys
and official fact-finding missions—fed the alarm about the danger Chinese
men and women posed to white Americans’ health” (Shah 2001, 17–18).
News illustrations of burned and destroyed buildings came with captions of
how “city officers ‘survey[ed] with satisfaction’ the demolishing of ‘the Den
of Filth’” (Trauner 1978, 77), just as city officials boasted of their success in

52 • c h a p t e r ON E
seeing to the passage of extreme measures and orders to have “every house in
Chinatown thoroughly fumigated” (Trauner 1978, 82).
Proposals to segregate and expel the Chinese settlements outside of the
city limits of San Francisco that were set forth since the 1850s were still met
with varied rebuttals throughout the late nineteenth century (Trauner 1978).
Throughout the late nineteenth century, the use of exceptional surveillance
techniques on the Chinese—especially photography—was debated9 even
as “supporters of Chinese immigration were concerned that photographic
documentation marked innocent Chinese residents as criminals” (Pegler-
Gordon 2006, 58). Varied concerned officials, moreover, on principle,
embraced the possibilities of “tutoring and reforming conduct to ensure self-
regulation . . . [and] vigorously questioned whether the Chinese residents
were amenable to reform or so recalcitrant that they must be expelled so
the rest might thrive” (Shah 2001, 48). The campaign to exclude Chinese
women as prostitutes demonstrated how such political sympathies could be
overcome. It also provided a model that proved how “dataifying” the threat
to White native lives could energize campaigns that pushed the negating
of democratic rights for improper subjects. Indeed, the Page Act created a
first-of-its-kind, cross-continental system of examination, investigation, and
documentation—only genuinely enforced on Chinese women at the time
of its passing. It required varied photographs, biographical records of family
and relations, and certificates demonstrating moral character to be generated,
verified, and resubstantiated by authorities at ports of departure and entry
(Curry 2021; Peffer 1986).
Immigration historians have noted too how the surveillance of Chinese
women in the nineteenth century instantiated the power of the case file for
immigration, a format that was integral to the functioning of modern disci-
plinary societies for opening new correlative possibilities. This included the
constitution of the individual as a describable, analyzable object, and
the constitution of a comparative system that made possible the measure-
ment and description of observed phenomena in individuals within and
between systems. Eithne Luibhéid thus noted how the combined data of
case files on Chinese women enabled a series of investigations to be brought
to bear upon them. Individual files could be cross-referenced with aggregated
archival records of other Chinese immigrants, including in other cities, to
verify and track familial relations, and a sequence of others to then track
and calculate incriminating gaps in individual testimony.10 Historians thus
noted that unlike any other immigrant group, Chinese women were required

I m m ig r a n t E xc i s ions • 53
to prove their propriety. With no evidentiary standard designated,11 how-
ever, the system ensured that nearly all Chinese women were criminalized
and denied entry (Curry 2021).12
It was the notion of the especially “virulent threat” that Chinese women
posed to White men and respectable domesticity that l­ ate-nineteenth-century
eugenic campaigns aimed to harden into objective facts through medical
and legal officials’ ominous predictions about infectious transmissions from
Chinese female prostitutes to White male clients and innocent families.
Testifying before a congressional committee investigating conditions in
Chinatown in 1877, the founder of the University of California Medical
School,13 Dr. H. H. Toland, claimed that an astounding 90 percent of the
venereal disease in San Francisco could be traced directly back to Chinese
prostitutes, who were “the source of the most terrible pollution of the blood
of the younger and rising generations” (Trauner 1978, 75). Eugenic physician
and publisher Dr. Mary Sawtelle, editor of the Medico-Literary Journal, a
medical advice journal with largely middle-class White female readers, like-
wise circulated articles representing all Chinese women as prostitutes who
conspired to “infus[e] a poison into the Anglo-Saxon blood” and imperiled
American families and the “future of the American nation” with syphilis
(Shah 2001, 107). By the late 1870s, eugenic reformers such as Sawtelle would
propose measures that historians today describe as “far more aggressive” than
even systems of mandatory inspection imposed on female prostitutes in west-
ern European colonies (Shah 2001, 110). Sawtelle argued for the creation of a
federal bureaucracy and surveillance system to leverage public health authori-
ties to “track syphilis to its lair” and to require physicians to register all vene-
real disease cases, report the condition of victims to their sexual partners, and
isolate carriers behind locked hospital doors. Chinese proximity to White
residents was used to amplify claims that domestic servants, chambermaids,
and “half of the Chinese servants employed in the families of the wealthy . . .
reek[ed] with this venereal virus” (Shah 2001, 89). In the midst of such
attacks, Chinese women were reduced “to the menacing stereotype of the
syphilitic prostitute” and classified as a uniquely vicious “source of contami-
nation and hereditary diseases” (Shah 2001, 80). By historian Nayan Shah’s
account, such framings reified the notion of Chinese bodies and sexuality as
threats, not merely to the moral sanctity and health of White citizens and
workers, but to the institution of White heterosexual marriage, the purity of
heterosexual reproduction, and White American middle-class domesticity
as a whole.

54 • c h a p t e r ON E
 By 1882, the expanded anti-Chinese immigration act prohibited the entry
of almost all classes of Chinese men, too. Included in the act were prohibi-
tions on the entry of immigrant convicts, prostitutes, lunatics, and idiots
into the United States. Such additions codified eugenic worldviews of the
need to protect superior classes from broadening degenerate populations into
national policy. The Immigration Acts of 1903 and 1907 expanded barred
categories to include anarchists, epileptics, the insane, those with infectious
diseases, and those who had physical or mental disabilities that hampered
their ability to work. By 1917, the exclusions culminated further to include a
broad list of immigrant undesirables: alcoholics, anarchists, contract labor-
ers, epileptics, feebleminded persons, idiots, illiterates, imbeciles, paupers,
persons afflicted with contagious diseases, persons being mentally or physi-
cally defective, persons with constitutional psychopathic inferiority, p­ olitical
radicals, polygamists, and vagrants—all viewed as biological and social
expenses to society. The measure also granted the government the author-
ity to deport alien radicals in the country and imposed a literacy test for
all immigrants for the first time (Okrent 2019). They laid the ground, too,
for the historic 1924 Immigration Act that drastically reduced immigration
into the United States and that initiated use of national quotas designed to
limit immigration from undesired nations, to reserve the largest number of
slots for Nordic races (Black 2003; Spiro 2009) and to ensure that the future
of the nation would be driven by eugenic worldviews.
The growing political gains of anti-immigration laws by eugenics advo-
cates in the United States are reminders of how much eugenicists had come
to play dominant roles in various channels of research and information
­culture in the late nineteenth century, even before the 1917 and 1924 immi-
gration restriction laws. For decades, the naïve defenses of democratic norms
of government had been read as a necessary target of eugenics advocates,
who decried the danger of liberal ideals that weakened national futures by
protecting the individual rights of the unfit without appropriate checks
or outright prevention from better informed parties. By 1916, texts such as
Grant’s Passing of the Great Race warned that the seeds of racial suicide were
embedded in democratic ideals; he argued that in nations like the United
States, liberal immigration policies were “introducing the seeds of fatal dis-
ease into the body politic” (Spiro 2009). Projecting the future extinction of
“native Americans of Colonial descent” from an immigration policy that
granted overly expansive rights of “asylum for the oppressed,” Grant urged,
“We Americans must realize that the altruistic ideals which have controlled

I m m ig r a n t E xc i s ions • 55
our social development during the past century and the maudlin sentimen-
talism that has made America ‘an asylum for the oppressed,’ are sweeping
the nation toward a racial abyss. If the Melting Pot is allowed to boil with-
out control and we continue to follow our national motto and deliberately
blind ourselves to ‘all distinctions of race, creed or color,’ the type of native
American of Colonial descent will become as extinct as the Athenian of
the age of Pericles, and the Viking of the days of Rollo” (Serwer 2019). Such
assertions remobilized arguments made since the mid-1800s on “the perils”
of democratic government and leveraged the threat of racialized immigration
in published accounts to do so.
Dr. Arthur Stout’s 1862 report to the California Board of Health, Chinese
Immigration and the Physiological Causes of the Decay of a Nation, warned
that racial degeneration among the Caucasian race would result from the
“morbid philanthropy in liberal government and by the belief in the general
equality of mankind” (1862, 7). This invective followed Arthur de Gobineau’s
1855 “Essay on the Inequality of Human Races,” which advocated for the
segregation of superior White races from inferior Yellow and Black races
and warned that nations’ incorporation of such lower races had led to the
fall of past civilizations. He further decried the French Revolution and
the rise of democratic governments for “reveal[ing] the failure of superior
individuals to control the weak and the mediocre” (Kale 2010, 52). Stephen
Jay Gould reminded readers that Gobineau, in his 1855 essay, also tellingly
argued for the need to establish methods to “find a measure, preferably
imbued with the prestige of mathematics, for average properties of groups,”
rather than comparing individuals, to affirm racial hierarchy among popu-
lations. “The difficult and delicate task cannot be accomplished until the
relative position of the mass of each race shall have been nicely, and, so to say,
mathematically defined,” he argued (1981, 382).
The incrementing gains of such arguments in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries underscored how much could be realized by eugenic
strategies that aimed to harden racialized data into concrete fact. Following
gains in immigration restrictions, eugenicists in the United States turned
their attention to sterilization laws. From 1907 to 1917,14 such efforts made
rapid gains state by state, so that by 1917, some fifteen states had passed new
laws to allow the sterilization of convicted criminals, the mentally disabled,
and the mentally ill in state custody.15 California’s passage of such a law even-
tually allowed twenty thousand individuals to be sterilized between 1909
and 1979—a disproportionate number of whom were working-class, Latinx,

56 • c h a p t e r ON E
Indigenous, and Black women who were incarcerated or in state institu-
tions for disabilities (Hawkins 2021; Lombardo 2010, 2011; Mizes-Tan 2021;
Zhang 2017).
It was not until World War II and the unapologetic championing of
the Nazi party by US eugenicists in the 1930s that eugenic policy gains
in the United States officially began to be reversed. During the twelve-year
period of Hitler’s regime, for instance, US leadership at the ERO still “never
wavered in . . . scientific solidarity with Nazi race hygiene . . . [or with the]
view that the racially robust were entitled to rule the earth” (Black 2003,
1047).16 Historians have noted that, indeed, even after Hitler’s rise to power
in 1933, leadership at the ERO turned publications such as Eugenical News
into channels of “pro-Nazi agitation” (Black 2003, 1105).17 Just months before
the official start of World War II in 1939, ERO’s Harry Laughlin published
a report, Immigration and Conquest, that continued to predict and decry
how America would soon suffer “conquest by settlement and reproduction”
through an infestation of defective immigrants, who, like rats, would begin
their infestation from Europe via the ability “to travel in sailing ship” (Black
2003, 1069). After years of open endorsement, recirculation, and amplifica-
tion of Nazi disinformation, the ERO was forced to finally shut down by the
Carnegie Institution and its head, Vannevar Bush, after the Nazi invasion
of Poland in late 1939, and the official beginning of World War II, allowed
news of atrocities to circulate to the shock of publics around the world. A
few short years after, when Harry Laughlin passed away in 1943, ERO direc-
tor Charles Davenport nonetheless defended him in Eugenical News as a
visionary whose views were opposed by those of “a different social philosophy
which is founded more on sentiment and less on a thorough analysis of the
facts” (Black 2003, 1071).
Even while the ERO closed its doors, eugenic laws in the United States
continued for decades, forcing tens of thousands more Americans to be ster-
ilized, institutionalized, and legally prevented from marriage on the basis
of race. During the twentieth century, eugenic visions that first targeted
Chinese women as specific racial and sexual threats to secure futures saw
to the forcible sterilization of more than seventy thousand people across
thirty-two US states—more than half of whom were poor or ethnic minor-
ity women (Stern 2020)—with programs targeting Native American women
even in the 1970s.18 One-third of the female population of Puerto Rico was
sterilized due to the passage of eugenic policies—the highest rate of steriliza-
tion in the world (Andrews 2017). The lasting impact of eugenics in America

I m m ig r a n t E xc i s ions • 57
and ERO would be noted in at least one other concrete way. Years and even
decades after the ERO’s closing, individuals who had submitted family data
to be assessed and included among the one million index cards, thirty-five
thousand files, and half-ton of family genealogical volumes that had been
amassed there for research continued to look to the ERO for revelations into
their identities by sending requests for information and updates on pedi-
grees and proof of lineage. Historian Edwin Black noted the continuity of
such correspondences demonstrates the enthusiasm for eugenics that was
sustained and documented until at least the 1980s. By Black’s account, such
inquiries “probably never stopped” (Black 2003, 1079).
I draw attention to forgotten archives of an American eugenics age that
span the indices of the ERO and the Downieville ledger to insist that they
are ready reminders of how much eugenics’ legacy has shaped our data past
and to shed light on the close proximity of their resonances for our data
present. That those proximities are not readily legible among the dominant
­narratives that shape our imaginaries of the contemporary is a telling indi-
cator of how easy it has become to forget how deeply histories of assessing
the Other have shaped data practices across the decades of our information
age. This is especially relevant in a moment when fetishizations of AI as a
newly evolved, superior form of racialized, rational intelligence (Baria and
Cross 2021; Katz 2020) explicitly channel eugenic imaginaries. However, it is
also an indicator of how much frameworks of progress and innovation have
overdetermined the dominant narratives that are reproduced around our con-
temporary information age. It underscores how little frameworks of amne-
sia, silencing, or violence—that might as well have described the symptoms
dominant in our data present and that post- and decolonial studies scholars
have pointed to as a defining aspect of Western archival practice and history
making, too—are permitted space in the conversation (Trouillot 1995).
More than one hundred years later, archives such as the Downieville led-
ger and the ERO records remind us how far back the cultural obsession for
datafication as an instrument for segregation and dispossession goes. They
also remind us of how broadly such logics could spread through eugenic
imperatives that translate such practices well beyond the discrete research
and technical professionals who have largely been the focus of contempo-
rary critical data scholarship today. Downieville reminds us, moreover, how
broadly such techniques could spread via the routines of everyday authorities.
It reminds us of how everyday local institutions—not merely centers of high
technology and knowledge production—came to serve too as core channels

58 • c h a p t e r ON E
for the extension of informatic instruments and archives for surveillance as
supposedly necessary means to enhance security for more properly deserving
classes. They remind us too how readily information ledgers could activate
and concretize social stratifications between social classes and how vulnera-
ble and marginalized populations would prove to be early inhabitants of new
data futures. Much as today, marginalized classes then would likewise serve
as the testing grounds for new mechanisms of racialized and gendered sur-
veillance. Such pursuits often argued to uniquely define our big data present.
But they have been obsessions sustained by nineteenth-century knowledge
paradigms around eugenics that read the impossibility of shared, common
welfare as defining constraints on future building.
These resonances, far from being incidental, tie together our data pres-
ent and past. Both were initially promoted from the obsessions of elite
knowledge­classes and researchers aiming to perfect “broken” presents
through methodological innovations that aimed to quantify and predict the
empirical world. Both were driven by visions of a radically contingent future
that no longer presumed the future as a temporal space, open to and inclu-
sive of all and conditioned on the simple passage of time. The future instead
required new, radical techniques for managing information and filtering
populations to preserve the survival of civilization’s fit races. In the case of big
data, these techniques allow a new temporal and technical order to be set by
­emerging classes who promise a more perfect prediction. In the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, such framings of contingent futures in the United
States helped naturalize and amplify eugenic calls for surveilling, evaluat-
ing, and later segregating and excluding or otherwise excising populations.
In the twenty-first century, similar projections of a contingent future have
likewise fueled techno-eugenic calls for a radical transformation of knowl-
edge ­institutions to prioritize research practices anchored around future
prediction and to deprioritize outdated knowledge routines and disciplines,
some of which have been projected as outdated precisely because of their
focus on understanding the past. And in the past as in the present, eugenic
paranoias around contingent futures would be used to bolster authoritar-
ian arguments to limit autonomous choice and suspend ideals around free
personhood and self-determination on which liberal societies had been
founded. Indeed, whether through generalizing automated decision-making
in contemporary AI systems or imposing decisions on classes deemed too
unfit to responsibly exercise individual rights and free choice, both called for
redesigning ­societies around new hierarchical structures where only classes

I m m ig r a n t E xc i s ions • 59
able to demonstrate readiness to manage information as property should be
granted full decision-making capacity.
How such logics continued to play out throughout the twentieth century,
generations after eugenics had been presumed to recede, is the subject of the
next two chapters.

60 • c h a p t e r ON E
 T WO

Streamlining’s Laboratories
Monitoring Culture and Eugenic Design
in the Future City

Well before smart city technologies began to be prototyped

across global twenty-first-century cityscapes and urban laboratories, a sprawl-
ing “future city” emerged in the center of New York City, a luminous jewel
of the 1939 World’s Fair. Commissioned by General Motors, the Futurama
showcased a proximate utopia featuring an orderly, predicable flow of auto-
mated highways, driverless cars, and planned suburban societies. The thirty-
five-thousand-square-foot installation brought to life the smooth, frictionless
principles of the streamline design movement that made the new, aerody-
namically remade forms of bullet trains and mass-produced vehicles iconic
representations of the modernist era. Celebrated as the “smash hit” of the
1939 World’s Fair, the Futurama incorporated all the seductive conveniences
of streamlining’s design principles of uninterrupted flow into a single, immer-
sively engineered futurescape. Drawing in an unprecedented audience of
some forty-four million visitors, the largest of any World’s Fair until then,
it unveiled a model of trafficless, remotely managed, fourteen-lane highways
that seamlessly connected the nation’s vast terrains. And as its architect, the
famed streamline designer Norman Bel Geddes, put it in his book, Magic
Motorways (1940), predictably, it “never deviat[ed] from a direct course.”
A 1939 Life Magazine article on the Futurama embellished on the order
and promise achieved with streamlining’s efficiency-oriented designs. It
highlighted the remote controls of an engineer monitoring the city from a
distance, removing all the chaos and noise from users’ unpredictable decision-
making. Across the fourteen-lane highways of future America, it marveled,
“Cars change from lane to lane at specified intervals, on signal from spaced
control towers which can stop and start all traffic by radio. Being out of its
driver’s control, each car is safe against accident. . . . [While o]ff the highway,

61
Figure 2. Spectators given a god’s eye view of the Futurama’s streamlined world. (General
Motors, New York World’s Fair/Manuscript and Archives Division, the New York Public
Library)

the driver dawdles again at his own speed and risk” (1939). This, the article
affirmed, is what streamlining’s “sober, courageous planning can do” with
“inventors and engineers” who, audiences were assured, had “cracked almost
every frontier of progress” (1939).
However, it was the eugenic ideals baked into the Futurama’s model city
that conditioned its sublime effect on visitors and the press. This was trans-
lated through a showcasing of social achievements that were projected to
have emerged from perfected high technological design. It wasn’t just how
this city of the future functioned, in other words, it was also about the society
for whom the city was designed. As the 1939 Life Magazine article opened, it
reveled in the unabashedly fit, tanned, heteronormative, family-based ableist
masculinity standardized at the center of the streamlined future projected
through the Futurama. It stated, “America in 1960 . . . is really greener than
it was in 1939 . . . full of tanned and vigorous people who in 20 years have
learned how to have fun. They camp in the forests and hike with their hand-
some wives and children . . . its members alive and very fit. . . . [And] when
they drive off, they get to the great parklands on giant highways” (1939,

62 • c h a p t e r T WO
Figure 3. The Futurama’s crossing fourteen-lane highways. From LIFE magazine, June 5,
1939. (Alfred Eisenstaedt/the LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock)

81). This was a future utopia, readers were told, where the fruits of intel-
ligent planning, science, and technology had eradicated problems of excess,
uncertainty, and wasteful heterogeneity—and where the dedicated work of
­streamlining standards, and ridding the world of disorderly, bad designs,
ensured evolutionary progress in social and technological products alike.
Generations later, streamlining is remembered for popularizing and
creating new market appetites for cleansed, decluttered forms and smooth,
elongated surfaces in industrial products, represented by the now iconic aero-
dynamic profiles of 1930s bullet trains and airplanes (Bush 1974; Cogdell
2004; Kulik 2003). Far from innocent, however, the Futurama reminds us

S t r e a m l i n i ng’s L a b or at or i e s • 63
too of how much streamlining’s aesthetics and its use to mediate the spirit of
unhindered progress relied on eugenic methods around a racially purified,
planned society and its commitment to the necessary removal of dysgenic
forces to advance a future utopia. The so-called elements of “parasite drag”
(Bel Geddes 1934) that streamlining designers, including Bel Geddes and
Raymond Loewy, both members of the 1939 World’s Fair planning commit-
tee (Kargon et al. 2015), worked obsessively to diminish, were decried for not
simply introducing unsightly, devolved elements into products and design.
For streamliners, such elements worked as explicitly regressive forces that,
even if imperceptible to untrained eyes, measurably impeded social and mate-
rial operations, truncated market flow and economic profits, and obstructed
the advancement of technological and biological machines.
Streamliners thus blended perfectly into the World’s Fair international
expositions that were architected to celebrate Western progress and tech-
nological advancements. London’s 1851 Great Exposition was the first such
event; its profitability and popularity helped spur an international movement
in exposition making. This fed into the elaboration of extravagant visual
architectures intended to celebrate the global market-based innovations of
host nations and to affirm the interests of the political, financial, corporate,
and intellectual elites behind their making. Under the pretense of creating a
space for global comparison, world’s fairs welcomed spectacles of racialized
global difference. Colonial villages and living ethnological displays of native
and other non-White peoples were infamously used to confidently channel
an equation of White supremacy with Western technological progress and
to contrast spectacles of primitive humanity with the “blueprints for future
perfection” (Rydell 1984, 19) offered by elite Western designers. Channeling
an unequivocal endorsement of Western nations’ global dominance, world’s
fairs framed imperialist expansions into Asia, Africa, and Latin America
as parts of a rightful world order that they assured audiences would remain
unchallenged. Such assurances aimed to allay what historians have noted was
a “widespread anxiety” (Rydell 1984, 19) among White consuming classes
in the West over the rapid economic changes underway in the nineteenth
century, spanning rising class struggles, colonial independence movements,
economic depressions, and new patterns of global migration.
Eugenics’ perfected future was thus contingent. Streamliners promoted the
idea that it all relied on a continuous monitoring to contain c­ ontaminating
elements and to segregate or excise unfit, dysgenic forces from well-bred
populations. The Futurama’s twenty-minute-long travel experience not only

64 • c h a p t e r T WO
simulated the ease of autonomously managed long-distance transport, but it
assured passengers that the unpolluted world they passed through had been
scrupulously crafted by dedicated, ever-attentive, and watchful professionals
who ensured the security of well-born travelers. Replicating the observational
powers granted from the elevated vantage of a suspended conveyor belt one-
third of a mile long, the Futurama floated passengers, seated side by side,
through a simulated aerial pathway as they looked over the meticulously
sculpted “world of tomorrow.” Intentionally data-rich in its planning and
design, with over 408 topographical photographs of different regions of the
nation used in its development, the one-acre-size expanse of miniaturized
urban and natural landscapes was filled with over five hundred thousand
model buildings, fifty thousand cars, and one million trees as a means to
deliver a veritable god’s eye view of the future to spectators (Morshed 2004).
As visitors stepped off the Futurama, too, they were immediately provided
a pin that read “I have seen the future” to certify the experience (Kargon
et al. 2015).
It was no secret either that the exacting order and perfection achieved in
the Futurama’s streamlined society had been fundamentally shaped through
investments in eugenic methods and design. Historians noted that in the
early twentieth century, the burgeoning field of industrial design leveraged
a visible marketplace of goods to create the explicitly consumer-facing sites
of international expos (Cogdell 2010; Rydell 2010). By the 1890s, such expos
were called “world’s universities” and showcased the future benefits of eugenic
thinking and planning to broad consumer audiences. Smart city prototypes
and their universe of perfected streamlined products thus projected the pos-
sibilities of eugenic advancement through a visible world that aimed to con-
vince publics of the real, tangible results that could materialize by r­ emoving
regressive elements—defined by their “dysgenic, parasite drag”—from society
and showcase industrialization as the apex of civilization (Bender 2009).
Streamlining in this sense might be described as a post-pluralistic
aesthetic—self-consciously drawing attention to the perfection achieved only
when overly populated, crowded, and noisy elements were identified and
removed. Design historian Christina Cogdell wrote about how streamline
design channeled the material embodiment of eugenic ideology in the early
twentieth century by approaching products the same way that eugenicists
approached human populations. Both, Cogdell wrote, “considered them-
selves to be agents of reform, tackling problems of mass (re)production,
eliminating ‘defectiveness’ and ‘parasite drag’ that were thought to be slowing

S t r e a m l i n i ng’s L a b or at or i e s • 65
evolutionary progress. Both were obsessed with increasing efficiency and
hygiene and the realization of the ‘ideal type’ through such amputations
and as the means to achieve an imminent ‘civilized’ utopia” (2010, 4).
In addition, both worked assiduously to assure publics that they could rely
on new knowledge professions, especially those related to industry and
­evolutionary biology, “two of the most powerful social and scientific systems
of the late 19th Century,” Cogdell wrote, “who offered their professional
skills as a means to gain control over rapid changes and anxieties over new
disorders infiltrating modern life” (Cogdell 2010, 82).
In this chapter, I point to the 1939 Futurama exhibit and its celebrated
success as a future model for smart cities and design in consumer society
to directly address the history of eugenics and what a growing number of
­historians point to as its enduring persistence in Western societies (Black
2003; Cogdell 2010; Rydell 2010; Stern 2005; Wolff 2009). Conventional
explanations espouse the disappearance and retreat of eugenics in the United
States following World War II, marking its decline following a peak of
political influence in the 1910s and 1920s. It was during this period when
proponents in the United States successfully led the passage of the National
Origins Act and the nation’s institutionalization of broadly applied immi-
gration quotas, as well as laws legalizing forced sterilization of the unfit in
over thirty states. However, I underscore that the broad popularity of the
Futurama marked another important transition.
Rather than marking a dissolution of eugenics influence in the United
States, the Futurama, I argue, evidenced continued public appetites for
eugenics thinking. It marked an important turn for the movement when the
capitalist marketplace, rather than the policies of modern states, came to be
the key platform for scaling eugenic ideals to broad publics. If the world of
law and policy had previously been regarded as the essential social vehicle to
target for eugenic reforms around the measurement and removal of dysgenic
classes, the 1930s marked the rise of a new strategy that centered the market-
place, with its vibrantly visible ecology of production sites and manufactured
goods, as the key stage to utilize for reforms. Broadly engaging for consumers
and producers alike, the economy could be an expedient alternative to poli-
tics for public outreach and education on eugenic ideals and how to monitor
supposedly subordinate populations to reduce polluting forces.1
This chapter thus builds on chapter 1’s exploration of eugenic research-
ers’ development of a nineteenth-century information market. While
conventional histories of eugenics in the United States have focused on the

66 • c h a p t e r T WO
­ ationally scoped policy gains of its promoters and eugenics’ contributions to
n
data-centered research methods, largely overlooked has been how eugenicists
came to identify the economy too as an opportunity for extending and popu-
larizing its radically segregationist worldview to a growing class of informa-
tion consumers. Eugenics’ discovery of the economy as a relevant stage
yielded early market-based experiments with the publishing industry and
collaborations with filmmakers, cultural sectors, and educational institu-
tions eager to distribute eugenics to an audience beyond the narrow research
networks and knowledge professionals who made up its early base. And as
this chapter explores, by the twentieth century, such a strategy expanded to
include an emerging network of industrial designers, producers, and archi-
tects who recognized the visual politics of the capitalist marketplace as a
uniquely rich space from which to extend eugenic ideals. Moreover, it could
be space that offered the consumption of visual difference as evidence for and
a predictor of the superiority of consuming classes themselves.
The Futurama’s smart city thus made explicit how flexibly eugenicists
could shift from the world of politics to a world of commerce as a new site
and stage for reforms. More than just a strategy that provided eugenics with
a new existential justification and target for salvation (one that their projec-
tion of overly permissive, degradation-accelerating democratic politics once
supplied), the growing marketplace of capitalist goods could provide a scal-
able theater to extend eugenics’ utopic prophesies in modes more visually
seductive and persuasive than any state policy could provide. Through the
marketplace, eugenics promoters could project a future of perfected goods,
material bodies, and standardized production, efficiently and profitably
reproduced and responsive to the needs and concerns of fit, well-born, and
future-worthy populations. In such a world, metrics around the social
and economic benefits of removing parasitic elements from products and the
growing popularity and sale of streamlined goods provided empirical valida-
tion to eugenicists’ obsessive (and often failed) methods. If their attempts
to “dataify” human difference had failed to produce a science of racial
degeneration and improvement, the economy could provide an alternative
evidence-bearing mechanism to empirically validate eugenic ideals. That is, it
provided ready methods that allowed the brutality of modern marketplaces’
exclusions, exploits, and violences to be selectively represented and cleanly
rationalized (or forgotten), where what mattered most was a luminous world
of consumer products and rising sales. And importantly, it provided eugenics
a place to hide in plain sight.

S t r e a m l i n i ng’s L a b or at or i e s • 67
 The politics of monitoring and streamlined design channeled through
global smart cities today remind us of eugenics’ enduring market-based
shift. This chapter reviews this transition, looking first at eugenicists’ grow-
ing recognition in the 1930s of the capitalist marketplace and production
of consumer goods as a viable and even advantageous alternative to politics
as the primary stage in which to project its salvationary reforms. Exploring
the work of leading designers and the famed “godfather” of American
industrial design, Raymond Loewy, I unpack how streamlining was used
to draw young design professionals into the burgeoning practice during the
interwar period. I close by reviewing the persistence of streamlining ideals
in smart city ecologies, exploring how streamlined approaches to salvation-
ary transformation translates into contemporary start-up enterprises in
Latin America. There, datafication infrastructures promise to perfect flawed
designs in gendered labor by compelling self-monitoring habits among young
female tech ­workers, whose productive capacities could be streamlined for
optimal profitability and correctively transformed into value-generating
accessories for smart living.

Monitoring Markets, Eugenicizing Design

Generations following the Futurama’s debut, the ideal of the smart city still
looms large as a model of perfected urban space. Like the mixed-sector col-
laborations between industry, state, design, and urban development actors
that once coordinated world’s fairs’ global visibility, parallel partnerships
over a century later now find new purpose in global smart city architec-
tures. Anchored around the product innovations of corporate giants such
as Cisco, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Siemens, and Google Alphabet, the public-
private investments behind smart cities today promote them as evolved
global spaces where the complexities, uncertainties, and potential dangers
of urban life are managed through ubiquitous forms of urban “­ sensing,”
expansive data collection, and predictive analysis. Channeling what tech-
nology studies scholars Orit Halpern and Robert Mitchell called the
“smartness mandate” (2023), smart cities’ temporal logics “colonize space
through time” (14) and turn on the future-oriented, anticipatory practices
of constant evaluation to secure economic evolution and ensure techni-
cal devolution remains foreclosed. Smartness thus organizes a form of
technical rationality, “the primary goal of which is . . . perpetual evaluation

68 • c h a p t e r T WO
through a continuous mode of self-­referential data collection; and for the
construction of forms of financial instrumentation and accounting that
no longer engage, or even need to engage, with what capital extracts from
history, geology, or life” (24).
Yet, well before data-driven ecologies automated contemporary forms of
ubiquitous digital surveillance in smart city architectures, parallel forms
of offline population monitoring were being promoted in the name of
eugenically designed societies. Streamline designers’ role in exciting public
appetites around the Futurama and prototyping future cities nearly a century
ago reminds us how the cultivation of hypervigilant monitoring techniques
was not to merely cleanse the market of dysgenic design but to work for the
emergence of a consumer capitalism optimized through eugenic principles.
While the popularity of streamlining in the early twentieth century is cred-
ited today to the appeal of its symbolic value and aestheticization of speed
and efficiency (Bush 1974), its leading designers actively promoted their
uptake of eugenic-derived techniques of continuous assessment, economized
production, and excision of parasitic drag as driving their practice (Cogdell
2010). It emerged, then, as the defining aesthetic of modernity in US indus-
trial design circles in the years following World War I. As the United States
entered into World War II, streamliners could frame their practice as a “sal-
vationary” force for a market facing a new period of crisis—one where the
untold demands of the wartime economy needed to be met with an evolved
form of market capitalism.
This required first cultivating new techniques of observation to repeatedly
examine and monitor for the expression of parasitic drag—often impercep-
tible in normal conditions—to diminish regressive forces. Futurama designer
Norman Bel Geddes thus stressed streamlining’s “empirical method,” applied
to meticulously examine and alter designs toward streamlined ideals. As he
wrote describing the painstaking process of model testing while a wind was
driven around them, “[C]ertain models register less resistance—or parasite
drag—than others . . . [which are] altered and more data secured. Slowly, from
a good many thousand such experiments . . . desirable forms [are] established”
(1934). Pronouncing the iterative process should seed a “science of streamlin-
ing,” Bel Geddes predicted that monitoring to reduce parasitic anomalies
could yield a revolution in knowledge making. As he stated, “Science has
been awaiting the great physicist, who, like Galileo or Newton, should
bring order out of chaos in aerodynamics, and reduce its many anomalies to
­harmonious law” (1934).

S t r e a m l i n i ng’s L a b or at or i e s • 69
 Historians today credit industrial design – and streamlining in particular
– with innovations that revived consumer markets following the economic
slump of 1927 and the Great Depression of 1929 (Kulik 2003). It was arguably
less through a platform of science and more through leveraging the visual
theater of a new consumer society, however, that streamliners succeeded
in promoting hyper-monitoring to rid design of what they saw as its many
anomalies and inefficiencies. Streamliners Bel Geddes and Raymond Loewy,
in particular, rose to heightened levels of public fame following the end of
World War I. Their introduction of new streamlined aesthetics helped boost
sales and profits of mass-produced artifacts during the economic slump of the
interwar period. Celebrated in the media for years after World War II, they
would be lauded as turn-of-the-century futurists (Harry Ransom Center
2013), modernist heroes (Goldberger 2013), and revolution-making visionar-
ies (Albrecht 2012). Loewy, whom Time magazine placed on its front cover
in 1949, was crowned “the most important” industrial designer in twentieth-
century America (Kulik 2003). Their insistence on approaching production
as a system that could be obsessively assessed to identify unwanted, noisy ele-
ments was credited for saving a “sluggish” postwar market and “simplifying
fabrication” processes with “sometimes spectacular” sales results (Bush 1974,
311).2 Typically, however, there was little attempt to explain or even mention
how deeply eugenics fundamentally shaped the methods and techniques of
streamlining (Cogdell 2010; Morshed 2004).
Streamliners, though, were acutely aware of the power of publicity.
Before they became known as industrial designers, Bel Geddes worked as
a Hollywood and Broadway set designer, and Loewy worked as a fashion
­illustrator for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and as a window designer for
major US department stores, including Macy’s and Saks Fifth Avenue. Both
recognized opportunities to excite market appetites by cultivating public
personas. Both drew amply from eugenics to dramatize the importance of
their work and to promote the adoption of purifying practices among fellow
designers, particularly when it came to what Loewy referred to as protecting
“prosperous” consumers (Loewy 1942) from the contaminating excesses of
the postwar market. In various magazine articles and interviews from the
1930s to 1950s, in publications such as The Atlantic, Ladies Home Journal,
Life, and Time, as well as the 1939 World’s Fair, broadcast platforms were
used to showcase streamliners’ public role as “[t]he Industrial Designer [who]
dedicated himself to educating public taste . . . [for] an increasingly high
standard of design and engineering perfection” (Loewy 1942, 95).

70 • c h a p t e r T WO
 Within their profession, too, streamliners promoted a duty to vigilantly
monitor against an overpopulated, polluted marketplace—one where the
exercise of an examiner’s eye determined the necessary application of what
Loewy called “design abortions” (1942, 98). Loewy stressed the dire absence
of such monitoring work evident during the origin years of the profession.
Addressing the British Royal Society of the Arts in 1942, describing the
period following WWI, when industrial design emerged, he stated, “[P]
eak production for war turned overnight into peak production for peace
. . . and the demand was immediate for every sort of manufactured item,
no matter what its form” (1942, 93). He was more strident about what he
saw as a world of putrid excess in the United States after decades of uncon-
trolled growth. He spoke retrospectively about his career as an honoree in
1981 before the British Society of Royal Designers for Industry, stating,
“[Following WWI], the entire American scene was in need of . . . a design
transfusion. Products were gross, clumsy, noisy, vibrating, smelly and quite
ugly” (1981, 203). Further leveraging eugenic metaphors as he referred to the
heroic work – and “industrial blood transfusion” (1981, 203) – that indus-
trial design provided to US consumer markets in the Great Depression’s
late 1920s, Loewy credited himself with “convinc[ing] Washington of the
role industry should assume” in leading national policy. Successful products
and their consumption, Loewy insisted afterall, was the central driver of
the nation’s future that grew everything from employment bases to more
demand for raw materials, shipping, insurance, and advertising.
Streamliners like Loewy thus openly dramatized their work as a
salvation for national markets and the future of civilized culture (Loewy
1942, 93). They projected the rise of industrial design as responding to the
existential threat posed by the uncontrolled growth of devolved products
that were allowed to flood markets irresponsibly. More than merely inno-
vative, Loewy saw industrial design as a corrective to the “painful mon-
strosities” (Loewy 1942, 93) that threatened to taint future generations,
and emphasized how streamlining worked to “cleanse” manufacturing and
“abort” (1942, 98) polluting designs. As he professed to his Royal Academy
audience in 1941, streamlining would at last rescue the “civilized taste of
the increasingly prosperous customer” (1942, 93) from the “unbelievable
ugliness” and “the most flagrant bad taste” in the majority of manufactured
items.” (1942, 93).
Just a few years later, Loewy’s advocacy for removing design monstrosi-
ties via streamlining earned him the October 1949 cover of Time. Featuring

S t r e a m l i n i ng’s L a b or at or i e s • 71
an image of Loewy’s face knowingly staring back at readers, framed by
his famed streamlined product designs, the cover included a caption that
cemented Loewy’s reputation as not just a streamlining evangelist, but a sav-
ior of c­ apitalist profit making. It read simply, “Designer Raymond Loewy:
He streamlines the sales curve.”

Streamlining Capitalism, Remaking

the Self for Crisis Time

Just two decades earlier, parallel arguments made by eugenic research-

ers and political leaders on the need to truncate uncontrolled population
growth among the unfit – including people living in poverty, people with
disabilities, and minority and immigrant classes – led to the passage of
the landmark US Immigration Act of 1924. Projecting a future of blood-
based, genetic contamination and racial suicide that permissive border
policies would inflict upon well-born, White elites, eugenicists successfully
legalized the heightened monitoring, surveillance, and datafication
of minoritized classes as a means to control, contain, and predict devolu-
tionary impacts. The racialized immigration quotas, monitoring instru-
ments, and restrictions eugenic researchers put in place (and that remain
the model for nationally based immigration quotas maintained to this
day) were designed to exclude unwanted classes from ­non-Anglo and
non-Scandinavian countries of origin. They also expanded the national
bans established by the Chinese exclusion acts (that began in the 1860s) and
the 1917 immigration law of earlier decades. Such eugenic policies’ impacts
were compounded by state-based sterilization laws (over thirty-two states
by 1937) (Stern 2020) targeting the unfit and heightened restrictions on
movement, marriage, and coupling of unwanted populations already within
the nation.
Projecting the social abominations and degenerated national future at
stake that had been allowed to advance from overly permissive political ideals
around equality, freedom, and autonomy, eugenicists targeted democratic
policies and norms as their initial site of reform. Well before eugenicists’
discovery of design worlds and the market economy, eugenicists focused on
the world of politics. At least until the end of the 1930s, politics were the key
public stage for expediting their reforms and for successfully advancing a
eugenic society.

72 • c h a p t e r T WO
 The official start of World War II, however, changed public receptiv-
ity and prompted the need for a new strategy. While leading US eugenics
policy and research institutes, such as the Eugenics Research Organization
(ERO) in New York, continued to promote the adoption of sterilization laws,
the 1930s saw the final state among thirty-two (Georgia) become the last to
legalize eugenic sterilization. The period just before the official start of the
war saw the ERO turn the final streams of its once ample funding toward the
publication of “pro-Nazi agitation”3 and resources (Black 2003, 1105). Many
local organizations were finally forced to close their doors, too, as financial
and political backers were no longer willing to finance eugenics (Allen 2011;
Bird and Allen 1981) after the Nazi escalations and invasion of Poland in late
1939 allowed news of atrocities in Europe to circulate broadly.
By the beginning of the 1940s, as global war spread across Europe, US
streamliners found a new public platform for eugenics’ evangelism in the
world of commerce and marketplace of designed goods. In speaking as a
US-based streamliner before the British Royal Academy audience toward
the end of 1941, Loewy projected the war’s economic and political instabili-
ties as disruptive but ultimately evolving forces for streamliners that would
rightfully press producers toward necessary “design abortions” for excessive,
deficient, or defective product plans that an earlier period had irresponsi-
bly allowed. Instead, as he put it, “The number of models in any given line
of products [could be reduced]” to a “single, perfect unit. . . . Many design
­abortions will be automatically disposed of in this action” (1942, 98).
Beyond perfecting product output, such crisis events from Loewy’s
­vantage also prompted designers’ internal evolution of mind and cultivated
skills by pressing “the designer [to become] an economist” (1942, 97) and a
flexible forecaster in planning for all the potential stages and timelines for
production. Urging them to reorient their temporal registers and cognitive
capacities toward an acutely heightened, future-tensed work of anticipation
and prediction, he stated, “Emergency has upset . . . the tempo [of] normal
activity. . . . There is no constant flow of business. . . . [T]he designer must
condense into three weeks what work would ordinarily have been distributed
over three months” (1942, 97).
Advocating readiness for a “state of unlimited emergency” (Loewy 1942,
98)—or what feminist Maria Puig de la Bellacasa called the “permanent
precariousness” that conditions “innovation time’s” restless, insatiable
­value-seeking activity (2015)—Loewy assured his audience that “ultimately,
design will benefit from the present emergency,” as designers would be

S t r e a m l i n i ng’s L a b or at or i e s • 73
pressed to streamline and “conserv[e] materials” (1942, 98). They would be
compelled to cultivate a new internal discipline and temporal disposition
necessary to “produce the most beautiful accessories to living ever available
to any ­civilization” (1942, 98). Such intensified internal tempos, by Loewy’s
projection, would enable the designer to “operat[e] with a split personality,
in a dual role. He is coordinating the various fields . . . working quickly, effi-
ciently, to produce in a state of unlimited emergency, while at the same time
he is preparing a ten-year schedule for good design when all materials are
plentiful” (1942, 98). It was not merely that designers’ temporal registers and
attentive capacities should be remade to optimize for constant productiv-
ity, but that to achieve such an ideal the designer now needed to perfect an
acutely heightened practice of monitoring directed both inward to the self
and outward to external factors.
Beyond ridding a visual marketplace of the degrading influence of bad
products, streamliners came to see their designs as complementary to the
demands of a newly competitive economy that the crisis period of world wars
and their aftermath brought. Such conditions demanded greater innovative
capacity and predictive anticipation as designers worked in a shifting market-
place, where the flow of supplies to manufacturing and the needs of consum-
ers were rife with contingencies. If a eugenic-derived design could help create
a more efficient and innovative capitalist market, streamliners’ capitalism
could also help forge a more resilient form of industrial design and predictive
designer. And it would be those evolved professionals who could later help
ensure that eugenic influences sustained a currency in modern markets well
after eugenicists’ early twentieth-century policy gains in the United States
began to wane.

Self-Monitoring in the Latin

American Smart City

Generations later, streamliners’ mission to prevent market abominations

and promote new temporal dispositions among working professions chan-
nels through global smart city design. In such experimental sites, expansive
­sensing networks now routinize surveillance and ubiquitous forms of exami-
nation to be undertaken throughout systems. What once appeared as stream-
liners’ obsessive call for ­continuous monitoring to remove parasitic elements
is now automated through distributed sensors, remotely run cameras, and

74 • c h a p t e r T WO
grids of closed-circuit televisions. Showcasing the promise of expanded urban
monitoring applied to minimize uncertainty and disorder, smart cities allow
diverse urban sites to be legible as enhanced digital infrastructures(Kurgan
and Brawley 2019), distinguished for a “logistical superiority” that stream-
lines urban life and outperforms other, allegedly regressed spaces (Halegoua
2020, 10).
“Smartness” as an extension of streamlining indeed manifests in the vast
product network of sensors and monitoring hardware operating to evolve
the performance of urban systems. However, smartness itself as a govern-
ing disposition—or what Halpern and Mitchell called a form of technical
rationality (2023)—also permeates life and work across living complexes.
Like streamlined designs, smart architectures promote the virtue and profit-
ability of perpetual evaluation, sustained through both automated technical
networks and the everyday participation of actors conditioned to accept and
even valorize an ecology of constant surveillance and datafication of human-
system interaction. Smartness as an attribute thus turns on the intersecting
operations of digital monitoring, sustained human-system engagement, and
occupants’ willingness to live and work under constant data collection
and assessment.
Part of this entails a redefinition of practices of the self through smart-
ness, where new tolerances for perpetual monitoring are cultivated to man-
age growing uncertainty and disorder across both urban space and within
the self. Personal conduct as a target of streamlining promises to better evi-
dence, know, and predict the value—or expense—generated by an individual
through enhanced forms of datafication. This final section thus explores how
such techniques of self-monitoring are cultivated through the streamlined
self as they extend within a contemporary smart enterprise in one recent
fieldwork site for me—the data-driven start-up and code academy in Lima,
Peru, called Laboratoria. Particularly within global tech and development
sectors, Laboratoria has been celebrated for accelerating education models
and rapidly retraining women in Latin American cities to be employment-
ready coders in just six months. Doing this, however, has entailed developing
monitoring systems—and cultivating self-monitoring habits—for the work-
ing class students to evidence and predict their future worth as women and
gendered minorities in tech.
Indeed, well beyond Peru, code academies such as Laboratoria rapidly grew
for disrupting conventional educational markets to respond to the reported
global crisis of a shortage of coders. Central to this was ­demonstrating

S t r e a m l i n i ng’s L a b or at or i e s • 75
the profit-making viability of ventures that could teach programming
in a f­raction of the time universities or technical institutes required.
Education remade under smartness regimes extends rationales for continu-
ous ­evaluation by promoting self-monitoring and modulation as necessary
operations to measure transformation and to navigate and endure the perva-
sive u­ ncertainty, competition, and crisis conditions of innovation ecologies
(Chun 2011). Halpern and Mitchell thus underscored how s­ martness logics
apply as much to the governing of urban space as to individual self-governing.
As they put it, “[If] smartness is predicated on an imaginary of crisis that
is to be managed through a massive increase in sensing devices, [its spread
enables] self-organization and constant self-modulating and self-updating . . .
[so ­systems] can . . . adapt by analyzing data about themselves” (2023).
Speaking to me in 2017, just three years after launching Laboratoria, its
founders described the origins of their social enterprise as an experiment
to accelerate the training of coders to fulfill high, unmet demands in the
market. They added that the unique business advantage they developed
was to not only outpace conventional education systems, but to direct the
potentials of technological empowerment to the social transformation of
women. Through this, Mariana Costa Checa, Laboratoria’s founder, stressed
an ambitious vision: to become the main global source of female tech t­ alent
from Latin America. Distinct from many parallel ventures, Laboratoria
touts its ability to empirically identify, filter, and track among thousands of
applicants—over two thousand for placement in its Lima-based classroom in
2017—talent that really can be transformed into employment-ready coders.
As Costa Checa underscored, “We realized we had to have a selection process
that was more robust, training that was much more complete, and a clearer
strategy to place them in the market” (personal interview, June 25, 2017).
In working toward this, Laboratoria credits what it refers to as the start-
up’s “rigorous data driven Selection Program” that collects over six hundred
data points from applicants to help them identify “real potential for technol-
ogy.” An extensive series of online and on-site exams, preadmission tests,
psycho-social evaluations (for measuring traits, from perseverance to persis-
tence), logic and comprehension tests (with exams on reading comprehension
with technical themes), an additional prework assignment, and, finally, a rig-
orous “simulation week” are designed to ultimately reject over 95 percent of
applicants and to select only those (just seventy admits in Lima in 2017) with
“real potential.” As Chief Operating Officer Ana Maria Martinez elaborated,
“We are superobsessed with data . . . with predicting who has potential to

76 • c h a p t e r T WO
learn programming. . . . So we are constantly measuring [the students]—not
only when they are admitted, but at graduation, and after they work” (per-
sonal interview, June 9, 2017). Laboratoria credits this approach to obsessive
tracking to creating a placement rate where some 75 percent of graduates
are placed in coding jobs that average a threefold increase in income after
completing the boot camp. They note that such measures provide evidence
that they provide real “Skills—Not Just Diplomas.”
Indeed, at the graduation ceremony in Lima for Laboratoria’s summer
2017 cohort, the motto of the company on the power of code to transform was
palpably channeled throughout. The event, hosted in a packed auditorium in
the manicured, tourist district of Miraflores, opened with the familiar, trium-
phant soundtrack from Star Wars, with text scrolling over the screen of how
“in a galaxy far, far away” the students of Laboratoria were called upon. It was
followed by a virtualized three-minute data visualization video animating a
morphing network graph. It was created using the data drawn from students’
monitored activity in the class’s shared Git Hub repository, which included an
active code-based archive of all the students’ lesson work and coded commits
over the course of the boot camp. The morphing graph’s aestheticized muta-
tions and steady, mesmerizing whirls provided a smooth veneer to a stream-
lined version of students’ experience over the previous six months. Whatever
hardships, discomfort, and struggles there were could now be reduced into a
glossed-over version of luminously represented code commits, an idealized
distillation of evolved human productivity at the ­technological interface.
As the primary means for the audience, made up largely of students’
families hailing from distant cities, to view a narrative of the past six months
of a loved ones’ life in aggregate with Laboratoria, it spoke in the language of
smartness with its reliance on data monitoring and managed data pools to
project its tracking of an optimization of life, performance, and productivity.
In the final seconds, the animation suddenly burst into an explosion of rapid
whirls that represented the intensity of two Hackathon events organized by
Laboratoria with regional corporate representatives to oversee and proto-
type work with students in a thirty-six-hour period confined to Laboratoria’s
office site. The back-to-back, all-nighter events for students were in the com-
pany of and under the constant observation of corporate reps and sponsors,
who remained visibly on site during the intensified competition to emphasize
to participants the potential for earning employment following the events.
Those events memorably came to life for students in the flurry of data streams
stretching out before them.

S t r e a m l i n i ng’s L a b or at or i e s • 77
 Alongside larger industry actors, data-driven start-ups such as Laboratoria
have worked to prototype the presumed proximate future of industry-
oriented tempos and hyperevaluative environments with the added tools
of data analytics that can work to optimize results in the artificially inten-
sified and temporally compressed space of the start-up boot camp. While
Laboratoria’s work turns on reputed capacities for managing thousands of
user profiles to weed out most applicants per cohort and mine information
pools for key signals that best identify viable talent, it has also touted itself
for being a start-up that works to know applicants differently from other tech
companies or traditional education institutions.
Since its founding in Peru nearly a decade ago, all students have hailed
from economically challenged sectors. In Lima, the first city where the
company set up offices, students are typically first-generation degree earn-
ers, hailing from peripheral districts and new urban settlement zones where
families migrating from the Andes and dispersed Indigenous communities
that adopt Spanish as a second language often begin to settle. For such learn-
ers, two-hour-long commutes to Laboratoria’s class site (in a single direction),
in paths that weave across Lima’s variated traffic and vast zones of cultural
and economic divide, are routine.
“All of it is truly horrible,” one twenty-five-year-old Laboratoria graduate
flatly stated, recalling what her daily commute of nearly four hours entailed.
Such complexities are only one among many layered risks students manage
on a daily basis in order to invest in and train for their futures. While often
taken for granted, navigating the city for marginalized working popula-
tions requires developing a savviness in managing space and time for both
speed and safety. As one part-time instructor described it: “[Otherwise]
Lima devours you, just being in traffic and the general conditions of work.”
For students living outside Lima, too, it’s not unusual for their own tem-
poral investments to begin well before formal admission into Laboratoria’s
program. One alum recalled how she bought her first bus ticket—one for
travel to Lima from Trujillo, a city some ten hours away—after deciding to
apply to Laboratoria. “I had never stepped a foot in Lima before. . . . I arrived
alone without any family here, and went straight on to take the exam,” she
explained, adding that she would repeat the same trip alone three more times
before being accepted into the program.
The work of predicting worthy and unworthy potentials for future com-
pany success, however, has made Laboratoria a darling in the world of social

78 • c h a p t e r T WO
enterprise. Since its founding, Laboratoria has won multiple international
awards, including the 2014 Kunan Prize for Social Entrepreneurship, the
2016 Google Rise Award, and multimillion-dollar backing from Google,
Telefónica, and the Inter-American Development Bank. They also gained
prominent global visibility as one of only three awardees distinguished at
the 2016 Global Entrepreneurship Summit hosted by the White House and
moderated that year by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg with then US president
Barack Obama (King 2016). And by 2022, it had won added multimillion-
dollar awards from Mackenzie Scott, Blackrock, and the Peery Foundation.
All this has further accelerated the tempo for expanding Laboratoria’s
start-up sites and graduation rate. Having begun in Lima with a first cohort
of just fourteen students in 2014 as a project among four friends—half of
them graduates from the same elite masters program in international affairs
at a US ivy league university—the company opened sites in Mexico City;
Santiago, Chile; and Arequipa, Peru, shortly after its launch, graduating some
four hundred students just three years later. That year, the enterprise proudly
announced aims to exponentially expand operations to see to an incredible
ten thousand graduates per year across the network within the next four
years, adding that it would soon open two new sites in San Paolo, Brazil,
and Guadalajara, Mexico, with added sites being scoped in Colombia and
Ecuador. That same summer of 2017, in Laboratoria’s Lima-based classroom,
a converted floor of a high-rise office building in Miraflores, I listened as
Herman Marin, one of the charismatic cofounders of Laboratoria, spoke to
a cohort of fifty students without any hint of concern of the changes already
taking place due to the new demands of rapid scaling and growth in the com-
pany. Even if he no longer knew any of the students by name, he channeled
his own early experiences in tech, sermonizing to the class the imminent con-
versions that would soon open up to them: “There are thousands of things
that are going to happen . . . from meeting supercool people . . . to being able
to travel. . . . And being able to have control . . . to define your future.”
That kind of message blends a tech-imbued salvationary conviction with a
pitched, almost missionary-like faith in what the power of opting into tech-
nological training and increased market opportunity can rapidly effect. But
the emphasis on individual “transformation” also seeps into Laboratoria’s
aim to provide more than just tech skills—and to stress the value of “personal
conduct” and “soft skills” in tech sector and office environments. Among
the classes students take throughout the program are ones not just focused

S t r e a m l i n i ng’s L a b or at or i e s • 79
on web development, user-experience design, and coding skills, but also on
developing skills in personal conduct, streamlining personal aesthetics (with
clean, uncomplicated, and pulled back hairstyles stressed), and managing
personal desk space as visual markers that make themselves available for rou-
tine evaluation in office cultures. These practices, too, are opportunities to
evidence individual value and worthiness to company authorities.
Coaching on the importance of self-conduct and preparing students for
the kind of mindset monitoring he anticipates, Marin told the class, “Today,
all jobs of the future are very focused on trying . . . not just to connect with
people who can do the technical work . . . but also focused on understanding
how to achieve the right cultural fit . . . how to find people who can really
ground themselves in the organizational structure of a company that has a
distinct mindset . . . and how to develop within new employees the kind of
perspective that [those companies have] created.”
Marin, however, also underscored the importance of individuals making
the right choices for themselves in managing space and time in the context
of data-driven monitoring and assessment techniques. Data-driven con-
duct channels new possibilities of self-monitoring—of a micro-attention
to ­constant feedback loops of information and an experience of self as now
embedded within fluid interactive, information-generating spaces. As Marin
said, “It’s a fact . . . that a person takes about twenty-six minutes to recover
when there is an interruption in work. That is a huge problem because . . . if
you’re interrupted three or four times . . . we are talking about an hour or two
hours of work lost . . . productivity that you fail to develop. And employers
lose an opportunity to continue creating value . . . and obviously, there are
ways to limit that.”
His comments orient the class to consider how one’s consciousness of
time can get parsed to the tempo of microdecisions, local data points, and
moments of potentially impactful action, so that even a minute won’t be at
risk of being used badly. As Marin advised, self-organization should start
“before starting your workday . . . or maybe even the night before, when you
have the opportunity to quickly check emails . . . or to try to coordinate in
advance with the people you want to try to connect with the next day . . .
[since] there are already people and things that are happening without you . . .
and [you don’t want them to have to] depend on your being there.”
But it was his next tip on the utility of commute time that I found most
unexpected. Channeling smart city ideals of streamlined urban transporta-
tion, he advised students, “Another important strategy is to use commute

80 • c h a p t e r T WO
time . . . and go from home to work in a more productive way . . . [and] there
are a lot of things that can be done . . . like trying to use that space [for] meet-
ings . . . [since] today a lot of jobs work remotely . . . [so] you can have meetings
on the phone. . . . For many of us, commute times are long, right? More than
an hour . . . [so] that time can be used to accomplish things at work, and not
wait until you get there . . . it’s [just] a matter of organizing.”
For all Laboratoria’s celebrated data management and for all of Marin’s
own micro-attention to time and space, down to the optimal use of each
minute, Marin seemed to have entirely lost sight of the limits of a smart city’s
infrastructural projections that, far from having attained general ubiquity,
are inoperable outside the designated confines of strictly zoned, future-ready
urban living. He missed, then, what even the most novice of first-time visitors
to Lima might notice. He missed that the informal system of micro- and
public buses that the city is infamous for, and which are the most common
forms of transportation used by the vast majority of Limenans, would be
almost inconceivable for the kind of workplace activity he prescribed. When
Laboratoria’s students reference their typical commute of two hours from
the city’s peripheral zones to Laboratoria’s offices in the manicured business
district of Miraflores, they describe two hours of standing with one hand
gripping a handrail for balance and the other gripping a bag of possessions.
Most commutes require an exchange between multiple bus routes, so there’s
never an uninterrupted stretch of time. Even if a free seat was available, a
background of rush-hour traffic, horns, motors, and the calls of combi drivers
would drown out most conversation.
As importantly, he missed crediting students for how much self-organiza-
tion and time management are already exercised in their day-to-day naviga-
tion of the city, both well before and after being accepted into Laboratoria’s
boot camp. Marin’s own commute to work consists of a fifteen-minute walk
through Miraflores’s picturesque neighborhoods to Laboratoria’s office. I
can’t help but wonder, for as much personal coaching and data collection on
students as Laboratoria dedicates to know its coders better, if the blindness to
even the basic complexities of life for Laboratoria’s students isn’t something
that is itself predesigned. Could it be that the company’s message on the
potentials of identifying viable, investment-worthy talent—enabled by access
to personal data and monitoring of choices around technology—can only be
sustained so long as dispositions are streamlined exclusively toward market
demands; so long as it can keep attentions focused on the promise of moni-
tored conduct, optimized value generation, and production, and away from

S t r e a m l i n i ng’s L a b or at or i e s • 81
the real and varied local complexities that shape the actual lives and daily
work experiences of students, that can now be treated as excess noise. And so
long as the principles of streamlining, turned onto the lives of Laboratoria’s
students as products of smart ecologies’ futurized labs, can continue to be
credited with perfecting designs and purifying human production for the
elite White, governing classes it always projected as its ideal consumer.

Conclusion

This chapter opened by exploring eugenics’ influence on the work of founding

figures in industrial and smart city design, reviewing how principles of hyper-
monitored design and production were used to identify market optimizing
and value “dragging” elements in products during the interwar period. Over
half a century later, the persistence of streamlining ideals in smart city ecolo-
gies continue to channel through messages of the salvationary, transforma-
tive potentials of technological markets and the hypermonitoring practiced
under contemporary start-up enterprises in Latin America. There, datafica-
tion infrastructures promise to perfect “flawed designs” in labor by compel-
ling self-monitoring habits among young tech workers, whose productive
capacities can be newly streamlined for optimal profitability and correctively
transformed into value-generating accessories for “smart living.”
This chapter underscored how powerfully an unsullied narrative of
“transformation through code” and data-driven evaluation can operate and
how much such mantras can be used to speak in the interest of the futures
of individual workers and knowledge institutions. As a parallel symptom
of the affective bonds between global Western liberal and financial logics,
popular “invest in a girl” (or, really “invest in a global girl”) campaigns and
their related epistemic infrastructures that feminist technology studies
scholar Michelle Murphy described are resonant here, too. Such campaigns,
their dependence on data and anticipation, and their melding of Western
liberal NGO and global corporate excitements—whether from Nike, Intel,
or Goldman Sachs—could grow and gather enthusiasm, Murphy noted,
­precisely because the numbers and data did designate “the girl” as a good
investment (2017, 121). Investing-in-a-girl campaigns, Murphy wrote,
“exemplif[y] the way finance capitalism creates value out of life, rendering life
as something that either accrues or diminishes in value . . . like other growth/
risk opportunities for capital” (131). However, she asked, “What if the math

82 • c h a p t e r T WO
had not added up, and in fact another object or life form was calculated
as the best investment? . . . The popularity of the girl raises the questions,
What work does this phantasmagram do for capitalism? What is the girl an
alibi for?” (121).
Particularly considering eugenicists’ interest in remaking markets and
economic production in the image of streamlining, the question is apt. For
at least as much as the work done to make the heroic potentials of dysgenic
monitoring and data capture around unwanted parasitic elements on markets
known has been the work done to discount and diminish other forms and
terms of knowing, to deliberately create “un-knowns” and omit awareness of
key aspects of human experience that inevitably exceed the narrow terms
of industry-optimizing valuation and market-driven demands. And in so
doing, this work allows “the (global) girl” to stand in not for the radically
excluding, dispossessive contradictions of a streamlined, data-driven capital-
ism’s contemporary regime, but to be reframed as a “recoverable” version of
what less deserving, unworthy counterparts could never be before the evalu-
ative assessments of Western techno-elite monitors. What, indeed, is “the
Global Girl” an alibi for?

S t r e a m l i n i ng’s L a b or at or i e s • 83
 THR EE

Of Merit, Metrics, and Myth

Cognitive Elites and Techno-Eugenics
in the Knowledge Economy

Veter an media justice organizer and US digital rights advo-

cate Danielle Chynoweth was candid about her deepest criticism of the
technology sectors’ growing impact on social services and the hype around
venture philanthropy (Brainerd 1999; Moody 2007; Onishi 2015) that
began in the early years of the new millennium. She recalled her work with
the Google Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates’s Foundation in the
2010s, the latter now estimated to be the second-largest charitable ­foundation
in the world with over $69 billion in assets. Such outsized investments, how-
ever, haven’t always translated into improved social services. As she said,
“[With] the big Silicon Valley funders . . . there was always another agenda
in their funding, which was technological experimentation and gathering
information . . . transmission . . . [and in the end] expanding technologies’
role and power in social spheres.”
It is a criticism that only intensified across the better part of the past
three decades, as economists, social scientists, and business leaders pro-
nounced tech industry actors as the leading edge of a new economy centered
around knowledge-intensive activities, an increasing reliance on intellectual
labor and large-scale information processing (Powell and Snellman 2004).
Chynoweth’s own work in the same period remained dedicated to devel-
oping nonprofit participatory media initiatives that put communication
technologies into the hands of underserved, local communities. Her cam-
paigns worked to democratize media ownership and argued for universal
media and technology access as a fundamental human right, rather than
a commodity supplied through market-driven consumer services. Such a
reframing would include Central Illinois’s homeless and housing-­precarious

84
Figure 4. An interactive eugenics exhibit by the American Eugenics Society that circu-
lated at US public fairs in the mid-1920s. Large text frames the display, reading “Some people
are born to be a burden on the rest.” Beside it, a light flashing every fifteen seconds is cap-
tioned with the text “Every 15 seconds $100 of your money goes for the care of persons with
bad heredity such as the insane, feeble-minded, criminals and other defectives.” (Science
Photo Library/Alamy Stock Photo)

p­ opulations, which she now serves as the head of the Cunningham

Township Supervisor’s Office in Urbana, Illinois.
And despite being well outside the mainstream in imagining technol-
ogy’s future, Chynoweth has built a remarkable record of successes in estab-
lishing new policies and infrastructures for grassroots media. Working with
Prometheus Radio Project, she coordinated the national campaign that won
passage of the Local Community Radio Act of 2010, implemented under
the Obama administration, which authorized government licensing of
local low-power broadcasting in urban spaces. Later, as organizing director
at Media Justice from 2014 to 2016, she coordinated a national network
of racial justice leaders to win policy campaigns for net neutrality, prison
phone justice, and broadband expansion for low-income families. Following
the 1999 World Trade Organization citizen protests in Seattle, she became a
leading voice in the independent media movement, spearheading the found-
ing of Urbana-Champaign’s Independent Media Center (UC-IMC) in
2000, still globally renowned for being one of the largest (at thirty thousand
square feet) and longest-running independent ­community media and arts

Of M e r i t, M e t r ic s , a n d M y t h • 85
centers. Today, a quarter century after the historic protests in Seattle, she
still serves as a leader of a very active UC-IMC, where a community radio
station, media training facility, performance venue, public access computer
center, books to prisoners project, and art gallery and studios count among
its routine operations.1
Across that time, she noted how she increasingly found herself in encoun-
ters with tech-sector philanthropists. She had to grow accustomed to the
market-based logics driven by industry appetites for the “next big thing”
that they brought with them. Despite the deep divides separating their
worlds, Chynoweth plainly stated that today, “There is a lot of technology
in philanthropy.” By 2021, the top ten philanthropic donors were made
up disproportionately of technology entrepreneurs, not only the Bill and
Melinda Gates and Google Foundations but other familiar headline mak-
ers, including Elon Musk ($5.7B in funding in 2021), Michael Bloomberg
($1.6B), Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan ($1.1B), Sergey Brin and Nicole
Shanahan ($816M), Jack Dorsey ($765M), and Jeff Bezos ($511M) (Di Mento
and Gose 2022). Chynoweth’s observations about the outsized influence such
capital-heavy investments would have on philanthropy echo what other
researchers have observed about venture philanthropists’ self-described push
to evolve social services for the twenty-first century through metric-driven,
data-focused assessments that promised a return on investment in a way tra-
ditional philanthropy had never done (Moody 2007).
Despite such conceits, Chynoweth’s greatest frustration remains the
persistence of a classificatory logic that she recognized as dominant in such
organizations’ approach to giving and charity: that of the undeserving
poor. She cited the long history of classifying the undeserving poor, what
historian Michael Katz noted has existed as a defining feature of Western
political and social discourse that rose to national prominence in the United
States during eugenics’ public surge in the early twentieth century (2013).
She underscored the particular perniciousness of its use and vitalization
in the contemporary knowledge economy, where intensifying techniques
of ­metrification, assessment, and impact evaluation around even poverty
management are used to increasingly filter deserving beneficiaries out from
the rest. And she echoed its parallel with what Caribbean science studies
scholar Sylvia Wynter called the category of “human otherness” peopled by
the “jobless, the homeless, the poor, the systemically made jobless and crimi-
nalized—of the underdeveloped—all as the category of the e­ conomically
damnés” (2003, 321).

86 • chapter THR EE
 For Chynoweth, the currency of the “undeserving poor” as a category
is what has allowed a “bureaucratization of violence” to emerge against
people living in poverty today. Sorting lives into categories of deserving and
undeserving poor, it works by applying data protocols and eligibility assess-
ments that project life chances and rationalize economic investments and
resource provisions (or denials) for populations that funders rarely see. She
did not mince words in describing the visceral brutality of impacts she has
witnessed: “A maze of highly rationalized, highly technical processes stands
between citizens and residents and the resources they need to avoid tragedy.
And whether l­iterally or metaphorically, people can’t get access to housing,
their fingers freeze, and they get gangrene and then their fingers are cut off.”
She adds, “This wasn’t the result of some dramatic autocratic gesture. We
didn’t need to take ­homeless people and chop off their fingers in the public
square, but their fingers are gone all the same. This is just the banal, everyday
outcome of the bureaucratization of violence.”
After more than three years working with Chynoweth in research part-
nerships oriented toward designing technology programs to support the
needs of low-income and underserved populations, I am used to her direct
and incisive observations (see more in chapter 6 on these collaborations). Her
read on the violence of “dataifying” the undeserving poor directly implicates
contemporary knowledge economies and the use of the “undeserving” clas-
sification to provide a technical, rationalizing veneer to the deadly, necropo-
litical stakes at its heart (Mbembe 2003). The designation “undeserving,”
that is, evidences how powerfully new techno-eugenic logics around met-
ricizing worthy and unworthy life and rationalizing the differential values
of human worth now operate to calculate the danger – and cost – unfit
populations pose through an inability to integrate into dominant technical
regimes. As Chynoweth has written with Elizabeth Adams, “This catego-
rization of the ‘undeserving poor,’ is driven by logics of superiority such as
racism, sexism and ableism that justify care for some and deprivation for oth-
ers within an avowedly democratic system that would otherwise find such
inequities abhorrent. This sorting is supersized by technology . . . [that for
some populations have] life or death consequences” (forthcoming). Feminist
historian Michelle Murphy likewise described parallel logics as sustained
by twentieth-century social sciences’ “economization of life” (2017), a mode
of valuation rooted in eugenic concerns around population that relied on
“the project of racializing life—that is, dividing life into categories of more
and less worthy of ­living, reproducing, and being human” (2017, 5). Through

Of M e r i t, M e t r ic s , a n d M y t h • 87
such classifications, life could be newly understood as a utility for enhancing
national economies. As such, value in human lives could be reformulated
as “lives worth living, lives worth not dying, lives worthy of investment,
and lives not worth being born” across varied policies and economic indices
that advance “new kinds of racialization even as they reject biological race
as such” (7).
Historians of science thus explored how the economy-focused object of
population served eugenic researchers such as Raymond Pearl, a devoted stu-
dent of the famed English eugenicist Karl Pearson. Through the economy,
Pearl found a cunning means to recode biological models of racial hierar-
chy without making any direct reference to race (Murphy 2017; Ramsden
2002). In the decades following WWII, population’s quantifiable object
gave researchers a means to calculate the differential value of racialized lives
in terms of economic contributions without making racial stratifications
explicit. Through such fungibilities, it allowed eugenics—and academic dis-
ciplines such as demography that had elevated Pearl—to powerfully assume
the cover of political neutrality (Ramsden 2002). That disciplinary cover
lasted throughout the twentieth century and remained, historians note, even
after Pearl amended his initial framings of population by specifically rein-
tegrating a language of racial hierarchies. Writing a decade later in 1937, he
noted that the quantifiably driven biological law of exponential population
growth that he had become renown for advancing now appeared to him to
apply more to human populations that were less evolved socially and biologi-
cally. This included the fertility of groups of foreign and colored populations
in the United States coming closest to “the animal pattern” he had famously
described a decade earlier with his studies of drosophila fly reproduction
([Pearl 1937, 88] Ramsden 2002, 887).
Population as a quantifiable object, however, was not the only utility that
allowed eugenics to find cover and make claims to providing a seemingly race-
agnostic, objective regime for the economization of life. This chapter explores
how intelligence and mental fitness came to be repurposed too as lasting
metrics-based classificatory indices. By providing a numbers-based measure
for rationally segregating individuals according to their chances for best
utilizing or squandering investments, intelligence provided an “objective”
indicator of how well or poorly an individual with given resources of mind
and intellect could perform as a productive, profit- or dependency-generating
economic asset. By eschewing the language of race, it provided a palatable
means to advance eugenic logics across generations. It could thus serve as

88 • chapter THR EE
a direct planning resource for advancing more competitive modern econo-
mies and to “objectively” predict the value of life in relation to future market
productivity. As an attribute that eugenicists insisted was hereditary and
biologically driven, intelligence further correlated—by eugenic ­framings—to
an individual’s moral capacity and propensity for crime, addiction, or lazi-
ness. It thus provided a means for allegedly predicting individuals’ offspring
too as future economic values or liabilities. With such heightened stakes, it
could then be deployed by researchers to argue for new monitoring practices
over suspect classes—namely, immigrants and people living in poverty—in
the early twentieth century. Data collected could then be used to evidence
mental unfitness, and later, to call for massive exclusions or segregations
based on projected economic impacts.
Decades later, as a newly hailed knowledge economy came into view in
the late twentieth century, resonant queries prominently shaped national
public discourse once again. If cognitive elites (Herrnstein and Murray 1994)
continued to outperform others in a technologically driven marketplace, why
should public investments adhere to democratic rather than meritocratic
logics based not on a vision of equality but on distributed rewards accord-
ing to differential merits? What would responsible public policy look like,
if wasted investments in some forms of life could not only be empirically
mapped and tied to intelligence data, but could be argued to amplify eco-
nomic ­inefficiencies that detracted from deserving, intellectually competent,
and competitive classes?
This chapter draws a through line from the eugenics thinking of the
early twentieth century to the meritocratic logic of the late twentieth ­century
that directly fed into contemporary techno-eugenics. It demonstrates how
metrics and merit worked together to provide techno-eugenics with an
objective cover and means to dodge accusations of racism across the twen-
tieth century. This occurred even as their program for justifying racialized
stratifications remained fundamental to its project. Central to this was the
work of datafication around the undeserving poor and the cognitive elite
that enabled both categories to endure across the twentieth century. The
persistent demands around their measurement and monitoring that first
rose to prominence with eugenics research circles and their obsession with
­objectifying a universal measure for human intelligence thus continued to
shape national debates. These debates raged with the rise of the knowledge
economy from the late twentieth century and into the new millennium as mod-
els of ­predicting hereditary intelligence reemerged through techno-eugenics.

Of M e r i t, M e t r ic s , a n d M y t h • 89
 I close this chapter by tracing a transition from vilifications of the
undeserving poor to contemporary defenses of their counterpart—
­
the d­ eserving cognitive elite. In an era of growing applications of artificial
intelligence (AI), where AI-driven models heighten new anxieties around
competitive superiority, predictions by tech-sector leaders of widescale soci-
etal regress have increasingly begun to circulate. Such accusations of techno-
logical stagnation project blame on a political unwillingness to fully embrace
AI’s future or empower a cognitive elite by instead sustaining support for
underproductive and undeserving populations and sectors. Such condemna-
tions are rooted in eugenics’ generations-old arguments around the enduring
threat that democratic institutions allegedly pose to a true social evolution
driven by cognitive elites. But if democratic norms around public welfare and
inclusion erected obstacles to techno-eugenic promotions of natural hierar-
chy and “evolution through innovation”, at least the data-driven knowledge
economy might enable a site where the unfettered freedoms of deserving
individuals, and the merits (rather than privileges) of the cognitive elite
might at last be realized.

Metricizing the Undeserving Poor

US poverty historian Michael Katz reminded us that while the classification

of the undeserving poor has existed across centuries, it was only in recent
modern history that it came to be widely read as something resulting from
individual failure and personal inadequacy. For large parts of history, poverty
was seen as a largely inescapable and inevitable phenomenon brought about
from a general condition of scarcity. While a “soft” version of poverty as
­individual failure might have attributed poverty to laziness, immoral behav-
ior, inadequate skills, or dysfunctional families (that might still be reformed),
not until the late nineteenth century with the arrival and rise of eugenics
did a “harder” version of a biologically determined undeserving poor emerge
(and become datafied) as a central object of research. Eugenic research-
ers labored across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to
­demonstrate poverty not as the result of inevitable scarcity or the result
of structural exploitations, as labor reformers argued, but as the result of
inherited deficiencies that concretely limited intellectual potential, encoded
harmful and immoral personal proclivities, and concretely circumscribed
economic achievement. Coupled with what Katz called Progressive Era

90 • chapter THR EE
economists’ “discovery of [economic] abundance” in the early twentieth cen-
tury, he wrote that a new “world of possibility where poverty no longer was
inescapable” (Katz 2013, 3) emerged. It was one, however, that “carved a hard
edge of inferiority into ideas about poor people” (Katz 2013, 3) who failed
to apply the same resources (whether personal, material, and information-
based) others had as vehicles for wealth creation. Or so the myth went.
From the start of their earliest research endeavors in the late nineteenth
century, eugenicists sought to “dataify” the empirical degeneracy of the
mentally, physically, and morally unfit and the hereditary nature of dysgenic
traits, whether criminality and licentiousness, or laziness, alcoholism, and
pauperism. They also aimed to concretely objectify the empirical superior-
ity of the well-born and the hereditary nature of their gifts, singling out
“character and intellect,” in particular, from their earliest endeavors. Francis
Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin and the English biostatistician credited
with founding eugenics, published “Hereditary Character and Talent” in
the distinguished London periodical Macmillan’s Magazine (whose con-
tributors included prominent literary and scientific figures of the day) as his
earliest manifestation of eugenic methods in 1865. As covered in chapter 1,
Galton targeted Macmillan’s explicitly elite, educated, urban audience to
launch his argument, appealing to his readership by offering them evidence
of genius as a hereditary trait passed down through the well-born. Drawing
from selected portions of five biographical dictionaries, four English and
one French, which he argued represented “the chief men of genius whom the
world is known to have produced” (1865, 159), he built a statistical analysis
aiming to demonstrate familial, biological relations among the men repre-
sented. He insisted that “abundant data” supported his hereditarian claims.
Asserting an aggressively anti-egalitarian vision for conserving Western-led
progress, he wrote the essay in the same period as the US Civil War was
entering its final stages, and when the Haitian Revolution, the 1857 Indian
mutiny, and varied independence uprisings by colonized peoples of color
across the European empire had raised the promise of new liberty for for-
merly enslaved and subjugated peoples across the West. While framing the
article around genius and talent as characteristics of well-born elites, he did
not miss the opportunity to make his larger point: that broad peculiarities
of character that created expenses on the state and well-born, including
“craving for drink,” “pauperism,” and proclivities to “crimes of violence” and
“fraud” (1865), were all inheritable. Beyond a critique of global liberation
and ­independence movements—which he projected implied a threat for

Of M e r i t, M e t r ic s , a n d M y t h • 91
the future of genius and intelligence—Galton aimed his invective toward a
critique of national welfare in the West. Such policies, he argued, artificially
preserved the lives of the weak and “deteriorated the breed” (1865, 326). Were
social elites empowered to enforce an economy of controlled, selective breed-
ing in Western nations, instead, he argued, what “prophets and high priests
of civilization” and “what a galaxy of genius might we not create!” (1865, 165).
Galton’s formula for promoting eugenics, which focused as much on prov-
ing an information-based profile of the “deserving elite” as dataifying the
“undesiring poor,” continued to be replicated by growing global cohorts of
eugenic researchers. Across the next half century, many worked obsessively
to develop a spate of biostatistical measuring techniques and new qualita-
tive and quantitative data methods and research instruments to bolster their
claims around mental fitness. By the late 1870s, Galton published in social sci-
ences and technical journals on his development of composite portraiture—a
technique that visually blended multiple facial photographs to render predic-
tive, prototyped images of healthy, criminal, and Jewish “types” (1883). His
obsession with eugenic accounting and education also led him to develop
datafication methods and techniques accessible to wider audiences. Among
them was a self-developed, handheld, “invisible” counting pad that allowed
the counter to pick a hole with a pin-based counter held in one’s pocket.
Galton used this to surveil and count what he considered to be “attractive”
women in neighborhoods. By the 1880s, in pursuit of the idea that intelli-
gence would surface in the form of sensitivity of perceptions, Galton opened
his “Anthropometric Laboratory,” a thirty-six-foot-long by six-foot-wide
testing space that he used to stage a variety of his self-designed measuring
­instruments and gather data on publics who attended the International
Health Exhibition in London (Herrnstein and Murray 1994, 2). For a price
of three pence, individuals could proceed through the lab’s successive stations
to have their data recorded across a spectrum of tests measuring their acuity
of sight and hearing, sensitivity to slight pressures on the skin, and speed of
reaction to simple stimuli. While some stations recorded the height, weight,
and eye and hair color (what Galton wrote could be correlated to robust
health) of individuals, others offered devices to measure the highest audible
note individuals could perceive or measured breathing power and capacity,
strength of pull and squeeze, and swiftness of blow (Galton 1884). Proudly,
Galton wrote at the end of a twelve-page pamphlet he published in 1884
with the details of the lab’s content, “Most of the instruments in use at the
Laboratory are wholly or in large part of my own designing” (1884, 12).

92 • chapter THR EE
 By the end of the century, Galton’s obsession with hereditary genius
and his parallel anxieties around the spread of “feeblemindedness” in the
West led to founding the field that came to be known as psychometrics.
Particularly in the United States, researchers inspired by Galton’s eugenics
channeled their enthusiasms toward the development and spread of varied
instruments for the measurement of psychological faculties. These gave rise
to new global appetites for dataifying and objectifying human intelligence.
Such investments, as the head of the New York–based Eugenics Record
Office (ERO) Charles Davenport put it after founding the ERO in 1904,
were key in shaping new policy that could, at last, “purify our body politics
of the feeble-minded, and the criminalistic and the wayward by using the
knowledge of heredity” (Katz 2013, 32), particularly since, as Davenport
asserted to fellow eugenicists, welfare agencies were a “force crushing our
civilization” (Rosenberg 1997, 95).
In the early decades of the twentieth century, US eugenicists saw to the
development of various techniques, methods, and models for the measure-
ment of so-called hereditary intelligence packaged as administrable exams
and intelligence quotient (IQ) tests sold by the hundreds of thousands to
state and government institutions. Ironically, they had been derived from
the work of psychologist Alfred Binet, who, in 1904, was commissioned
by the French government (following the nation’s establishment of public
education) to develop techniques to identify school children in need of some
form of special education beyond the standard classroom. Binet remained
adamant to his death that the techniques he developed were not a measure
of intelligence (Gould 1981, 181). Although Binet’s method assigned scores
to children derived from the “mental age” indicated by “age-assigned tasks”
they were able to complete during an exam, Binet insisted that intelligence
was too complex to be reduced to a single number that could be used to
rank and compare individuals as a generalizable practice. He explained, “The
scale, properly speaking, does not permit the measure of intelligence, because
intellectual qualities are not superposable, and therefore cannot be measured
as linear surfaces are measured” (1905a, 40). He was concerned that his
techniques could be used as predictive tools to indelibly classify a child as
backward, or to permanently deny care. He warned of how schoolmasters
with “exaggerated zeal” (1905b, 168) might use the tests as an “opportunity
for getting rid of all the children who trouble [them]” (1905b, 169) or might
create rigid classifications around a child that would become “a self-fulfilling
prophesy.” Binet shared his new methods by raising the recent memory of

Of M e r i t, M e t r ic s , a n d M y t h • 93
the political scandal around the Dreyfus Affair—a scandal that involved
Alfred Dreyfus, a French artillery officer of Jewish descent who was exoner-
ated of baseless charges of treason after a two-decades-long series of anti-
Semitic campaigns by the French press and military. As Binet cautioned, “It
is really too easy to discover signs of backwardness in an individual once one
is forewarned. This would be to operate as the graphologists did, who, when
[Alfred] Dreyfus was believed to be guilty, discovered in his handwriting
signs of a traitor or a spy” (1905b, 170).
Binet stressed early on the varied limits of his method, underscoring
what it was not, as much as what it was designed to do. He declined to
define IQ as a measure of inborn intelligence. He insisted that his scale was
designed for the specific purpose of the charge given by France’s Ministry of
Education and was only useful as a guide for identifying children in need
of special e­ ducation. It was not a general device for ranking all pupils by
mental worth, for affirming eugenic claims of hereditary feeblemindedness,
or for ­predicting and projecting a fixed state of mental inferiority that would
be used to classify an individual in perpetuity (Gould 1981). As Binet wrote
in his 1905 article introducing his new method, examiners should only con-
sider the results of their study of any child as an indicator of that child’s
“condition at the time and that [time] only. We have nothing to do either
with his past history or with his future; consequently . . . we shall make no
attempt to distinguish between acquired and congenital idiocy . . . [and] we
do not attempt to ­establish or prepare a prognosis. . . . We shall limit ourselves
to ascertaining the truth in regard to his present mental state” (1905a, 37).
Such explicit delimitations against prediction, for historian Joanne Brown,
demonstrated Binet’s larger commitments towards a model of “mental
orthopedics” that evoked “a whole system of meaning, founded on a humane,
ameliorative approach to medicine” (1992, 82) over epidemiological models
that emphasized pathology. As Gould put it, it demonstrated Binet as less
concerned with the impacts or “cause of poor performance in school” than
in identification “in order to help and improve, not to label in order to limit”
(Gould 1981, 182).
Despite Binet’s specifications, eugenicists were quick to realize the poten-
tial in his scale, particularly proponents such as the US psychologist Henry
H. Goddard. Goddard became increasingly convinced that of all hereditary
traits, inferior intelligence and mental deficiency were the chief determiners
of problems of human conduct and the source of most undesirable behavior.
In 1908, just a few years after Binet’s first publications on his testing m
­ ethods

94 • chapter THR EE
were published, Goddard began translating the Binet test into English
and distributing the test—around eighty-eight thousand copies by 1916—
across US institutions (Goddard 1916). Goddard, like Binet, had worked
with children in the early 1900s as the director of research at the Vineland
Training School for Feeble-Minded Girls and Boys in New Jersey (Katz
2013). Unlike Binet, however, Goddard, a fervent eugenicist, was convinced
that deficient intelligence in children was genetically determined. Moreover,
he believed it was the primary indicator of a future of deficient emotional
and moral control—understood as the cause of criminality, alcoholism, and
­prostitution—that would inevitably require greater state intervention
and public investment to address. He was likewise convinced that high
intelligence, framed as the single most important human attribute, enabled
not only strong cognitive aptitude but also good judgment and a mastery of
emotions that he argued underpinned moral behavior before society and the
state (Gould 1981). Intelligence, as he wrote, “[c]ontrols the emotions and
the emotions are controlled in proportion to the degree of intelligence. . . .
[I]f there is little intelligence the emotions will be uncontrolled and . . . will
result in actions that are unregulated. . . . Therefore, when we measure the intel-
ligence of an individual and learn that he has so much less than normal as to
come within the group that we call feeble-minded, we have ascertained by far
the most important fact about him” (1919, 272).
By 1910, Goddard was promoting a three-tiered system for classifying
feebleminded individuals and introducing new terminology around the
­category of “the moron” that he had come to stress in his invectives demanded
newly intensified measures to manage. He promoted his new taxonomy at
the American Association for the Study of the Feeble-Minded’s 1910 annual
meeting, specifying that morons are those with an IQ of fifty-one to seventy,
who ranked higher than previously recognized classes of “imbeciles,” whom
he specified were those with an IQ of twenty-six to fifty, and “idiots” with
an IQ of zero to twenty-five. However, as higher-ranking undesirables who
might pass unnoticed and even procreate among nondefective populations,
morons, Goddard warned, posed the real risk to well-born society. He wrote
in his best-selling study of hereditary feeblemindedness, The Kallikak Family,
a book infamously filled with doctored photos of physically altered subjects
that nonetheless popularized his new taxonomy of defectives in 1912, “The
idiot is not our greatest problem. He is indeed loathsome. . . . Nevertheless,
he lives his life and is done. He does not continue the race [but]. . . . [i]t is
the moron type that makes for us our great problem. And when we face the

Of M e r i t, M e t r ic s , a n d M y t h • 95
question, ‘What is to be done with them . . . ?’ we realize that we have a huge
problem” (1912, 101–2).
Goddard served as a consultant for the American Breeders’ Association,
helping devise their 1914 position that “defective classes be eliminated from
the human stock through sterilization” (Hothersall and Lovett 2022, 361).
He also advocated for establishing an intelligence testing program to moni-
tor and assess new immigrants arriving at Ellis Island for mental fitness,
focusing only on those he could identify as the lowest economic strata. He
began an infamous study on immigrant intelligence in 1913 that collected
data exclusively from immigrating passengers who had arrived by travel in
steerage class—the cheapest means of travel—and ignored entirely those who
had traveled in either first- or second-class passage. Noting in the study that
he omitted individuals who were either “obviously” normal or feebleminded
to focus on feebleminded persons who would not be obvious to immigra-
tion officers without the aid of tests, he assembled a staff to work with him
over three months to administer an intelligence exam to a preselected group
of 178 people who were of Jewish, Italian, Hungarian, or Russian descent.
Among the assessment questions, all delivered in English, that he designed
were “What is Crisco?” (the US-made cooking product introduced just
two years earlier as an alternative to butter and lard) and “Who is Christy
Matthewson?” (an American football player). Respondents were also
shown a picture of a tennis court without a net and asked what was missing
(Hothersall and Lovett 2022, 363). Based on responses to his questions, over
80 percent of all respondents were found to be feebleminded, confirming, as
Goddard wrote in 1917, “that a surprisingly large percentage of immigrants
are of relatively low mentality” (Goddard 1917, 269).
Even as Goddard admitted that such a large percentage might invite dis-
belief among readers, he asserted that “[i]t is never wise to discard a scientific
result because of apparent absurdity. Many a scientific discovery has seemed
at first glance absurd. We can only arrive at the truth by fairly and conscien-
tiously analyzing the data” (1917, 266). He went on to rationalize the results
by describing the changing nature of European immigration, which, prior to
1900, had disproportionately come from northern and western Europe, and
which, in later decades, had increasingly come from eastern and southern
Europe. As Goddard characterized it, “It is admitted on all sides that we are
getting now the poorest of each race” (1917, 269). Notably, a consideration of
one potential economic impact seemed to give him pause over how strictly
the exclusion of feebleminded immigrants—“morons” in particular—should

96 • chapter THR EE
be enforced. Underscoring the potential utility of “mentally defective”
populations in the workforce, he wrote,

At least it is true that they do a great deal of work that no one else will do. . . .
It is perfectly true that there is an immense amount of drudgery to be done,
an immense amount of work for which we do not wish to pay enough to
secure more intelligent workers. . . . May it be that possibly the moron has
his place? . . . [P]erhaps after all it is a superficial view of that problem to
say, we will eliminate them all as fast as we can. It may be vastly wiser, more
scientific, and more practicable to say, we will accept the moron, discover him
as early as we can, train him properly and use him as far as his limited intel-
ligence will permit (Goddard 1917, 268).

He nonetheless reminded audiences that “the question of heredity” should

not be overlooked, given that “[m]orons beget morons” (Goddard 1917, 270).
Such competing considerations, Goddard concluded, could be resolved
through a multipronged approach to the undeserving poor that included
sterilizing immigrant morons (just as the nation was doing with “native
morons”), deporting imbeciles, and finally, his own readers taking public
action. As he wrote, “All of this means that if the American public wishes
feeble-minded aliens excluded, it must demand that Congress provide the
necessary facilities at the ports of entry” (1917, 271).
Goddard ended the article by proudly sharing the dramatic expansion in
deportations of mentally defective populations from Ellis Island—by 350
percent and 570 percent in 1913 and 1914, respectively—that his study had
triggered. This, he concluded, was what the promise of mental testing as a
means to monitor the unfit had quickly made possible. He wrote, “This was
due to the untiring efforts of the physicians who were inspired by the belief
that mental tests could be used for the detection of feeble-minded aliens”
(1917, 271). Indeed, within just a few years after Goddard’s publication of
the use of mental tests at Ellis Island, what historians have noted as a rapidly
growing testing enterprise (Brown 1992) could already be seen expanding
globally, with sales reaching “astonishing” levels (Katz 2013, 36). By 1923,
Princeton psychologist Carl C. Brigham followed Goddard’s arguments in
a book titled A Study of American Intelligence, which used the results of the
US Army’s World War I mental testing program to predict that an influx
of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe would lower native-born
Americans’ intelligence. Immigration therefore should be restricted to
Nordic and northern European stock. By then, too, nearly four million test
copies of the National Intelligence Test had been sold (Katz 2013). Historians

Of M e r i t, M e t r ic s , a n d M y t h • 97
noted that by the 1920s “the entire public educational system of the United
States had been reorganized around the principles of mental measurement,
[with] the psychological profession [producing] more than seventy-five tests
of general mental ability” (Brown 1992, 4). Copies of Goddard’s test were
also being distributed in at least twelve countries, including Canada, Great
Britain, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Germany, Switzerland, Italy,
Russia, China, Japan, and Turkey (Goddard 1916). And by 1930, at least nine
million adults and children in the United States alone had been tested by
one of the Binet-Simon revisions (Brown 1992; Hothersall and Lovett 2022).
By the beginning of the 1920s, IQ had entered the American vernacu-
lar and was largely understood, despite the debates that still surrounded it,
as a synonym for intelligence. Varied schools—including school districts
in Springfield and Boston, Massachusetts; Peoria, Illinois; Trenton, New
Jersey; Buffalo, New York; Atlanta, Georgia; and Oakland and Berkeley,
California—had begun to incorporate mass intelligence testing as part of
school routine by 1926. Detroit students took tests in the first grade to deter-
mine the grouping they were assigned for the first six years of schooling, as
well (Brown 1992). Critics of the use of mental tests began to raise “a chorus
of political dissent . . . around the issues of democracy, mental testing, and
‘educational determinism’” several years following their mass marketing
and promotion. Social historian JoAnne Brown wrote, however, that they
found themselves “hard-pressed to mobilize sufficient counterevidence to
remove the tests,” given that “[testing] professionals [had] established a
data base that was, by virtue of its sheer size, nearly impossible to challenge”
(Brown 1992, 6–7). By the early 1920s, Brown concluded, “Mental testing was
no longer an experimental technique but a commercial enterprise in which
many individuals and institutions had a stake” (138).
As significantly, by the 1920s, public education campaigns by the American
Eugenics Society (AES) reflected lessons from Goddard connecting mental
unfitness and feeblemindedness with national economic degradation and
regression. In varied eugenic exhibits that the AES installed at public fairs
across the nation, interactive displays framed with the text “Some people are
born to be a burden on the rest” invited visitors to observe a series of flashing
lights. Around one light that was labeled as flashing every forty-eight sec-
onds, a caption read, “Every 48 seconds a person is born in the United States
who will never grow up mentally beyond the stage of a normal 8-year-old
boy or girl.” Beside it was another flashing light with the caption, “Every 50
seconds a person is committed to jail in the United States. Very few normal

98 • chapter THR EE
persons ever go to jail.” Above the boxes, large text pronounced “American
needs less of these.” Around another light that flashed every seven-and-a-half
minutes, a caption read, “Every 7–1/2 minutes a high grade person is born in
the United States who will have ability to do creative work and be fit for lead-
ership. About 4% of all Americans come within this class.” Above it, large
letters indicated “American needs more of these.” Above them all hovered a
single light that flashed every fifteen seconds that punctuated the economic
rationale and critique of waste and excess under welfare state policy chan-
neled in the display. “Every 15 seconds,” it read, “$100 of your money goes
for the care of persons with bad heredity such as the insane, feeble-minded,
criminals and other defectives.”
The rapid expansion of an intelligence testing enterprise and the ready
popularization of eugenic classifications around mental fitness through the
projection of economic futures and the impact on healthy populations read-
ily demonstrated to Goddard the viability of such strategies to protect the
political power of the established White elite in a context of rapid global
change. As importantly, it provided a means to press for a reinvention of
democracy, uprooting the meaning of democratic government from conven-
tional definitions as historically rooted (as he acknowledged) in a “rebellion
against a so-called aristocracy.” By allowing that people rule instead by select-
ing “the wisest, most intelligent and most human to tell them what to do to
be happy,” democracy could be “a method for arriving at a truly benevolent
aristocracy” (Goddard 1919, 237). Just a year later, Goddard conceded that
“unintelligent millions” might eventually “decide to take matters into their
own hands” in a kind of “Russian-style revolution” (Hothersall and Lovett
2022, 376). He reasoned that his version of a restyled democracy would read-
ily resolve such a possibility by ensuring that such populations be quickly dis-
enfranchised and that established democratic governments be reinvented as
hierarchically organized meritocracies based on intelligence testing instead.

The Knowledge Economy and the Rise

of the Cognitive Elite

Nearly a century after the release of Binet’s scale, US social scientists hailed
the final decade before the new millennium as a new kind of knowledge
economy (Castells 1996; Powell and Snellman 2004). The same period saw
proclamations of the rise of new cognitive elite classes and an unapologetic

Of M e r i t, M e t r ic s , a n d M y t h • 99
revival of eugenics’ pro-hereditarian standpoint on intelligence with the pub-
lication of The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life
(1994). Written for a popular audience by longtime conservative and libertar-
ian authors Richard Herrnstein, a Harvard psychology professor, and Charles
Murray, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, the text infamously
set off a pitched national debate. The authors reasserted a biological basis
for intelligence and correlating individual achievement, socioeconomic suc-
cess, and professional productivity with hereditarily determined IQ measures
(Jacoby and Glauberman 1995). Across over eight hundred pages of content,
replete with tables, graphs, and data on IQ, they argued that America’s most
pressing economic and social problems could be empirically traced to ques-
tions of intelligence and populations with lower intelligence. Through such
data, the authors aimed to underscore how lower and higher IQs mapped
across racial and ethnic differences, with White populations demonstrating
higher levels than Black and immigrant groups, now dominated by popula-
tions of non-European descent. Echoing eugenicists from generations past,
they channeled their data toward a critique of democratic policy and wel-
fare programs as wasteful expenditures that detracted from support for the
gifted and cognitively deserving. Attacking a broad sweep of welfare, educa-
tion, and immigration allowances, they closed their text by asserting that
inequality “is a reality” and investments “trying to eradicate inequality . . .
[have] led to disaster.” As the authors wrote, “It is time for America once
again to try living with inequality” (Herrnstein and Murray 1994, 551).
Selling four hundred thousand copies in its first two months after publica-
tion, the text’s overnight bestseller status sent its eugenicist arguments into
the headlines of nearly every major US news magazine and newspaper. It
appeared on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, Newsweek,
and the New Republic, and was featured on National Public Radio and popu-
lar television news programs, including Good Morning America and Meet the
Press (Staub 2019). Such popular reception in the United States was by no
means a given. The decades following WWII saw the fervent hereditarian
and biological determinist standpoints that had once been so publicly at the
center of eugenics’ mission gradually wane as an “environmental consensus”
(Katz 2013) around individual achievement began to rise. By the beginning
of the 1960s, historians noted that confidence was running high that early
educational interventions could accelerate the cognitive abilities of disadvan-
taged children (Staub 2018). While the same period saw the testing industry
and profession around psychometrics flourish, with hundreds of millions of

100 • chapter THR EE

people worldwide being tested every year (Staub 2018), historians noted that
the most controversial uses of tests to promote eugenic laws and discrimina-
tion fell silent during this period. They remained out of the public eye, with
few vocal champions, for decades. This changed in 1969 when Arthur Jensen,
an educational psychologist from the University of California at Berkeley
and grantee of the eugenics- and race science–dedicated Pioneer Fund
(whose first president in 1937 was the Eugenics Research Organization’s own
Harry Laughlin), published an article in the Harvard Educational Review.
It attacked compensatory and remedial education as a failed public expen-
diture. Jensen argued that such programs, which targeted Black and other
minority students, would inevitably continue to fail because they were aimed
at populations with relatively low IQs, a largely heritable trait (80% heritable,
according to Jensen) that therefore would remain immutable, regardless of
external interventions (1969).
Just two years following the publication of Jensen’s article, a fellow grantee
of the Pioneer Fund, Nobel laureate physicist William Schockley, defended
Jensen’s arguments around the wasteful economics behind the nation’s wel-
fare policies, adding that they would only lead to future social and economic
regression. He told the National Academy of Sciences in 1971 that “our nobly
intended welfare programs are promoting dysgenics—retrogressive evolution
through the disproportionate reproduction of the genetically disadvantaged”
(Katz 2013, 40). He followed this with recommendations to counteract such
trends, suggesting as a “thought exercise” a scheme for paying people with
low IQs $1,000 to be sterilized and advocating a sperm bank for geniuses.
He was echoed shortly after by a young Richard Herrnstein, who wrote in a
September 1971 article titled simply “IQ” in The Atlantic that “the tendency
to be unemployed may run in the genes of a family about as certainly as bad
teeth do now” (1971, 63).
Scholars and public commentators voiced alarm over the “new eugen-
ics” (Hothersall and Lovett 2022; Katz 2013) leading voices seemed to be
stirring among public appetites in the 1970s and early 1990s by leveraging
arguments around race and hereditary intelligence. While many pondered
why such arguments had reemerged with force in the 1970s and 1990s,
after seemingly lying dormant for years, Herrnstein and Murray were clear
about the resonances they saw between their argument around IQ, race, and
future achievement and framings of the contemporary era as defined by an
information-driven knowledge economy. As they wrote in The Bell Curve,
highlighting the economic demands for what they called the new “cognitive

Of M e r i t, M e t r ic s , a n d M y t h • 101
elite” in the contemporary age, “In our time, the ability to use and manipulate
information has become the single most important element of success, no
matter how you measure it: financial security, power, or status. Those who
work by manipulating ideas and abstractions are the leaders and beneficiaries
of our society. In such an era, high intelligence is an increasingly raw mate-
rial for success . . . [in] a new kind of class structure led by a ‘cognitive elite.’”
They further connected such an organically evolving economy with the
demand for more “complex” forms of labor and workers able to cognitively
process complexity.
Leveraging the notion of an empirically observable economy as a means
of distancing themselves from merely political editorializing, they wrote
matter-of-factly, “Today’s technological frontier is more complex than yes-
terday’s” (98). Given that the capacity for individuals to manage “complexity
is one of the things that cognitive ability is most directly good for” (541), the
undeniably growing complexity of contemporary life in a technologically
infused society would value and reward the labor of the cognitive elite more
than labor less efficiently performed by others. Moreover, today’s technologi-
cally infused economy had evolved to complexity on its own, they argued,
rather than through the structural forces and interventions of either the state
or private sector, and it required less regulation to align with society’s needs.
Opening The Bell Curve with a nod to the “economization” of life, then, they
highlighted the links between IQ and economic productivity, writing that
the link between IQ and occupation “goes deep. If you want to guess an adult
male’s job status, the results of his childhood IQ test help you as much as
knowing how many years he went to school” (51). They added that “a smarter
employee is, on the average, a more proficient employee” (63) and that “the
advantage conferred by IQ is long-lasting . . . [with] the smarter employee
tend[ing] to remain more productive than the less smart employee even after
years on the job” (64). Despite the fact that “since 1971, [the US] Congress
and the Supreme Court have effectively forbidden American employers from
hiring based on intelligence tests,” they nonetheless recommended that “an
economy that lets employers pick applicants with the highest IQs is a signifi-
cantly more efficient economy” (64), adding what the authors estimated to
be another $80 billion to the economy annually.
After dedicating the second part of the book to chapters on “how much
[low] intelligence has to do with America’s most pressing social problems”
(115)—including crime, poverty, unemployment, workplace injury, idleness,
welfare dependency, and single-parent families—the authors spent the final

102 • chapter THR EE

chapters taking aim at various government programs that they read as irre-
sponsible expenditures leading to a dysgenic nation. This included familiar
eugenic tropes—from immigration, which they called a “major source of dys-
genic pressure” (341), to affirmative action, special education, and compensa-
tory education programs. Those programs targeted underserved and minority
youth that “dumbed down” education (417) and taxed gifted students whom
the authors claimed were “out” of favor for the last thirty years, as federal
funds targeted so-called “in [favor]” disadvantaged students. By the authors’
avowedly apocalyptic (509) projections of the nation’s future, the US govern-
ment set society on a course toward self-destruction by insisting on policies
to support the vulnerable and working against the “reality” that the nation
had “naturally” evolved through the economy into a hereditary meritocracy.
Countless editorials and public commentaries emerged to counter The
Bell Curve in the wake of its release. Editorials from the New York Times to
the Los Angeles Times lambasted the text for its revival of long-debunked
eugenic theories (Jacoby and Glauberman 1995). Social scientists, biologists,
and educators were likewise among the vocal critics who underscored the
authors’ selective use of educational statistics and flawed and sloppy repre-
sentation of scientific literature on heredity and IQ. They also criticized the
authors’ conspicuous citation of varied researchers—seventeen in all—who
were known contributors to Mankind Quarterly, a far-right publication
funded by the Pioneer Fund. The publication has been called a “cornerstone
of the scientific racism establishment” (Kinchelow, Steinberg, and Gresson
1997, 40) and a “White supremacist journal” (Saini 2019), whose founders
included champions of apartheid in South Africa as well as former leaders
of Italy’s eugenics movement under fascism (Lane 1995). Notably absent
from the dissenting voices, however, were those very actors at the center of
The Bell Curve’s information economy—namely, the engineers and tech
­entrepreneurs placed at the center of Murray and Herrnstein’s cognitive elite.
Their silence on the topic channeled an assent to their elevation in the new
economy. Neither were there any direct refutations on the economic fram-
ing of The Bell Curve by social scientists or economists who had helped to
introduce the language of knowledge economy into a public lexicon. Their
silence, too, suggested alignment with reading the escalating inequities of
race and class in the knowledge economy as naturally evolving, rather than
structurally produced, outcomes.
Over two decades later, historians lament The Bell Curve’s “lasting impact
on policy discussions of race and intelligence” (Staub 2018, 148) and their

Of M e r i t, M e t r ic s , a n d M y t h • 103
continued connection to the nation’s economic productivity. More recently,
outlets such as Scientific American and the Humanist noted a resurgence of
The Bell Curve’s popularity, with revived sales and author Charles Murray
(Herrnstein passed away in 1994 shortly after The Bell Curve’s publication)
reappearing across national talk, broadcast, and podcast circuits in the
years following the 2016 US presidential election (Evans 2018; Seigel 2017;
Zevallos 2017). Leadership from Silicon Valley companies, which just three
decades ago in the mid-1990s had been entirely absent from the five most traded
companies on US exchanges and which by 2021 made up all five (Chafkin
2021), still remained largely silent on the ongoing debate around genetics,
intelligence, and economic progress. Helping solidify and later popularize the
image of new, intellectually dependent work and heroic technological innova-
tors in the public consciousness, leading social scientists and scholars who
had argued for the emergence of a knowledge economy early on still refrained
from commentary or intervention around the issue. Researchers continued
to treat the sustained fetishism around hereditary intelligence and its link to
the flourishing of national economies as if it were outside their domain. This
occurred even as early theories on the growing power of knowledge work
and scholarly literature around the knowledge economy gained popular
currency, and as Silicon Valley and the t­ echnology industry’s global rise was
celebrated across international headlines for g­ enerating unprecedented scales
of wealth.
Those that were vocal, such as Silicon Valley’s Peter Thiel, the outspoken
libertarian venture capitalist and billionaire cofounder of PayPal and Palantir
Technologies, echoed the explicitly pessimistic tones of The Bell Curve and
earlier eugenic authors. Thiel notably channeled his critiques toward a new
techno-eugenic framework that emphasized the imperative of evolution
through innovation. In 2009, Thiel already espoused contempt for what he
read as the economically degenerative, innovation-blocking policies of the
regulatory welfare state that insisted on supporting regressed populations.
They made it necessary for actors like himself to intervene to ensure “the
world [is made] safe for capitalism” (Thiel 2009).2 He elaborated further in
an essay for the Cato Institute, writing,

I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. . . . The future
of technology is not pre-determined, and we must resist the temptation of
technological utopianism—the notion that technology has a momentum or
will of its own, that it will guarantee a more free future. . . . A better meta-
phor is that we are in a deadly race between politics and technology. . . . The

104 • chapter THR EE

 fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or
propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capital-
ism (Thiel 2009).
A decade later, Thiel publicly endorsed Donald Trump for US president,
speaking for him at the Republican National Convention and pouring funds
into Trump-backed candidates’ campaigns (Heffernan 2021), including
Trump’s 2024 vice-presidential running mate, JD Vance (Kinder, Hammond
& Rogers 2024). Far from merely an eccentric technologist turned political
dabbler, Thiel has been credited more than any other investor or entrepre-
neur with “creating the ideology that has come to define Silicon Valley: that
technological progress should be pursued relentlessly—with little, if any,
regard for potential costs or dangers to society” (Chafkin 2021, 10). His suc-
cess in ruthlessly pursuing a singular drive toward technological advance-
ment, at whatever cost, “has earned him troves of devotees in Silicon Valley
and around the world who read him as a techno-libertarian whose pursuit of
technological advancement channels nothing less than deep commitments
to personal freedom, scientific progress, and even salvation” (Chafkin 2021,
10). This was seeded with his leadership of the “PayPal Mafia,” an informal
network of technology financiers, engineers, and ­capitalists dating back to
the late 1990s that includes Elon Musk and the founders of YouTube, Yelp,
and LinkedIn (Weiner 2021). Among their investments were companies
including Facebook, Airbnb, Lyft, Spotify, Stripe, and DeepMind (Google’s
world-leading artificial intelligence project).
Thiel’s vision for progress as an explicitly economically driven force that
should be prioritized by societies even at the cost of conventionally p­ rotected
democratic values echoed eugenic proponents’ public assertions from over a
century ago. His insistence on economic progress above all echoed the lan-
guage of turn-of-the-century Wharton Business School economist and future
American Eugenics Association president Simon Patten, who asserted bluntly
in 1899 the evolutionary force of progress in helping societies to “crush the
inefficient.” As Patten wrote then, “Social progress is a higher law than equal-
ity, and a nation must choose it at any cost. A lack of progress would eradicate
the efficient and prudent as certainly as the presence of progress crushes the
inefficient and thoughtless. Progress [thus] . . . favour[s] non-moral standards
upheld on the one hand by concrete economic rules harmonizing with the
immediate environment, and on the other hand with intensive feelings that
made men discontented with anything short of perfection” (1899). Thiel’s
techno-eugenic f­ramework updated Patten’s language by emphasizing the

Of M e r i t, M e t r ic s , a n d M y t h • 105
existential threat to an innovation-centered knowledge economy and the
cognitive elites who powered it via regulatory states that insisted on protect-
ing public welfare. Thiel’s language, by the post-Trump era—as AI-based
products increasingly shaped global trade and economic bases—grew more
pessimistic. Speaking before an Oxford University audience in 2022, he
highlighted the innovation “stagnation problem” that the current democratic
establishment had created across a spate of Western nations by continuously
attempting to regulate new technological developments, from AI to biotech.
Such efforts, he predicted, would “derange our societies” by eventually ensur-
ing a no-growth economy (Thiel 2023). It would impose barriers around the
intellectual power of the cognitive elite in the interest of protecting lesser-
evolved classes, restraining potentials for technological advancement and
inevitably leading to a regression of society and the economy alike.
While easy to dismiss as incompatible, mainstream framings of the
knowledge economy that were popularized by late-twentieth-century liberal
social sciences and business news outlets shared varied key parallels with
techno-eugenic frameworks. Both highlighted the central protagonism
and heightened value of new classes of knowledge professionals and cogni-
tive elites, whose novel economic and technological contributions directly
powered the knowledge economy, and arguably enabled such positions to
advance with little public outcry or intervention. By keeping the public eye
trained on the anxieties around new forms of intellectual demands, skills,
and capacity knowledge work the new economy demanded of all classes of
workers, both could keep attention pinned around the deficiencies of labor-
ing populations, rather than drawing attention to the racially segregating
politics of “the knowledge economy” and questions of what interests were
creating new pressures to accelerate a push toward knowledge production
as an optimized site of profit generation. Such public calibrations projected
a natural, rationalized veneer to the rapid transformations underway in the
economy, rather than recognizing the state or private sector activity that had
enabled a dismantling of regulatory frameworks when it came to technology.
They would both lean heavily on knowledge and intelligence as factors that
enabled a selective elision of the knowledge economy’s racialized impacts
and dispossessions. In doing so, they kept the public eye distracted from
larger questions of racialized and class-based economic stratifications that
had amplified across the decades and that had accelerated with the rise of
Silicon Valley disruptors and parallel knowledge economy actors driven by
new imperatives to innovate at whatever cost.

106 • chapter THR EE

 To attend to Thiel’s pronouncements around the knowledge economy,
and the silence that has generally characterized the larger tech industry and
digital economy scholars’ reactions to texts such as The Bell Curve, then,
is to confront the techno-eugenic logic of assessment that underpins the
­rationalization of the contemporary knowledge economy’s growth. It is to
ask that we attend to the intensified forms of social inequality and race-
based stratifications that have grown with it. And it is to recognize the
double face—and nocturnal, necropolitical twin (Mbembe 2003, 2019)—of
its growth. Such intertwined architectures are what allow Big Tech to oper-
ate, on the one hand, as official and even preeminent engines of innova-
tion working under the guise of Western liberalism’s highest promise (as
much of the popular and scholarly framings of the knowledge economy
have s­ uggested), and on the other hand, as entities that can profit by econo-
mizing global progress and security for only those prioritized as the most
deserving, worthy, and intellectually equipped. More than ever, it is time we
diagnose the global condition in which Silicon Valley companies and their
data-driven extractions can still perversely be promoted as uniquely scalable
engines of global innovation and economic salvation, even in the face of
growing s­tructural inequities that have advanced under the accelerations
of the knowledge economy.

Conclusion

To attend to techno-eugenics’ reverberations throughout the contempo-

rary knowledge economy is to recognize the underacknowledged ecologies
of illiberal violence and anti-pluralist, xenophobic terrains—sites where
“death has nothing tragic about it” (Haritaworn, Kuntsman, and Posocco
2014; Mbembe 2003, 2019) that scholars of necropolitics have recognized as
foundational to modern orders—as latent, too, in the contemporary ecol-
ogy of big data and AI-driven systems. It is to recognize the inseparability
of the growth of Western liberalism with the extension of global systems of
imperialism, t­ errains of settler colonial dispossessions, and plantation slavery
that decolonial, critical race, feminist, and queer scholars have long explored
(Azoulay 2019; Byrd 2011; Byrd et al. 2018; Cacho 2012; Hartmann 1997;
Mbembe 2003, 2019; Rosas 2019) as likewise enabling the continuity of spaces
where individual rights and values could be officially suspended. Philosopher
Achille Mbembe described how such spaces of political exception—central

Of M e r i t, M e t r ic s , a n d M y t h • 107
among them, the colony and the plantation—functioned as the “nocturnal
face” of liberal states (2003, 2019) that could be architected away from offi-
cial sites where civil peace needed to be formally maintained and visible. At
these remote sites of exception, however, conditions of unregulated war and
violence—exercised outside normative conventions and “obey[ing] no rule of
proportionality” (2019, 25)—could give rise to the organized destruction
of necropolitical “death worlds.” The full functioning of such worlds first
requires, Mbembe specified, “on the one hand, a generalized cheapening of
the price of life and, on the other, a habituation to loss” (2019, 26). Mbembe
reminded readers how often necropolitical sites have emerged, then, not as the
antithesis or limit of active democracies but as their hidden twin and under-
acknowledged double. Ever latent within liberal political orders, they can
emerge and come to dominate, not merely once the world can be segmented
into realms of the biopolitically useful and useless, but once a generalizing
acceptance of and “habituation to loss” has been conditioned.
The sacrificial economy that the contemporary knowledge economy has
given rise to, particularly in the age of big data and AI, appears not despite
or as the exception to global tech companies’ growth. It emerges instead as
their offspring, developing through remote, concealed, and seemingly dis-
connected “sites of experimentation” in the name of preserving Big Tech’s
public face and protecting the official narrative of Western technology (and
big data and AI systems, especially) as the twenty-first century’s consummate
force of progress, innovation, and high enlightenment.
Media justice organizer Danielle Chynoweth’s critique of the technology
industry’s impact on social services that began this chapter underscores
such a lens among social service providers working with populations that
would be classified among the undeserving poor. In stark contrast to the
official narrative of tech-driven philanthropy extended within ­business
and technology sectors, the emergence and growth of tech-driven venture
philanthropy in the late 1990s was celebrated as a remedy for the pro-
jected inefficiencies of traditional philanthropy. Pressing for an ­evolution
of traditional philanthropy, venture philanthropy, as Paul Brainerd of
Social Ventures Partners put it in a widely circulated 1999 essay, would
introduce new “innovative approaches to giving” (Brainerd 1999). During
its rise in the early 2000s, as it was being touted as the “new buzz” in
­business and philanthropic circles (Weiss and Clark 2006), other founda-
tions emerged with funding from prominent technology entrepreneurs.
As sociologist Michael Moody found after interviewing varied dot-commers

108 • chapter THR EE

and ­entrepreneurs involved in the field in 2007, many proudly and unself-
consciously described themselves as “innovation junkies” with “very high
expectations” of their investments. And they saw themselves as benevolently
bringing the power of tech-based transformation to social service work as
a means of improving social sectors’ “slow, inefficient, and unproductive”
workplace routines (Moody 2007, 341).
While the pitched hype around venture philanthropy has leveled in recent
years, the undeniably outsized and still-growing investments and enduring
influence of venture philanthropy in nonprofit practice today (Onishi 2015)
continues to spur heated debates among nonprofit and social service provid-
ers. These debates center around not only what it means to import metric-
centered principles—from “return on investment” to “due diligence”—from
corporate realms into the center of nonprofit missions. They highlight too
what it means to do so with the particular form of innovation-demanding
hubris, self-righteous conceit, and disruption-seeking “move fast and break
things” mindset that has defined Silicon Valley’s approach to innovation in
the new millennium. Such unrepentant disruption has proven destructive,
especially when it comes to social institutions, from education to the press,
to care sectors, and to health and human services. For Chynoweth, that self-
assured sense of superiority has made the ordinary violence such logics have
wrought upon the populations she serves all the harder to bear. And it has
underscored the powerful and continuing salience of the “undeserving poor,”
and their metrification, as a foundation to tech-centered enterprise in the
new millennium. It is a reminder too of the spectrum of positionalities that
techno-eugenic proponents could occupy.
Like eugenicists in the early twentieth century that infamously encom-
passed liberal progressive reformers alongside illiberal xenophobic champi-
ons (Leonard 2016), techno-eugenics proves flexible enough to encompass
a range of positionalities across technology sectors. Despite their superficial
distinctions, they maintained a classificatory logic that urged the need for
reform and intervention driven by more evolved and competitive knowledge
classes. Heralding an imperative for innovation as an economically and
socially evolving force, they amplified and mainstreamed outcries against
the “excesses” of the regulatory welfare state and democratic protections.
This was enabled by exchanging past references of degradation through
racial dysgenics for an emphasis instead on projections of Western ruination
through economic stagnation, technological regression, and ­curtailments of
individual choice in a once free market.

Of M e r i t, M e t r ic s , a n d M y t h • 109
 Of course, there have been other forms of critical orientations around
the obligations of government that aimed to hold political leaders more
­accountable to the work of securing public welfare and democratic protec-
tion. The data work that such actors channeled over generations and the
­justice-oriented solidarities and intersectional collaborations they fostered
to undertake their efforts is the subject of the next three chapters.

110 • chapter THR EE

 FOU R

Relational Infrastructures
Feminist Refusals and Immigrant
Data Solidarities

Jane Addams’s unflinching refusal of University of Chicago

President William Harper’s 1895 proposal to incorporate Hull House into
the university did not mince words. As the renowned US feminist cofounder
of Hull House wrote to Harper in a letter from December of that year,
[A]ny absorption of the identity of Hull-House by a larger and stronger body
could not be other than an irreparable misfortune. . . . Its individuality is
the result of the work of a group of people . . . living in the 19th Ward, not
as students, but as citizens, and their methods of work must differ from that
of an institution established elsewhere, and following well defined lines. An
absorption would be most unfair to them, as well as to their friends and sup-
porters, who believe that the usefulness of the effort is measured by its own
interior power of interpretation and adjustment (Deegan 1988, 35).

Indeed, there were already multiple invitations for Hull House to be

incorporated into the University of Chicago by the time the now famous
volume Hull-House Maps and Papers had been published in 1895. Each invi-
tation, historians recount today, had been roundly refused by Addams. Her
unflinching refusal of Harper’s 1895 proposal to incorporate Hull House into
the university decried what she called the “irreparable” ethical breach that
allowing the collective life of the settlement to be “absorbed” into institu-
tions of the establishment would cause, despite the “very valuable assurance
of permanency” it promised.
But from Harper’s end, there were multiple reasons that motivated the
University of Chicago’s attempts to incorporate Hull House’s experimental
community of resident-researchers in the heart of Chicago’s multi-ethnic
West Side. The University of Chicago, newly founded in 1892 through a
$35 million donation from Standard Oil m ­ onopolist John D. Rockefeller,

111
Figure 5. A wage map visualizing household income data among the immigrant fami-
lies in Chicago’s West Side, published in the Hull-House Maps and Papers volume in 1895,
demonstrating the “total earnings per week of a family,” up to $20 per week. (Courtesy,
Newberry Library)

was itself a fledgling institution with new departments—including the

United States’ first department of ­sociology—that were established to draw
in leading faculty and help cement the University of Chicago’s reputation
as a preeminent knowledge ­institution. Although Hull House was barely

112 • c h a p t e r FOU R
half a decade old at the time, its engagements after its founding in 1889
(as only the second US settlement, following the Neighborhood Guild in
New York City’s Lower East Side that was built in 1886) had allowed it to
establish a reputation for “daring” efforts in the social settlement movement
(Deegan 1988, 3). And it quickly distinguished its leadership as “the arche-
type and dominant U.S. social settlement” (Lengermann and Niebrugge-
Brantley 2002, 6) by the turn of the century. Central to this was not only
Hull House’s development of community-based classrooms, free courses,
and open organizing spaces extended to the working families and largely
immigrant households growing in Chicago’s 19th Ward, but its work to
document the conditions of life, labor, and conflict far outside the city’s elite
districts in a period of rapid urban expansion, stratification, and change.
As Hull House grew resources to include a free kindergarten and day care,
a coffee house, gym and athletic programs, a theater and art studios, and
legal services for residents of the 19th Ward, its work would be credited with
spurring the expansion of parallel settlement house organizations across
the nation, which would grow by 1910 to 413 across thirty-three states.
Many, following Hull House’s publication of its Maps and Papers volume,
would similarly release research volumes that tracked the rapid transforma-
tion of city life and its impact on marginalized populations—­including,
notably, W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro (1899), published with
Philadelphia’s College Settlement, and Frances Kellor’s Out of Work: A
Study of Unemployment (1904), published with New York City’s Henry
Street Settlement.
While Harper’s overtures to incorporate Hull House were clear in their
day, and arguably still translate in the present when elite universities in the
United States have struggled to demonstrate their relevance to broad publics
and civic bases, the reasons for Addams’s pointed refusal of incorporation,
despite whatever benefits it might have promised, invites exploration. As this
chapter reviews, it had to do with the elite academy’s relation to eugenics
and its role in extending hierarchical, social Darwinist paradigms in society.
But it also had to do with the commitment of Hull House’s diverse research-
ers to build other models of knowledge infrastructures that could enable
alternative intersectional feminist research practices and pluralistically cul-
tivated data methods. In contrast to the previous three c­ hapters, this chapter
and the next two explore community-based alternatives to predatory data
that existed across generations. Designed to push back on the s­tratifying
and dispossessive impacts that eugenic researchers anchored into and

R e l at ion a l I n f r a s t ruc t u r e s • 113

worked to mainstream over more than a century of data work, community-
developed alternatives aimed to foster new forms of data solidarities among
diverse practitioners. And whether through the relational infrastruc-
tures covered in this chapter, or through contemporary community data
methods covered later (in chapter 6), such forms of community-based work
showcased the fervent commitment practitioners have long had and culti-
vated to orient data and knowledge practice toward ends other than profil-
ing, profit making, and predicting narrow forms of survival.
Largely forgotten today, Hull House was broadly recognized at the turn of
the century not only for its development of nineteenth-century urban settle-
ment architectures and its novel blending of a community and educational
center in the heart of Chicago’s West Side, but also for its parallel innova-
tions in data methods and infrastructures led by feminists and largely “ama-
teur” researchers who were decentered from the elite academy and dominant
knowledge institutions of the day. Today, historians underscore how, in the
decades prior to the US legalization of women’s suffrage, Hull House “coor-
dinated and led a massive network” of diverse justice-centered organizers who
were “more egalitarian, more female-dominated” (Deegan 1988, 3–5) than
either the British model for a settlement house or US university models that
had come before it. Built from the work of feminist, immigrant, queer, and
prolabor researchers, Hull House’s network pushed back on the prominence
of social Darwinist and eugenic paradigms of the day that pitched public
anxieties around the changing demographics of US society and the proxim-
ity of poor, ethnic minority, and immigrant classes. The proposals for Hull
House’s incorporation into the University of Chicago issued by its founding
president William Harper and Department of Sociology head Albion Small
underscore how impactful Hull House and its knowledge-based endeavors
were already perceived to be by the final decade of the nineteenth century.
Historians credit Hull House and settlement researchers for advancing
varied methods in social scientific data collection (Deegan 1988; O’Connor
2002; Sklar 1985)—from the social survey and questionnaire to applications
in data visualizations highlighting neighborhood accounts and lived experi-
ence—that “pioneered for American sociology many of the strategies now
taken for granted by academic sociologists” (Lengermann and Niebrugge-
Brantley 2002, 11).
Far from seeking approval or authorization from established institutions,
Hull House’s international feminist researchers advanced new data methods
and architectures in active refusal of dominant knowledge institutions and

114 • c h a p t e r FOU R
their roles in enabling the intensification of social Darwinist paradigms. At the
turn of the century, as eugenic researchers heightened public anxieties around
non-Anglo Saxon immigrants in the United States and their connection to
social unrest, Hull House researchers pointedly critiqued dominant knowl-
edge institutions for their failure to confront problems of social stratification,
nativistic class division, and labor exploitation (with their gendered, racial-
ized, and classed dimensions), and for allowing eugenic framings of urban
poverty and “disorder” to be justified as inevitable outcomes of “natural”
social and racial hierarchies. By the turn of the century, US campuses, univer-
sities, local municipalities, and institutions of the nation’s cultural establish-
ment were not only visibly accommodating eugenic advocates, but would also
become some of the most prominent channels for elite classes to promote
and amplify eugenic fervor in the name of national order and preservation.
Eugenic researchers’ proximity to US elites and knowledge classes further
provided them access to expanding governing circles that by the turn of the
century had already allowed their data collection efforts to proliferate with
commissions from local and state-level public offices. Such developments
fed feminist convictions for the need to develop new, independent research
infrastructures that would work to not only foster critical forms of knowledge
production that mainstream institutions had marginalized (if not altogether
silenced), but would also tie the process of empirical data collection to alterna-
tive forms of civic accountability and reform-oriented relations beyond the
authority of established elites and academic professionals.
This chapter reviews the novel set of pluralistic research methods that
Hull House residents developed to document and visualize local data, includ-
ing in the Hull-House Maps and Papers volume that quickly placed them
at the forefront of new social science techniques. Such approaches, as femi-
nist historians note, played foundational roles in establishing fields such as
urban sociology, social work, occupational health and safety, and workplace
­inspection in later decades (Deegan 1988; O’Connor 2002; Schultz 2006;
Sklar 1985). More than a century ago, while eugenics was surging in national
popularity (discussed in chapter 1), immigrant and feminist data research-
ers at the Hull House project posed early questions about the intersection
of power and data, the knowledge practices of dominant institutions, and
their impact on diverse marginalized communities. Critical of the standard
epistemological infrastructures by which data on marginalized communities
accrued, and that allowed dominant institutions to maintain stature in soci-
ety despite their lack of public accountability and the flagrant exploitation

R e l at ion a l I n f r a s t ruc t u r e s • 115

of society’s most vulnerable sectors that continued undeterred, Hull House
researchers refused to be integrated into the institutional establishment.
What they pressed for instead through their local engagements in Chicago’s
19th Ward were alternative research infrastructures whose endeavors would
not be defined through the norms and claims of research professionals nor
the ideals of “objective” science—particularly that tied to a White, elite,
male-dominated academy and state bureaucracy. Rather, they imagined what
I call here “relational infrastructures” that organized data work around new
networks of political collaboration whose research-based endeavors could be
led by the very actors marginalized by mainstream knowledge institutions.
Moreover, Hull House’s feminist researchers defined the success of their
research engagements not so much by the scale of data collected or conven-
tions of academic prestige, but around the capacity to pluralize coalitional
relationships and orient collaborative knowledge practices toward the trans-
formation of broader social structures.
While the US settlement house movement drew increasing public
­attention to turn-of-the-century public crises, including hazardous labor con-
ditions and the exploitation of the working poor, immigrant, and Black and
female laborers, Hull House’s commitment to developing distinctive collabo-
rations, along with its critical orientation to established institutions, enabled
its unique success in advancing urban and social welfare reforms that came
to define the era. Its work in campaigning for key legal reforms, including the
eight-hour workday, a minimum wage, and the elimination of child labor,
championed what historians today underscore as “a new ethical paradigm”
(O’Connor 2002) that transformed knowledge and public understanding
of poverty. This approach emphasized poverty’s roots in unemployment,
low wages, labor exploitation, and political disfranchisement of vulnerable
gendered, raced, and classed populations, families, and households, and
“more generally in the social disruptions associated with large-scale urban-
ization and industrial capitalism” (O’Connor 2004, 18). Its advocates thus
emphasized collective responsibility and social justice over dominant social
Darwinist and eugenic models of the day that naturalized social hierarchy
and framed poverty as an inevitable part of society, the fault of the poor
themselves, and the result of individual pathology, moral failure, or biological
destiny. Hull House residents took leadership in the drafting of new reform
legislations at city, state, and federal levels, channeling their work toward dis-
entrenching dominant ways of framing marginalized households and families
from established knowledge infrastructures of the state and academy. They

116 • c h a p t e r FOU R
worked instead to create new infrastructures where socioeconomic inequity’s
causes could be seen and treated as systemic and tied to the exploitative
practices of corporate capital—rather than rooted in individual failings or
biological destiny.
This chapter revisits the late nineteenth century to attend to the long
history of feminist data practice and to likewise underscore the legacies
of work committed to imagine and insist upon the possibility of making
knowledge infrastructures and data futures otherwise. It explores how
central to the innovations of the collective of female, queer, and immigrant
authors organized under Hull House was their cultivation of novel forms
of intersectional politics and solidarity infrastructures that grounded their
alternative data work as necessarily relational. While such relationships
were actively embraced and foundational to the knowledge practice of Hull
House researchers, such critical forms of organizing were marginalized and
increasingly banned within elite academic campuses. Following a review of
academic politics at the time of Hull House Maps and Papers’ release, I turn
to the relational infrastructures that came to define the data work of Hull
House’s feminist researchers included in the Maps and Papers volume. I con-
trast this with the objectifying techniques and systematic surveillance used to
dataify and produce popular data visualizations of poor and immigrant
households and enclaves—in particular, the 1885 public health map of San
Francisco’s Chinatown that justified US eugenic immigration bans at the
turn of the century. While eugenic data visualizations aimed to expedite
civic amputations to optimize the survival of the “fit,” the data methods
developed by the feminist, queer, and immigrant researchers of Chicago’s
Hull House pressed for explicitly community-based research infrastructures
to support diversified ways of seeing “working households” and to insist upon
the possibility of new systems of knowing through relations and reform work
directly grounded in the residential districts of working f­ amilies themselves.

Refusing Dominant Infrastructures

and the Eugenic Academy

US universities were among the first sites in the nation to cultivate and
­organize around the promotion of eugenics, with at least 376 universities
and colleges, including Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Berkeley, and
Cornell (Cohen 2016b; Miller 2020), teaching eugenics in courses by the

R e l at ion a l I n f r a s t ruc t u r e s • 117

early decades of the twentieth century. Distinguished figures, including
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., then the dean of Harvard Medical School, pub-
licly endorsed eugenics in national publications like the Atlantic Monthly.
There, he wrote in 1875 of eugenics’ promise in predicting criminal behavior
and “deep-rooted moral defects” of individuals that were surely as tied to
genetic inheritance, as Galton had already “so conclusively shown,” as genius
and talent in individuals were (Holmes 1875).
Eager to put eugenic ideals into national practice, Harvard alumni1 and
faculty came together in 1894 to found the Immigration Restriction League
as a network to advance legislation to enforce racialized immigration quo-
tas, obligatory literacy tests for immigrants, and the sterilization of “unfit”
citizens. Harvard President Charles William Eliot (president from 1869 to
1909) and his successor, A. Lawrence Lowell (from 1909 to 1933), as well as
Bowdoin College President William DeWitt Hyde (also a Harvard alum)
notably served as vice presidents for the League. Eliot even became a vocal
promoter by helping the Immigration Restriction League’s membership
grow rapidly to hundreds of Harvard alumni and members of the East Coast
elite through public endorsements. By the late nineteenth century, the elite
US academy had become such a significant channel for eugenics promotion
that i­nstitutions like Harvard could be called a eugenics “brain trust” by
­contemporary historians. With so many administrators, faculty, alumni, and
multiple presidents at the forefront of the movement, it was no stretch to
call eugenics part of “the intellectual mainstream at the University,” where
“scarcely any significant Harvard voices, if any at all, were raised against it”
(Cohen 2016a).
Enthusiasm for eugenics was echoed across the leadership circuits of
other US campuses, too. When Stanford’s founding president, naturalist
David Starr Jordan, was recruited to head the private California univer-
sity in 1891 after having served as the youngest president of the University
of Indiana, he had already begun to teach courses on Darwin and the
theory of ­natural selection at Indiana. There, he had “becom[e] increas-
ingly convinced” (Gunderman 2021) of eugenic ideals around genetics’
powerful influences over human fate. By 1898, Jordan would write of his
distress over “the ­dangers of foreign immigration [that] lie in the overflow
of hereditary unfitness” (Committee to Review Namings in Honor of
Indiana University’s Seventh President David Starr Jordan 2020). In com-
ing years, he would gain ­prominence and renown not only for his “widely
re-printed” pro-eugenics treatise in The Blood of the Nation (1902), but also

118 • c h a p t e r FOU R
for his l­ ong-standing leadership and dedication to the institutionalization of
eugenic policy that centrally defined the last four decades of his career. He
would use his stature and advocacy to, among other things, get the world’s
first forced-sterilization law enacted in Indiana in 1907. California soon fol-
lowed in 1909. In 1928, Jordan would help found the Human Betterment
Foundation in Pasadena—to compile and redistribute information on the
benefits of forced sterilization policies to other states, as well as to ensure that
California’s sterilization program could serve as the nation’s leading model.
The Foundation’s initial board organized a range of California’s intellectual
elite into an influence engine that included Justin Miller, dean of the College
of Law at the University of Southern California; Paul Popenoe, a Stanford
graduate and future cofounder of the Ladies Home Journal; and David Starr
Jordan, who was by then chancellor of Stanford University. Later members
would include Lewis Terman, the Stanford psychologist best known for
creating the Stanford-Binet test of IQ; Robert Andrew Millikan, Chair of
the Executive Council of Caltech; William B. Munro, Harvard professor
of political science; and Herbert M. Evans and Samuel J. Holmes, professors
and faculty of anatomy and zoology at the University of California, Berkeley.
Among the Foundation’s credits was the release of the book Sterilization for
Human Betterment: A Summary of Results of 6,000 Operations in California,
1909–1929, with Macmillan Press in 1929.
Elite academic institutions’ leadership in eugenics would only grow
through the early decades of the twentieth century. Oliver Wendell Holmes
Sr.’s son of the same name, Supreme Court Justice, Harvard alum, and fellow
career eugenicist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., would infamously preside over
the Buck v. Bell case of 1927 that sustained the legality of states’ forced ster-
ilization of US citizens in state care. Following the founding of the Eugenics
Record Office (ERO) by Harvard’s Charles Davenport, the Immigration
Restriction League partnered with the ERO to realize not only a new literacy
requirement bill for immigrants in 1917, but also to see to the passing of the
Immigration Act of 1924 that historically imposed severe national quotas to
keep non-Anglo European immigrants out of the United States. Targeting
Jewish, southern and eastern European, and Asian immigrants in particular,
it would allow immigration from northern Europe to increase significantly,
while Jewish immigration fell from 190,000 in 1920 to 7,000 in 1926, and
with immigration from Asia—already severely restricted from the Chinese
Exclusion Acts from the 1870s onward—almost completely cut off until
1952 (Cohen 2016a).

R e l at ion a l I n f r a s t ruc t u r e s • 119

 Undoubtedly, when Hull House opened its doors to the households of
the 19th Ward in 1889, its residents were well aware of how much rapid urban
growth, unrest, and the “immigration problem” had come to define debates
and opinion among the nation’s intellectual elite. By the final decade of the
nineteenth century, cities like Chicago had seen their size more than double,
with Chicago’s population growing from 503,165 to 1,099,850 between 1880
and 1890 (Reiff 2005). By 1890, over 40 percent of all Cook County residents
were foreign born, with 78 percent of individuals classified by the census as
“white” being either foreign born or children of immigrants. Districts like
the 19th Ward were among Chicago’s most densely populated areas, where
varied new southern and eastern European households settled (Fischer 2014).
The expansion of US settlements at the turn of the century corresponded
with the height of immigration from non–Anglo Saxon nations and grow-
ing eugenic anxieties among US elites around the declining percentages of
immigrants from Great Britain, Germany, and Scandinavia. By the final
decades of the nineteenth century, labor unrest and organizing within the
city’s manufacturing and working classes that mobilized large numbers of
immigrant men, women, and children from ethnic communities had come
to define Chicago. From the period between the US Civil War and World
War I, no other city in the nation exceeded it “in the number, breadth, inten-
sity, and national importance of labor upheavals” (Schneirov 2005). In the
latter part of the nineteenth century, Chicago had come to be recognized
as the nation’s center of labor organizing, as general strikes that had been
growing in the city since the 1860s culminated into a coordinated national
strike on May 1, 1886, that organized eighty-eight thousand workers in 307
separate strikes around the country to demand an eight-hour workday (Thale
2005). As national headlines followed around Chicago’s Haymarket Affair
of 1886 and the Pullman Strike of 1894, anti-labor repression and senti-
ment among the nation’s elite would grow, becoming even more entrenched
and intensified.
Within just a few years after its founding, the University of Chicago, and
its Department of Sociology, too, had gained a reputation for their “particu-
larly repressive record” (Deegan 1988, 167) on prolabor sympathies among
faculty. At the turn of the century, as “Chicago’s business community poured
vast sums into the university” to secure it as a site “controlled by the monied
elite” (Deegan 1988, 170), varied cases of academic freedom would emerge
that resulted in the firing or forced resignation of professors. Historian Mary
Jo Deegan documents the cases of three University of Chicago sociologists

120 • c h a p t e r FOU R
that were removed from the department before 1918, writing that “all the
people whose rights to free speech were constrained practiced a certain
type of sociology” (Deegan 1988, 168) that promoted the rights of workers.
Sociologist Edward Bemis’s firing in 1895, after he had expressed prolabor
opinions during the Pullman Strike of 1894, became known as the first con-
troversy over academic freedom in sociology (Bergquist 1972). Bemis was a
visitor to Hull House at the time who had been publicly critiquing monopo-
lies and advocating for government ownership of public utilities, including
those owned by Standard Oil, for years before his hiring at the University of
Chicago. For his advocacy, he became the object of critique by conservative
business leaders and campus faculty that prompted multiple warnings from
the University of Chicago’s leadership.
President Harper publicly made his admonishment known for prolabor
sympathies, and for Bemis specifically, in his remarks delivered at Chicago’s
First Presbyterian Church in 1894: “Your speech at the First Presbyterian
Church has caused me great annoyance. It is hardly safe for me to venture
into any Chicago clubs. I am pounced upon from all sides. I proposed that
during the remainder of your connection with the University you exercise
great care in public utterances about questions that are agitating the minds
of the people” (Bergquist 1972, 387). University of Chicago economist J.
Laurence Laughlin urged Harper to take stronger action than verbal rep-
rimands, writing to Harper in the summer of 1894 that “[Bemis] is making
very hard the establishment of a great railroad interest in the University. . . .
[I]n my opinion, the duty of the good name of the University now transcends
any soft-heartedness to an individual. . . . [Let] the public know that he goes
because we do not regard him as up to the standard of the University in
ability and in scientific methods” (Bergquist 1972, 387). By the end of the
year, Bemis was officially discharged. Over the next several decades, other
working University of Chicago sociologists and active supporters of labor
rights—including Charles Zueblin, who was one of the few male authors
included in the Hull House Maps and Papers volume—would be fired or
asked to resign from the University of Chicago. Across the nation, as univer-
sity leadership worked to manage the prolabor sympathies of their faculty,
the increasing restrictions around academic speech and growing number of
firings of professors for their political views would prompt the founding
of the American Association of University Professors in 1915.
Largely absent from the majority of the era’s cases, however, were faculty
dismissals for endorsements of eugenics. Harvard University President

R e l at ion a l I n f r a s t ruc t u r e s • 121

Charles William Eliot could feel so protected in advocating for eugenics
that he would, alongside Stanford’s David Starr Jordan, play a prominent
role in building public appetites in the United States for forced sterilization
laws—the world’s first, and that were seen as eugenics’ most radical policy
innovations at the time—well into the 1910s and 1920s. Even the 1900 firing
of Edward Alsworth Ross, fellow eugenics promoter and friend to Stanford
President David Starr Jordan, resulted less out of objection to his views on
eugenics—and his professed embrace of conspiracy theories that blamed
Chinese and Japanese immigration for White “race suicide” (Eule 2015)—
than from concern over his making such remarks before a labor union in
an effort to rally prolabor sentiments in San Francisco (Samuels 1991). 2
Despite his vehement proclamation in his 1900 speech that Whites should
“turn [their] guns upon every vessel bringing Japanese to our shores rather
than to permit them to land” (Eule 2015), Ross’s dismissal from Stanford was
able to gain wide public sympathies among the lettered elite of the nation in
the months following, with editorials and articles published in hundreds of
newspapers to defend Ross, and seven other Stanford professors resigning to
support him (Mohr 1970).
It was this version of a culture of “academic” privilege and “freedom”—
channeled not merely through the individual knowledge practice of the elite
White male faculty working at university campuses, but stabilized, protected,
and reproduced through the larger infrastructures that surrounded them—
that the Hull House researchers refused at the turn of the century. Their
intentionality in growing and developing an alternative model of knowledge
culture in critique of the elitist, White male academy is demonstrated by
their dedication to foster a space that didn’t just defend an abstract version
of scholarly independence, which they had seen could be used in defense of
eugenic and labor positions alike. Neither did they claim their work to be
merely in the name of a decontextualized version of “academic freedom”
that could be weaponized against minority actors. They worked instead to
orient Hull House’s projects and practices to the growth of relational infra-
structures—ones that pluralized alliances and fostered intersectional soli-
darities for researchers and neighborhood collaborators around an explicitly
­anti-nativist, feminist, and prolabor politics and reform agenda.
They labored to generate actively connective spaces that could foster alter-
native means for intersectional knowing and collective being under shared
conditions of rapid change. Organized around efforts to develop pluralistic
approaches to local data practice, their growing gains in political reforms

122 • c h a p t e r FOU R
spoke for the possibilities of drawing together the diverse commitments
of actors working across differential vulnerabilities. The Maps and Papers
volume served as their first signal and mobile testimony to broader publics
for what such a coalitional form of intersectional knowledge work could
produce. And it materialized too their belief in how work to respond to and
create new accountabilities for what knowledge work revealed could look
otherwise when organized through relational infrastructures.

Feminist Relational Infrastructures

and Reaccounting for “Household”

Over a century following the height of the US settlement house movement,

contemporary feminist science studies scholars and critics of “big data” econ-
omies turned to history to underscore the hidden forms of political work
organized through large-scale, long-running infrastructures. Describing the
complexes of research practice that could accrue over time through the sta-
bilizing work of dominant research institutions and bureaucracies, Michelle
Murphy (2017) credited infrastructures for consolidating and “making real”
certain forms of knowledge around the “economy” and “population” in the
early twentieth century. The so-called “epistemic infrastructures” she wrote
of, that included buildings, standards, forms, resources, affective orienta-
tions, and power relations, “created the dense numbers and data about popu-
lation for the sake of the economy,” naturalizing notions of “differential life
worth” while at once turning life into something newly calculable. And as
“assemblages of practices of quantification and intervention conducted by
multidisciplinary and multi-sited experts,” she added, they could transform
what were once experimental practices for quantification and intervention
into pervasive twentieth-century infrastructures. Global agendas—from
development projects to global health, poverty relief, and imperialism—
channeled through such infrastructures could thus come to appear so natural
and inevitable that, in Murphy’s words, “it can it be hard to imagine the
world without them.”
Feminist science studies scholar Susan Leigh Star brought early attention
to how the remarkably overlooked and even boring nature of infrastructures
(1999) could disguise the power of their ordering functions. Drawing atten-
tion to infrastructures as understudied systems that underpinned modern
life—whether railroads and power plants or digital processing systems and

R e l at ion a l I n f r a s t ruc t u r e s • 123

workplace information platforms—she called for new methods to explore
the imbrication of infrastructure and human organization. Reminding
her readers of the “fundamentally relational” (1999, 380) nature of infra-
structures, she would write of their ability to organize and architect human
action and activity at scale. Even while they were conventionally treated as
mere substrates and background to some real action presumed to be located
elsewhere, information infrastructures, by Star’s read, channeled power by
inscribing every conceivable form of variation in practice, culture, and norms
into the foundations of technological design (1999, 389), embedding
them into categories, conventions of legible practice, and taxonomies of
permissible and standard (and nonstandard) use. Even while such embed-
ded programs, designs, and classifications were challenging to perceive,
Star reminded readers that to recognize the hidden work of infrastructures
was to recognize infrastructures as themselves malleable, changeable, and
reprogrammable forms—even if they required additional knowledge, time,
resources, or “a full-scale social movement” to change.
Such framings reverberate through Hull House’s Maps and Papers volume
and its work to draw attention to the overlooked efforts of nineteenth-century
relational infrastructures and the long history of feminist efforts to remake
shared imaginaries through intersectional knowledge practice. Released in
1895 and credited to the “Residents of Hull House” as its collective author,
the Maps and Papers volume was the first collaborative project and publica-
tion to speak for the pluralizing politics behind its methods. Composed of
essays by ten authors—eight of whom were women, two of whom identi-
fied as US immigrants, and only two of whom had university training in
economics or politics—it opened with a short “Prefatory note” from Jane
Addams that stressed the dialogic nature of what they imagined the vol-
ume might activate, writing that the authors “offer these maps and papers to
the public—not as an exhaustive treatise, but as recorded observations that
may possibly be of value.” It cited UK author Charles Booth’s color-coded
wage maps of London—the first of their kind, published in 1886—as an
inspiration. But Hull House’s Maps and Papers volume also added compel-
ling forms of qualitative data to Booth’s visuals by highlighting data drawn
from other varied methods—from direct testimony from the 19th Ward’s
residents to household surveys—and by drawing emphasis to issues of gender,
race, ethnicity, and age as key factors in the economic survival of households.
By modeling how such techniques added context to data and could power-
fully impact the research findings and the v­ isualizations that resulted, Hull

124 • c h a p t e r FOU R
House’s maps came to be recognized as a landmark publication. Historians
would recognize it as the first of many social surveys later conducted in
the 19th Ward and a precursor to the more “sophisticated” sample survey
methodology that had yet to emerge, which leading sociology departments,
including that at the University of Chicago, would instead be credited for in
coming decades (Bulmer, Bales, and Sklar 2011; Deegan 1988; Harkavy and
Puckett 1994; O’Connor 2002; Schultz 2006; Sklar 2011).
Moreover, the Maps and Papers volume and authors had played key roles
in the passage of the Sweatshop Act of 1893 in Illinois that became a model
for other US states. Hull House resident Florence Kelley, in particular, rec-
ognized the potential in leveraging local data and organizing relations from
the 19th Ward to see to the passage of the landmark bill. Kelley, who had
arrived at Hull House as a single mother of three, graduate of the University
of Zurich, and friend and translator of Friedrich Engels, had worked for the
Illinois Bureau of Labor Statistics before she became the first chief factory
inspector of Illinois. Her work with a coalition of varied labor groups and
women’s associations—including the thirty organizations united under
the Illinois Women’s Association (representing diverse political factions,
from women’s suffrage groups to working women’s trade unions)—led to
the drafting of the Sweatshop Act (Skar 1985). The bill not only established
gender- and age-based protections for women and children, outlawing the
employment of children under fourteen in factories and limiting the hours
that women could work, but it also created the state’s first Factory Inspection
Department to regulate general conditions of manufacturing that dispro-
portionately impacted immigrant women and children, whose labor was
exploited under sweatshop systems (Knight 2005).
The Maps and Papers volume’s content reflected such intersectional
political commitments of its feminist researchers, with chapters on
Chicago’s “Sweating System,” “Wage Earning Children,” and “Cloakmakers’
Expenditures,” which introduced some of the first published studies on US
sweatshops, the working conditions of adult men and women, as well as
child labor. Other chapters addressed Czech and Italian community life in
Chicago and “The Settlement’s Impact on the Labor Movement,” with the
collection offering one of the first documentations of the systemic exploita-
tion faced by immigrants and the working poor that highlighted gender and
age as factors. Details on the daily “conditions of life”—from the amount of
air, light, and space available for individuals and families in tenements, to the
schedule of work and sleep that families were required to maintain to sustain

R e l at ion a l I n f r a s t ruc t u r e s • 125

survival wages—were paired with empirical, but, until then, largely invisible
or ignored data on the economic system of Chicago sweatshops: the varying
hourly rates for making a buttonhole or stitching hems, the process of pre-
mature aging caused by work conditions, the deformities and occupational
diseases contracted by child workers, and the lasting effects of industrial
injuries seen in working men and women.
But it was the color-coded Wage Maps of the volume, along with the
written chapters by its authors, where Hull House’s multimethod approach
to social surveys could most compactly be seen. A collaborative creation of
Alice Sinclair Holbrook, who had studied math and the visual arts, and
Florence Kelley, the maps testified to the potential to apply statistical
and visual techniques as a tool for social reform. And they testified, too, to
their utility in challenging the dominant gender, class, and racialized social
categories that anchored the world of White US reading publics of the day.
Their use of “households” as the measuring unit for income in their Wage
Maps, for instance, was an intentional categorization that underscored
the essential contributions of women and children to family income. The
volume authors specified that each “household” indicated could represent
either an entire “family of wage earners” or a single wage earner. Anticipating
the gender, class, and race biases of a White, middle-class reading public
of the era, they explained their disruption of the standard use and dominant
understanding of the “household” category, noting that while readers might
find it unusual to code a single wage earner—assumed to be a single work-
ing man—in the same way as a family “head” with other dependents, the
authors explained, “[I]n this neighborhood, generally a wife and children are
sources of income as well as avenues of expense; and the women wash, do
‘home finishing’ on ready-made clothing, or pick and sell rags; the boys run
errands and . . . the girls work in factories . . . or sell papers on the streets”
(1895). Accordingly, they advocated relinquishing the standard practice of
treating wives and children as “dependents” rather than as contributors to
household income. As they wrote, “[T]he theory that ‘every man supports
his own family’ is as idle . . . as the fiction that ‘everyone can get work if he
wants it’” (1895, 61).
Holbrook further wrote that the context that the written commentary
provided the accompanying maps aimed to make their visualized data
more “intelligible” to readers by doing more than just appealing to their
reason and intellect. Rather, underscoring the affective quality of both the
maps and their accompanying notes, Holbrook explained that they offered

126 • c h a p t e r FOU R
data and context “with the hope of stimulating inquiry and action” in the
reader and to evolve new thoughts and methods toward the development of
not just a detached “scientific” research model, but a model with an invested
“humanitarian” transformation-oriented objective to investigation (1895,
58). She elaborated on decoding the visual data and translating the human
stories behind the wage maps’ abstract classification system, writing, “[T]he
black lots on the map . . . [represent] an average weekly ‘household’ income
of $5.00 or less, or roughly, families unable to gain . . . together [even] $260
dollars a year.”3 Illustrating a typical case, she further explained, “[A worker]
employed on the railroads from twenty to thirty weeks in the year [receives]
$1.23 a day; that is . . . $150.00 to $225.00 a year on the average. [But this is]
not an income of $4.32 a week, or even $2.88 a week, throughout the year,
but of $7.50 a week half the year, and nothing the other half . . . [due to the]
irregularity of employment.”4
Placing extra emphasis on what she intended to not be missed by her
readers, Holbrook added that the blocks colored blue “embraced families”
earning from $5.00 to $10.00 a week—what would translate to USD$174 to
USD$348 in weekly earnings in 20225 (a value below the national poverty
line of $18,3106 in annual income for even a two-person household in the
United States in 2022)—or what she stated as “probably the largest class in
the district.”

Eugenic Data and Visualizing Danger

to White Families

With good reason, the Hull House researchers took pains to explain their
reports and mappings, recognizing that what they argued was far from
the mainstream for lettered publics’ understanding of poor, working class,
and ethnic enclaves in the late nineteenth century. Hull House research-
ers’ data work operated in direct contrast to and refusal of the dominant
social Darwinist paradigms that continued to reinforce readings of poverty
and racial and social hierarchy as inevitable features of society. Comparing
the Hull House efforts with the data publicly circulated by city officials,
particularly on the US West Coast,7 where new migration and immigra-
tion patterns had rapidly changed urban demographics, demonstrates how
public and medical authorities mobilized eugenic methods to track such
changes and report their impacts on “fit” US-born White populations.

R e l at ion a l I n f r a s t ruc t u r e s • 127

 In San Francisco, varied government-sponsored investigations were under-
taken from the mid-nineteenth century onward to map the growing presence
and proximity of Chinese residents and enclaves in the city,8 stressing them
as a source of “terrible pollution of the blood” and “hereditary diseases”
in “rising generations among us” (Farwell, Kunkler, and Pond 1885, 14).
Between 1854 and 1885, at least five studies were commissioned by the city of
San Francisco to document the growing dangers to the physical, moral, and
genetic health of the city posed by the filthy, disease- and criminality-prone
Chinese (Shah 2001).9 Such reports stressed not merely Chinese enclaves as
unparalleled breeding grounds for vice, immorality, crime, and disease, but
also argued for the imposition of heightened forms of control on Chinese
residents as a means of containing the threat they posed to degrade the
future health and progress of the city and its “well-born” White populations.
Ensuring that intensified forms of surveillance, regulation, and restriction
would be maintained on Chinese immigrants as a special category for over
half a century, they would come to play critical roles in the passage of the
series of US Chinese exclusion acts that grew increasingly expansive from
the 1870s onward.
Underscoring the irrefutability of the evidence and data that spoke for the
subhumanity of the “Mongolian race,” city health officers like C. M. Bates
would directly liken the Chinese to “cattle or hogs” crowding together in
filth and moral squalor. In his 1869 municipal report, Bates would attest
that the Chinese “habits and manner of life [were] of such a character as to
breed and engender disease wherever they reside” (1869, 233). And he warned
that without some form of heightened intervention by authorities, “some
disease of a malignant form may break out among them and communicate
itself to our Caucasian population” (1869, 233). Just two years later, in 1871,
Thomas Logan, the secretary of the California State Board of Health and a
nationally reputed physician that served as president of the American
Medical Association, commissioned an investigation of San Francisco’s
Chinatown to track the “hereditary vices” of the Chinese, predicting that
their “engrafted peculiarities” preordained Chinese residents to physical and
moral sicknesses (Shah 2001, 28).
By 1885, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors would release its most com-
prehensive study to the public: a 114-page report on the conditions of the
multiethnic “Chinese quarter.” This allowed surveyors to be employed to
accompany city officials as they visited “every floor and every room” to ensure
that the “conditions of occupancy . . . are fully described” (Farwell, Kunkler,

128 • c h a p t e r FOU R
Figure 6. Official Map of Chinatown of San Francisco, prepared under the supervision of the Special Committee of the Board of Supervisors, July 1885, by W. B. Farwell,
John E. Kunkler, and E. B. Pond. The legend highlights “Chinese Prostitution” (green), “Chinese Gambling Houses” (pink), “Chinese Opium Resorts” (yellow), “Chinese
Joss (Worship) House” (red), and “White Prostitution” (blue). (Courtesy, Cornell University—PJ Mode Collection of Persuasive Cartography)
and Pond 1885, 1). Authored by city supervisors Willard Farwell, John
Kunkler, and E. B. Pond,10 the report built on nearly two decades of what
historian Nayan Shah called the “systematic surveillance” of San Francisco’s
Chinatown (2001). He notes that while “businesses and residences occupied
by Irish, Italian, Portuguese, Mexican, Canadian, and Anglo Americans
continued to thrive in so-called Chinatown,” they were “of little interest to
the health inspectors” (Shah 2001, 25). The authors confirmed in the report’s
opening pages that the increased control, “constant watching and close
supervision [of] the residents of Chinatown” had forced “less obnoxious”
habits among the Chinese. But they elaborated that Chinatown still stood
“as a constant menace to the welfare of [well-born, US] society . . . and always
will, so long as it is inhabited by people of the Mongolian race” (1885, 4). It
included as evidence the first “Official Map of Chinatown in San Francisco”
that resulted from the city’s commission. Covering a twelve-block city
area and permeated with color-coded blocks representing sites of “Chinese
Prostitution,” “Chinese Opium Resorts,” and “Chinese Gambling Houses,”
as well as nearby sites of “White Prostitution,” the map readily demonstrated
the spread of vice and “the great, overshadowing evil which Chinese immi-
gration has inflicted upon this people” that is “inseparable from the very
nature of the race” (1885, 5).
The authors of the 1885 investigation took pains to stress the novelty
of the data—qualitative and quantitative alike—and revelations uncovered
through the exhaustiveness of the methods they deployed. Highlighting the
“system of computation” (1885, 6) they developed, and that a study of this
kind necessitated the empiricization of the scale of contamination coming
from Chinatown, they noted their work as a first-of-its-kind census of an
immigrant enclave and its impacts on the broader population. They drew
attention to their comprehensive—and emphatically invasive—techniques
of documentation, including requiring “every building in the district . . . [be]
visited, examined, [and] measured,” with the number of rooms and bunks
and “the number of men, women and children of Chinese origin who sleep
in the d­ istrict” enumerated (emphasis theirs; 1885, 6). Inserting a visual chart
to ­tabulate the number of bunks per block that their diligent surveyors’ work
had uncovered, they described an elaborate relay of shared bunks that allowed
“thousands of Chinamen” to rotate through compacted sleeping schedules,
attributing the condition not to any system of labor exploitation, but instead
to the “universal custom among the Chinese to herd” (1885, 6). They used a
separate table to visually classify Chinese women and children in Chinatown

130 • c h a p t e r FOU R
into one of three categories and to lament that less than 10 percent of the
women and children in Chinatown—or fifty-seven women and fifty-nine
children—were “living as families.” In the narrative accompanying the table’s
quantifications, they further decried the lack of a discernible male household
head or a nuclear structure for the 761 Chinese women and 576 children
they counted as “herded together with apparent indiscriminate parental rela-
tions, and no family classification, so far as can be ascertained.” Specifying
a third category for Chinatown’s Chinese women and children, labeled as
“professional prostitutes and children living together,” they narrated they
had counted some 567 women and 84 children living in such “revolting”
conditions of “intermediate family relations” that it was impossible to tell
“where the family relationship leaves off and prostitution begins” (1885, 9).
The authors likewise drew attention to the eyewitness accounts they
deployed and that echoed the midnight journeys into Chinatown and medi-
cal travelogues published in newspapers and magazines of the era. Such pas-
sages were used to visceralize data and project the culpability of Chinese
immigrants to urban deterioration. For instance, among the varied “discov-
eries” Farwell, Kunkler, and Pond stressed as emerging from their investiga-
tive work was the “number of degraded” non-Chinese women working as
“white prostitutes” in Chinatown and the conditions of the social relations
they maintained. In a separate section in the report that they dedicated to
“white prostitution” alone, they anticipated shock and alarm from their
audience as they shared in its paragraphs that “the point that will impress
itself more strongly on the ordinary mind is that these [white] women obtain
their patronage entirely from the Chinese themselves” (1885, 15). Even more
“disgusting” (1885, 16), they continued, was the discovery of White women
“living and cohabiting with Chinamen” (1885, 16) as wives or mistresses.
Emphasizing the special attention required by Chinese prostitutes as
a particular “menace” to be controlled, the authors used their report to
reify the anti-Chinese misinformation of the era that targeted Chinese
women. Their report thus requoted 1877 testimony from the Board of
Health’s Dr. H. H. Toland (Trauner 1978), as well as testimony from police
officer James Rogers, who stated that “most of the Chinese houses of prosti-
tution are patronized by Whites” (1885, 12), that ninety percent (1885, 13) of
­venereal disease in the city came from Chinese prostitutes, and that White
male patrons as young as “eight and ten years old” (1885, 12) had contracted
diseases from Chinese brothels. Such anxieties drove the report authors to
intensively classify the social relations of the Chinese and fed their drive

R e l at ion a l I n f r a s t ruc t u r e s • 131

to publicize Chinese immigrants’ affront to US White middle-class domestic-
ity and morality. The racialized and gendered logic of Farwell, Kunkler, and
Pond’s population census thus created, as Nayan Shah writes, “an assessment
of Chinese society driven by statistical evidence” (2001, 40) that not only
revealed the Chinese as undoing models of White, middle-class propriety, but
that predicted the degradation of White families and the future “fitness” of
American society through proximity to the Chinese. Nothing less than the
“inaugurat[ion of] new rules and new policies, under which [the Chinese]
must be brought,” were needed, Farwell, Kunkler, and Pond vehemently
argued, with new, heightened regimes of racialized and gendered surveillance
imposed on Chinatown “if they are to continue to remain among us” (1885, 5).
Anticipating the emerging market in eugenic-themed books, whose sales
in the early twentieth century would turn leading US eugenicists such as
David Starr Jordan and Madison Grant into best-selling international
authors (Regal 2004), Farwell would republish the Special Committee
report, its map, and an additional one-hundred-page work as a three-part
­collected volume titled “The Chinese at Home and Abroad” in 1885, with
A. L. Bancroft, the first major publisher in California. Bancroft ran news-
paper advertisements throughout the United States, and in ads tailored
for West Coast papers in particular, the volume was praised as being “the
Book of the Hour!” for “showing the peculiar characteristics of this repul-
sive people” that “proves the appalling danger of retaining this heathen race
among us.”11 Farwell, Kunkler, and Pond’s emphasis on the Chinatown
map’s ­visualization of data to dramatize the “incontrovertible” danger to the
White public would likewise bear early lessons for US eugenicists in coming
decades. This included Madison Grant, who would use varied maps to visual-
ize national migration patterns in his best-selling 1916 book The Passing of the
Great Race: Or, The Racial Basis of European History.
As covered in chapter 1, eugenicists readily recognized the power of
their data visualizations. During the US congressional hearings that led
to the passage of the historic 1917 and 1924 immigration restriction acts,
eugenic researchers covered the walls of the US congressional hearing
room with expanded versions of Madison Grant’s maps. Harry Laughlin
of the Eugenics Record Office, the leading US eugenics policy and research
body, presented various tables and statistics to the US committee debating
the 1917 act to visualize the data from his study of populations, classified
by ethnicity, at 445 public institutions, and establish the “fact” of degen-
eracy among immigrant groups who threatened to “dilute the bloodstream

132 • c h a p t e r FOU R
of America.” Dramatizing the “fact of race suicide” among well-born US
Whites and the growing flood of immigrants from nations with undesirable
and degenerating traits, eugenics data visualizations helped produce the wave
of political support necessary to pass the historic acts in the United States
that established, for the first time, heavily restrictive national quotas and
literacy requirements from immigrants from almost all nations, save a hand-
ful of designated “Nordic” and A ­ nglo-Saxon nations (Black 2003; Okrent
2019). 12

Like other surveyors of Chinatown of the era, Farwell, Kunkler, and

Pond oriented their report toward “reasoning” for a heightened version of
eugenic social policy among the White lettered classes of San Francisco.
This included not just amplifying literacy around the danger that the “unfit”
classes posed to healthy White families, but also fortifying institutions to
ensure the protection and “preservation” of White elite households, as well
as the segregation, expulsion, and hyperregulation of poor and unfit classes
this entailed. They would thus end their report by asserting that the weight
of evidence led them to recommend that the Chinese should be driven
out of San Francisco with the full backing of law enforcement and city offi-
cials, given that “our laws [are] necessarily obnoxious and revolting to the
Chinese and the more rigidly this enforcement is insisted upon and carried
out the less endurable will existence be to them here, the less attractive will
life be to them in California. Fewer will come and fewer will remain. . . .
Scatter them by such a policy as this to other States” (1885, 67–68). In strik-
ing contrast to the localized studies of Chicago’s ethnic enclaves undertaken
by Hull House actors, Chinatown surveyors deployed data collection and
explicitly racialized visualization methods that aimed to establish a popular
literacy around immigrant enclaves as a direct source of vice and contamina-
tion. By their emphasis, immigrant quarters should be read as sites of d­ anger,
particularly to “healthy” White, US-born populations, rather than as sites
of systemic exploitation and a symptom of the modern advancement of a
racialized and gendered capitalism. Immigrant classes themselves were inher-
ent sources of moral, physical, and intellectual sickness, whose poverty and
“subhuman” standards of living were empirical testimonies of the depth and
inevitability of their pathology. And if there were new governing infrastruc-
tures to be built, they should be oriented not toward increasing oversight and
regulation of institutions with economic or political power, but toward the
surveillance of poor and contaminating migrant classes themselves, whose
proximity to “well-born” Whites ensured future social degeneracy.

R e l at ion a l I n f r a s t ruc t u r e s • 133

 Pluralizing Relational Commitments
and Situated Accountability
in Intersectional Data Practice

In contrast to eugenic approaches to research that popularized segregationist

forms of data methods and visualization, the methods developed through the
local social surveys of activist researchers, like those organized around
the Hull House Maps and Papers volume, worked to establish a framework
where poverty could be investigated as a problem of political or social econ-
omy rather than an inherent trait of the poor. Household exploitation, low
wages, un- and “under-” employment, long hours, hazardous work condi-
tions, and the lack of oversight of the practices governing the distribution of
income and wealth could be understood as the primary sources of poverty.
Such a framework allowed investigators to examine the political economy of
gender, race, and class by placing emphasis on the discriminatory policies that
shaped the labor market and that directly impacted working households and
family members of all ages. Filtered through nineteenth-century feminist
methods and commitments to intersectional organizing, the social survey
asserted a powerful argument to join research with a form of justice-oriented
institutional reform. Researchers and residents at Hull House advanced such
a practice, as historian Alice O’Connor writes, “by devoting as much energy
to displaying and publicizing as to amassing the data; by using it as the basis
for local organizing and community action; and by making research a col-
lective endeavor that engaged the energies of amateur as well as professional
social scientists” (2002, 27).
Feminist and labor historians note that it was the coalitional nature of
Hull House—centered on fostering not just a collective network of life,
friendship, and relationality among its primarily female-identified residents,
but also on cultivating a multifaceted network of diverse reform-oriented
activists and organizers—that enabled it to gain a distinctive political effi-
cacy. Kathryn Kish Sklar describes Hull House as a “social vehicle” (1985,
670) that provided feminist researchers with a space for independent politi-
cal action that could intervene in, while remaining outside of, the control
of White male–dominated institutions and associations. Kelley and the
authors of the Maps and Papers volume found in Hull House a space that
multiplied intersectional relationalities and alternative forms of support
that exceeded the norms of dominant institutions. Through it, they could
foster research relationships and political collaborations with a diverse array

134 • c h a p t e r FOU R
of other reform activists and organizations—including male leadership from
varied labor associations and professional bases—while still grounding their
activity in a feminist- and queer-led community that accommodated other
means to support research lives among marginalized practitioners. Kelley
described in personal letters how Hull House provided a refuge for herself
and her three children (then ages four, five, and six) after she had escaped an
abusive marriage. She would likewise credit its community for helping her
find boarding, employment, child care, and an alternative “family life” (Sklar
1985, 661) over a decade of her career not only as she completed work for the
Maps and Papers volume, but also as she worked to draft the 1893 Sweatshop
Act, serve as the state’s first chief factory inspector, and lead its office’s twelve-
person staff to oversee prohibitions against tenement workshops and enforce
other new labor regulations.
Hull House researchers’ refusal to allow their relational infrastructure
to be incorporated into the university demonstrated their understanding
of the critical work of their project as something that could best advance
by remaining independent of dominant knowledge institutions of state or
academy. Addams would stress in the preface to the Maps and Papers volume
that what qualified and authorized its studies were the “situatedness” of their
“observations”—and the important detail of the authors’ “actual residence”
in the 19th Ward. As Addams put it, “[T]he settlement method of living
among the people and staying with them a long time” was a technique where
recording observations might bear added value precisely “because they are
immediate, and the result of long acquaintance.” In contrast to what was
just beginning to emerge in the 1890s as legitimate “social science” in the
­academy—built around an increasingly apolitical and objectivist model
of social science—Hull House’s Maps and Papers argued for a critically
oriented form of social knowledge that was the direct result of feminists’
and diversely allied researchers’ integration of investigation and advocacy.
Social science methods, by Addams’s argument, could be imagined to serve a
more intentional form of local “constructive work” that prioritized cultivat-
ing new forms of intersectional coalitions and moved against “sociological
­investigation” as a primary justification.
Such a struggle over the terms of research on poverty would indeed come
to define the shifting terms of social science knowledge professions in the
United States in the early part of the twentieth century. What had centrally
accommodated reform-minded social investigators’ aims to extend the
boundaries of antipoverty research to issues of political reform, trade unions,

R e l at ion a l I n f r a s t ruc t u r e s • 135

and community-based organizing gradually came to be a more detached,
professionalized model of technical, social, “scientific” inquiry. As O’Connor
writes, the model of poverty knowledge that emerged in the early decades of
the twentieth century “became more and more about [the behavior of] poor
people and less and less about culture or political economy” (2001, 16). The
early decades of the twentieth century would mark a shift toward academic
and professional institutions, like the University of Chicago’s Department of
Sociology, as generating the dominant paradigm in poverty research. With
an emphasis on theory-based, objectivist research as the appropriate knowl-
edge base for policy, University of Chicago sociologists solidified academic
infrastructures for sociology as a scientific profession and grew a research
and training department that aimed to emulate the experimental techniques
of the natural sciences. Leading professors in the Department of Sociology
(like Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess) and their students treated local
neighborhoods more as labs for research than as sites for political organiz-
ing, collaboration, or industrial reform, and poverty was read as an inevi-
table by-product of modern cities, social disorganization, cultural lags, or
individual behavior, rather than rooted in a racialized and gendered form of
industrial capitalism.
Historians note that by the late 1920s it was this model that largely
­displaced Progressive-Era reform as a source of expertise, while reinforcing
a growing professional and gender divide between academic social science
and feminized or “amateur” reform research. Hull House contributions and
research methods would come to be framed as “social work” applications and
“social administration,” rather than as sociology or social science (concret-
ized in the University of Chicago’s 1920 incorporation of a School of Social
Work that was originally founded by Hull House alum Edith Abbott, Grace
Abbott, and Sophonisba Breckinridge) (Deegan 1988; O’Connor 2001;
Schultz 2006). The claim to scientific objectivity was increasingly codified
as depending on technical skills, methods, information, and ­professional
networks that historically excluded marginalized sectors of society, includ-
ing groups most vulnerable to poverty themselves, including women, people
of color, non-Anglo immigrants, and working classes. As O’Connor writes,
“It is this disparity of status and interest that make poverty research an
­inescapably political act . . . putting poverty knowledge [practitioners] in a
position not just to reflect [on] but to replicate the social inequalities it means
to investigate” (2001, 11).

136 • c h a p t e r FOU R
 To create alternatives entailed building relational infrastructures where
active organizers could not only interact through Hull House, but where a
host of other spaces and activities would be developed and oriented to the
neighbors and residents of the 19th Ward and their interests in advocacy,
reform, and organizing. Among the programs it fostered were college exten-
sion courses (that drew some hundreds of students, largely young women
diversely employed in public schools, factories, shops, and offices by 1895),
a summer school, a students’ association, a reading room and library, sev-
eral clubs for trade unions (including the Bindery Girl’s Union and a men’s
Typographical Union, both founded in the Hull House), an Eight Hour
Club (dedicated to the passage of the Factory and Workshop Bill), a 19th
Ward Improvement Club that met with “active members” from the Illinois
legislature to advocate for issues ranging from street cleaning and public
baths to coops for heating and coal, and a Working People’s Social Science
Club that drew in globally renowned speakers (including Susan B. Anthony
and John Dewey) to a “neighborhood forum on social and economic topics.”
As a relational infrastructure, Hull House generated varied alumni
who went on to serve as reform-oriented public leaders who helped found
varied national organizations dedicated to social change. This included the
Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL), the National Consumers League
(NCL), the National Committee on Child Labor, the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the Progressive
Party. Among the authors of the Maps and Papers volume alone, Florence
Kelley would go on to become the first chief factory inspector of Illinois
and later go on to the National Consumers League. Isabel Eaton would go
on to work with W. E. B. Du Bois as the only appointed assistant for the
historic Philadelphia Negro study, conducting a door-to-door examination of
the ward and helping collect over five thousand personal interviews. Among
other Hull House alumni, Julia Lathrop helped found the Chicago Juvenile
Court before she became the first director of the US Children’s Bureau in 1911
and later drafted the Sheppard-Towner Infancy and Maternity Protection
Act (passed in 1921). Physician Alice Hamilton pioneered the study of the
toxic effects of chemical exposure in workplaces among the “dangerous”
trades that especially targeted women, immigrants, and minority workers.
Grace Abbott helped draft the Social Security Act of 1935 and worked to later
promote the US Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. Sophonisba Breckinridge
and Edith Abbott founded the School of Social Service Administration in

R e l at ion a l I n f r a s t ruc t u r e s • 137

1903, which was incorporated into the University of Chicago in 1920. And
while many of their names never became household familiarities, feminist
historians today underscore how the infrastructures they helped develop—
from new welfare policies, acts, and regulations to civic organizations and
unions—continue their work today (Fitzpatrick 1990).
They arguably fostered more accountable forms of scientific practice
and methods (Harding 2006; Haraway 1988) that would work to rede-
fine fundamental categories around the human and to recognize the
intersectional forms of explicitly raced, gendered, classed, and colonial
forms of power that narrowed its terms of inclusion (Wynter 2003). Such
a mode of “situated knowledge” practice would be as interested as much in
what we know (as a matter of scale) as how we collectively come to know it
together (Haraway 1988), a science in which not just responsibility but the
more relational stance of “response-ability” toward fellow beings becomes
key (Barad 2012; Haraway 2008). Here, the compatibilities and interde-
pendencies of diverse forms of accounting and data, and of calculative
and ­interpretive approaches alike, might be bridged. Beyond developing
merely empirical infrastructures to extend and normalize research findings,
Hull House researchers’ work to build relational infrastructures fostered
new research methods as forms of interconnective, intersectional being as
­conditions for knowing. Like the forms of situated knowledge that femi-
nist science studies philosopher Donna Haraway argued for, such modes of
localized, grounded seeing intentionally documented empirical worlds “from
below.” They operated in distinction to the “God’s eye trick” of a distant
and ultimately “unaccountable” scientific practice that came to occupy social
studies, which increasingly placed primary interest in the “technical work” of
amassing and assessing new “data” and thus could continue to absolve itself
of response to (or response-ability for) their social implications and impacts
on vulnerable populations.
In the Era of Big Data, a “God’s eye” view of the world has found a new
contemporary architecture to argue for its supremacy as a means of seeing
and knowing the world. Big Tech companies’ forms of data capture extend a
hyperdetached, contextless mode of seeing from “nowhere” that naturalizes
an ambition to know the world via a sheer breadth of scale and volume in
big data. In contrast, relational infrastructures ground their methods and
practices for collaborative knowing in other means of being that prioritize
context, copresence, and accountability. Relational infrastructures not only
underscore the need for recognition of mutual interdependencies between

138 • c h a p t e r FOU R
agents and subjects of knowledge-making, but also call for a means of
grounded response and response-ability to dismantle systems of exploitation
and dispossession together. Far from reading their modes of local, situated
engagements as limitations or liabilities in scale that weakened or hampered
the goals for an abstracted “universal” science, these situated methods
could instead be read as explicitly strengthening accounts of the empirical
world and cultivating more accountable approaches to how researchers even
come to claim knowledge at all.
And as will be covered in the following two chapters, such work con-
tinues on in a range of strategies channeled through justice-oriented data
coalitions today.

R e l at ion a l I n f r a s t ruc t u r e s • 139

 FIVE

The Coalitional Lives of Data Pluralism

Intergenerational Feminist Resistance
to Data Apartheid

In the months leading up to the US Supreme Court’s decision

to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, city streets all across the United
States began to be seen pulsing with waves of green. That summer, as the
court handed down its decision to dismantle fifty years of legal protection
around abortion rights in the United States, feminist and reproductive rights
advocates began filling sidewalks and streets with a sea of green, wearing the
recognizable green scarves that Latin American feminists had been donning
for nearly two decades to call for the right to legal, safe, and free abortions
in varied national contexts across the continent. Across cities large and small
in the United States, demonstrators marched and chanted with green ban-
ners and released green smoke into the air, rechanneling the symbolic acts
that had marked Latin American feminist actions from the capital city
streets of Buenos Aires and Bogota to the provinces of the high Andes. Now,
in the marble hallways of the US Capitol building and on the streets outside,
congressional representatives could be seen wearing the same green scarves
that had turned Latin American city streets into a new symbol of coalitional
feminist futures.
For good reason, US reproductive rights activists were loudly invoking
solidarity with movements in Latin America. In the summer of 2022, the
US Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision
turned the United States into only one of only three nations in the world
(with Poland and Nicaragua) that had heightened restrictions to abortion
access in the twenty-first century. In Latin America, however, a feminist
tide was pointedly making landmark political gains and was turning the
region in the other direction. In December 2020, after a multiyear-long
debate, Argentina’s senate voted to legalize abortion. Less than a year later, in

140
Figure 7. Photo of the feminist march in support of abortion rights in Buenos Aires,
Argentina, on June 4, 2018, taken by the drone of the Prensa Obrera. (By Prensa Obrera /
https://youtu.be/Dp3soA2oDLY?si=7P7ftNorm-0CXQYg)

September 2021, Mexico’s Supreme Court voted to decriminalize abortion.

And in February 2022, Colombia’s constitutional court followed, marking
feminist victories in three of the largest nations in Latin America, where
Catholic majorities had once made such political futures seem unthink-
able. Now, in Colombia, the 2022 court ruling established some of the most
expansive legal protections for abortion (second only to Canada) anywhere
in the Americas. Feminist organizers in country after country across the
region, that is, had begun to use their newly gained momentum and legisla-
tive successes to press for a host of added reforms as central to their platform.
This included calling for mandatory sex education courses in public schools
and integrating transgender, queer, and disability rights perspectives into
national curricula.
In the United States, news headlines emphasized the symbolic power of
protestors’ contemporary coordinations around abortion rights that rechan-
neled the Green Wave in diverse contexts across the regions. Articles made
scattered mentions of acts of solidarity with US protestors, where Latin
American feminists donned long red robes and white hoods, in visual ref-
erence to the dystopian future popularized in the English-language novel-
turned-television series The Handmaid’s Tale, as they stood vigil in front

Coa l i t ion a l L i v e s of Data Plu r a l i s m • 141

of US embassies to protest the Supreme Court’s decision. But among Latin
American feminist networks, discussions remained focused on explicitly
more strategic dimensions. Their exchanges made clear that protest had
grown into something more than merely a means to channel an outcry of
collective defiance, grief, and frustration. For feminist activists and schol-
ars across the continent, protest had become a means to speak back to and
­challenge the exclusionary knowledge and norms reproduced by dominant
institutions—from the state, legal, and religious authorities to corporations
and elite universities. Their challenge was not only against the expansive
forms of violence associated with the long-standing framing of abortion as
“criminal,” but also for the deadly consequences that resulted from the struc-
tural marginalization and systemic underrepresentation of feminist stand-
points from centers of power. Using the common resource of public space
and a diverse assembly of bodies, they called such institutions to account.
In site after site across the continent, the transformed streets turned into a
symbolic force of refusal that exposed the insufficiency of dominant institu-
tions that presumed to know, speak for, and “recognize” the gendered lives
of women, the working poor, and other marginalized populations, and that
­powerfully animated the strength of feminist alternatives instead.
Moreover, across online forums and social media channels that had brought
feminist collectives together across the region, organizers underscored how
the recent gains around abortion protections were part of ongoing mobiliza-
tions that, for nearly two decades, had drawn together a broad coalition of
cross-national, multigenerational feminist activists with diverse social justice
actors across the continent. In some national contexts in the region, such
coalitions had grown to include hundreds of organizations bridging repro-
ductive rights advocates, anti-gender violence and LGBTQ organizations,
unions and labor interests, Indigenous groups, and student organizations to
work together as an active, pluralistic coalition (Kulbaczewska-Figat 2021).
Such networks worked locally through neighborhood organizations, schools,
unions, and other spaces of everyday life to successfully reframe abortion
access as an issue that was not just about a bounded set of “women’s” rights in
the way that dominant institutions from the state to the church had histori-
cally presumed a static, self-contained givenness to the category of “woman”
itself. Rather, these networks showed that the issue implicated a range of
social justice concerns that related gender inequities with the experience
of everyday social violence more broadly. Central to this work was not merely
the on-the-ground efforts for building popular coalitions, but intentional

142 • chapter FIVE

knowledge work. They reframed the violence of criminalized and clandestine
abortion as connected to other forms of structural violence around g­ ender—
not merely against women as a discrete population, but against diverse mar-
ginalized subjects whose own lived experiences evidenced how narrowly the
law and liberal constructions of personhood represented and recognized a
full spectrum of gendered lives.
This chapter attends to the knowledge work and alternative data prac-
tices behind the cultivation of feminist spaces of relating and their build-
ing of intentionally expansive coalitions as means to ground a politics of
refusal against the long-standing misrecognitions of dominant institutions.
Building on chapter 4’s observations around nineteenth-century feminist
data collaborations, I argue here that such commitments demonstrate not
only global feminist imaginaries for a new data pluralism, but also work
to actively counter predatory data’s extractivist routines (Cifor et al. 2019;
Simpson 2017; Tuck and Yang 2014) and threat to vulnerable populations
through their growth of dispossessive and segregationist data infrastruc-
tures. By attending to the alternative knowledge practices and politics of
refusal behind contemporary Latin American feminists’ multisited coali-
tion building, I underscore not merely the world-shaping potentials of data
­engagements driven by global actors other than the large corporate internet
firms and Western knowledge institutions that have conventionally been
framed—and arguably overnarrated—as the central protagonists behind
today’s data ecologies. I also explore how Latin American feminists’ contem-
porary data work defies and presses beyond a politics of liberal recognition
and inclusion as the paradigm for justice-based reform. They move instead
toward what Audra Simpson describes as a politics of refusal, whose “hard-
no” around dominant data regimes is grounded in a “deep cognizance of
differing social and historical facts” (2017, 9) among marginalized collectives
that point to the real need and possibilities of “producing and maintaining
alternative structures of thought, politics and traditions away from and in
critical relationship to states” and dominant institutions (2017, 2).
Their work thus importantly channels earlier arguments for a decolo-
nial feminist practice as the grounds from which to imagine new forms of
justice-centered knowledge work. Such modalities of practice are rooted
in what Argentine philosopher María Lugones argued for as a pluralist
feminist orientation (Lugones 2003, 2010). Grounded in calls for a “coali-
tional consciousness” (Sandoval 2000) between global actors in struggle,
such pluralist feminist orientations worked to forge new forms of “complex

Coa l i t ion a l L i v e s of Data Plu r a l i s m • 143

c­ ommunication” (Lugones 2006) that could expand and transform conven-
tional modes of relationality between diverse knowledge practitioners (Velez
and Tuana 2020). Far from adhering to liberal traditions around pluralism,
Latin American feminist orientations around data pluralism channel plu-
riversal knowledge ethics (Escobar 2018, 2020; Kothari et al. 2019; Morales
and Reilly 2023) as commitments to realize what the Zapatistas describe
as “a world where many worlds fit” and to counter what Caribbean science
studies scholar Sylvia Wynter called the “coloniality of being/power/truth/
freedom towards the human” (2003). It fostered a state of being where, as
decolonial scholars Ashish Kothari, Ariel Salleh, Arturo Escobar, Federico
Demaria, and Alberto Acosta elaborate, “all people’s worlds can co-exist with
dignity and peace without subjection to diminishment, exploitation and
misery . . . [from] patriarchal attitudes, racism, casteism, and other forms of
discrimination” (Kothari et al. 2019, xxviii).
Unabashedly, then, decolonial feminists locate the practice of data plural-
ism in the space of liminal positionalities and “borderlands” where ideologi-
cal and cultural “cross pollenizations” (Anzaldúa 1981, 1987) might enable
another consciousness for new feminist world building to emerge. Over a
generation ago, such orientations aimed to resist and refuse the forms of “sin-
gle-axis thinking” (Crenshaw 1991) and “intellectual apartheid” (Sandoval
2000) normalized by dominant knowledge institutions—including Western
academic organizations and liberal university campuses—that decolonial
feminists diagnosed as tacitly reinforcing established social hierarchies.
Their perspectives illuminated how dominant institutions diluted oppressed
people’s resistance potential by segmenting forms of oppression into discrete,
nonintersecting categories (i.e., race, gender, or class in exclusion of other
categories) (Gipson, Corry, and Noble 2021). Even as African American
feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins observed that oppressions “cannot
be reduced to one fundamental type” and that they instead “work together
in producing injustice” (1990, 8), the experiences of feminists of color were
continuously reduced by conventional norms of single-axis thinking to one
category of oppression in exclusion of others (Combahee River Collective
1981; Moraga and Anzaldúa 1981).
This chapter thus explores how such foreclosures in the potential to forge
political solidarities between marginalized populations continue to find
resistance from contemporary decolonial feminist work in Latin America.
Their critical investments have underscored the evolving means by which
dominant knowledge institutions maintain power hierarchies through not

144 • chapter FIVE

only sustaining a politics of marginalization, but also through a politics
of segregation where potential allies and intellectual kin are divided into
discrete social categories, subfields, or disciplines, and where such divi-
sions can increasingly be effected through the contemporary application
of dispossessive datafication regimes. Decolonial feminists’ data pluralism
thus underscores the work to generate alternatives to big data’s extractive
operations that have quietly amplified—and profited from—the division of
oppressed populations via proprietary algorithms that segment users into
predetermined classification systems. By decolonial feminist accounts, such
appropriating operations not only fail to account for the complex, dynamic
intersectionality threaded throughout diverse human experiences, but they
also reify Western liberal relations of appropriation where competitive indi-
vidualism and private property ownership operate as the basis for autonomy
and freedom, and where property making exists as a device valued for its
utility in maintaining and “keeping good order” (Byrd et al. 2018). Thus, as
Jodi Byrd, Alyosha Goldstein, Jodi Melamed, and Chandan Reddy put it,
propriation as a voraciously unsated “normative practice” works by projecting
property as “always a means to further accumulation, a relentlessly acquisitive
relation to land, to being in place, to people, to here and elsewhere” (2018,
4). Big data further entrench hegemonic power relations by naturalizing
competitive acquisition between entities as the default condition for growth
and existence, and fracturing alternative potentials for “interworld and intra-
world communication” (Lugones 2003) between oppressed beings that could
be forged outside of Western, colonial knowledge regimes.
By pointing to global feminist imaginaries for a new data pluralism and
contemporary experiments in developing coalitional consciousness, I under-
score methods to push back against predatory data’s instrumentalization and
dispossession of human relationships. Decolonial feminists’ coalitional work
makes explicit—and pointedly refuses—the means by which predatory data
preys upon and divides user populations through the dispossessive operations
of datafication, as well as the conversion of individual human activity into a
series of quantifiable indexes and information-based properties. Critical data
scholars have noted that via such processes of datafication, human life can be
rendered by Big Tech companies and dominant knowledge institutions into
a new form of “raw” material and commodity that invites algorithmic control
and manipulation, feeding the growth of predatory data’s infrastructures of
continuous extractions for profit (Couldry and Mejias 2019a, 2019b). More
importantly, decolonial feminists’ relational focus demonstrates how it is not

Coa l i t ion a l L i v e s of Data Plu r a l i s m • 145

only the manipulation of individual lives on which predatory data’s growth
depends; rather, they also rely upon the instrumentalization of human
relationships and the projected connections (and disconnections) that
can be intervened upon and manipulated for continued value extrac-
tion. The mapping of such relationships is what allows individuals to be
compared and measured against one another, so that distinct forms of
“meaningful” action may be exercised over some and withheld over others.
Indeed, the automated imposition of predetermined categories and the social
relations they imply are what allow complex human lives to become legible
(Bowker and Star 2000) to big data and AI systems—even as they reinstanti-
ate social hierarchies and amplify social division among populations in the
process of such translations. Far from a neutral process, the operations of big
data systems today that claim to dataify the human through social filtering,
fragmentation, and atomization disproportionately jeopardize marginalized
and minoritized populations—rendering the measure of their “difference” as
the key metric that stabilizes the status of the majority.
US feminist critical data scholar Anna Lauren Hoffman aptly points
to the “discursive violence” embedded within datafication’s capacity as
assigning different values to human life (Gandy 1993) through logics of
quantification and statistical methods (Couldry and Mejias 2019a) and
structuring—both socially and technologically—“how various identities
and bodies are produced, surfaced, made sense of, seen as legitimate, and
ascribed significance” (Hoffman 2021, 3543). Central to predatory data’s
process of dataifying subjects through applications of big data and AI tech-
nologies, then, is the work to segment populations under predetermined
classification schemes that channel and fix hegemonic notions of difference
and thereby effect “ground truths about people and the world” (Stark and
Hutson 2022). Predatory data thus rely on the assumption that predeter-
mined descriptive categories and labels drawn from the past can be unprob-
lematically assigned human experiences in the present. Predatory data
likewise operate on the assumption that dataified subjects can, in turn, be
unproblematically apprehended and accurately contained under such clas-
sifications moving into the future (Chun 2021). In the process of creating
datafied identities, AI and big data systems not only reify a “reality” to past
notions of difference, but also reduce the diverse embodied and lived experi-
ences of individuals into only those components that can be made rapidly
legible and meaningful to data-driven systems. Thus, the key to predatory
data’s processes is the capacity to manipulate not only individual human

146 • chapter FIVE

identity through assigning predetermined labels, but the capacity to manip-
ulate human relationships as well via classificatory groupings that encode
“past” social relationships—and automate the reproduction of existing social
hierarchies into the “future” of real-world relations.
Of course, the range of modern conceits around the promise of rational
observation that ground predatory data’s presumption of the unproblematic
reading of subjects as transparent, unitary, and stable entities has long been
critiqued by decolonial and science studies scholars alike. The presumed order-
making representation of diverse subjects under preestablished ­classification
systems reasserts Western binaries of mind/body, nature/culture, and self/
other into the foundation of big data architectures. Such dualisms—what
decolonial and feminist scholars observe had globally spread through the
imposition of colonial epistemologies—erased varied forms of being and
relating that didn’t fit neatly into such binaries, negating their existence
through narrow, monolithic understandings of human experience (Mohanty
1984). By legitimizing a hierarchical social order and advancing “unilinear,
univocal, unilogical understandings of history” (Sandoval 2000), dualistic
frameworks not only marginalized the experience of oppressed classes, but
also silenced the diverse forms of agency and critical consciousness that
existed outside dominant social and colonial orders. Moreover, as decolonial
Indigenous scholar Audra Simpson underscored, such binary modes of read-
ing the empirical world formed the basis of a system of “recognition and mis-
recognition indebted to deep philosophical histories of seeing and knowing”
(2007, 69) that empowered varied acts of past and continuing dispossessions
from marginalized peoples. In refusal of such active erasures, contemporary
Latin American and decolonial feminists’ on-the-ground organizing works
to recognize other means to know and account for the varied experiences of
gendered lives that would unsettle the long-standing categorical impositions
and misrecognitions of dominant knowledge institutions. Their undertak-
ings to develop an alternative feminist pluralist data practice arguably rec-
ognize what Audre Lorde called the vital “interdependence” (1984) among
differentially situated gendered lives, where coarticulated logics of resistance
defended relations in worlds of “multiple sensing, multiple perceiving, and
multiple sociality” (Lugones 2003).
Concerned with developing alternative forms of “objectivity” to resist
knowledge practices that spoke with the pretense of universality and the
“monologism of the colonizer [that] silenc[es] all contestatory interlocution”
(Lugones 2006, 81), decolonial feminists aimed to ground new knowledge

Coa l i t ion a l L i v e s of Data Plu r a l i s m • 147

production instead in the process of translating knowledge and expertise
held among distinctly positioned actors and potential allies. María Lugones
thus stressed that, in contrast to “liberal conversation,” the forms of “complex
communication” (2006) that she argued for would thrive not on the pre-
sumption of a ready, self-evident transparency of identity, but instead on the
recognition of the fundamental opacity and complexity of identity. Complex
communication thus draws from the premise that subjects’ identities are
never able to be captured simply through a superficial, skin-deep visual scan.
Rather, complex communication creates “relational identities, meanings that
did not precede the encounter, [and] ways of life that transcend national-
isms, root identities, and other simplifications of our imaginations” (Lugones
2006, 84). It thus functions in liminal sites, at the “edge of hardened struc-
tures,” where “transgression of the reigning order is possible” and requires
an awareness from engaged actors of one’s own multiplicity and a refusal to
attempt to assimilate any engaged identity into preheld, familiar meanings.
This chapter reviews how such forms of polyvalent, intergenerational
relationality are channeled through Latin American feminists’ contempo-
rary organizing around gender-based violence and abortion rights and their
articulations for an alternative feminist pluralist data practice. Their efforts
underscore the growing impacts of data methods developed by grassroots
organizers and diversely situated civic researchers to extend research prac-
tice beyond large knowledge institutions and corporate engineering labs.
In doing so, Latin American feminists demonstrated their commitment to
not only engage diverse, pluralistically oriented collectives as central to their
justice-based data practices, but also demonstrated how coalition-building
figured centrally in the new knowledge futures they imagined. Following a
review of Latin American feminists’ contemporary work to open new ways
of seeing “expertise” that unsettled traditional knowledge hierarchies and
positioned vulnerable populations as agents of data collection themselves, I
revisit a history of feminist advocacy for new decolonial knowledge futures.
Such imaginings worked toward the cultivation of coalitional conscious-
ness among diversely positioned social justice actors. A generation later,
they would become powerfully visible in the distributive data practices that
­contemporary Latin American feminist networks developed in campaigns
around the Green Wave and in the forms of coalition-making that extended
from the Ni Una Menos (Not One Less) movement. Latin American femi-
nist efforts to decriminalize abortion thus tactically emphasized the com-
mon structural nature of varied forms of gender-based violence across the

148 • chapter FIVE

region and the interconnected experiences of diversely vulnerable popula-
tions. Through alternative forms of data work, they would expand their
campaigns to successfully press for broadened justice-based reforms in the
name of diverse gendered populations and refuse dominant institutions’ roles
in foreclosing new knowledge futures.

Feminist Data and the Intergenerational

Informatics of Coalition

The first tweet sent out by Argentinian feminist activists, writers, and
­academics under the hashtag #NiUnaMenos spread quickly. Following the
­murder of fourteen-year-old Chiara Paez, who was found buried under-
neath her boyfriend’s house, beaten to death and a few weeks pregnant,
the first online signals set off a chain of mass demonstrations within just a
few months. By June 2015, in cities across the nation, tens of thousands of
marchers from varied socioeconomic backgrounds, political affiliations, and
generations flooded city centers to call for an end to gender-based violence.
In Buenos Aires, demonstrators marched to the Palace of the Argentine
National Congress wearing green scarves, intentionally used to recall
the white scarves worn decades earlier in the late 1970s by the Mothers
of the Plaza de Mayo when they began gathering to protest the disappear-
ances of their daughters and sons under the right-wing military dictatorship
that ruled during the country’s Dirty War.
Parallel protests were launched by feminists all across the region.
In Peru, more than fifty thousand filled the highways marching toward
Lima’s Palacio de Justicia—in what the national press called the largest
demonstration in Peruvian history. In Chile, more than eighty thousand
marched in protests in 2016, with subsequent marches shutting down streets
in Santiago. In 2017, some nineteen universities were forced to temporarily
close after complaints of gender-based harassment from students and fac-
ulty. By 2018, this grew to more than twenty-five higher education institu-
tions throughout Chile, and included, for the first time, several high schools
where students had organized. From the initial focus on sexual harassment,
the protesters started to call for universities to address the exclusion of
women and LGBTQ populations in leadership, their missing presence as
assigned authors in syllabi, and the thinness of protocols for dealing with
accusations of sexual harassment.

Coa l i t ion a l L i v e s of Data Plu r a l i s m • 149

 Indeed, from the beginning of the recent feminist political resurgence in
Latin America, feminist coalition-building—and intersectional approaches
to ending not just feminicide as a specific form of violence against women,
but also a multiplicity of structural violences against women and gen-
dered minorities that enabled a quiet epidemic of harms against them to
be n­ ormalized—was evident. In the years leading up to the contemporary
Green Wave, diverse feminist and social justice reformers organized Ni Una
Menos as a movement that forged a broad coalition between previously
segmented social campaigns. Beginning as a movement to protest domestic
violence and feminicide as hate crimes against women and feminized sub-
jects, Ni Una Menos continued to broaden the voices represented within
it, growing to encompass participation from grassroots groups, NGOs, and
political parties. From the families of victims to seasoned organizers, protes-
tors filled city centers to speak out against the diverse forms of violence faced
by gendered populations, whose experiences were differentially shaped by the
politics of class, race, age, and dis/ability. Refusing to prioritize a single ver-
sion of violence against “women” in any narrow construction, Ni Una Menos
instead channeled calls to end the varied forms of gender-based violence that
impacted the lives of the working poor, LGBTQ, Indigenous, and Black
communities and their access to basic resources, a living wage, and indeed,
reproductive rights and freedoms. Framing their vision for “intersectional
alliances” and the forging of what they termed “new subjectivities” in the
carta organica (organizational charter) for the Argentinian network, Ni Una
Menos o­ rganizers stated,

We bet on a polyglot, multilingual, wayward, fugitive force, a federal and

international Network, that arises from the network between different groups
capable of uniting under basic agreements, but . . . capable too of many sepa-
rate fights . . . . [across] the territorial differences that expand and enrich the
heterogeneity of our agendas and demands. . . . We are committed to undoing
the fences and crossing the borders in which patriarchal society confine us
. . . [to] thinking inside and outside national limits, to build[ing] a feminist
perspective on all inequalities . . . [recognizing that] reducing ourselves to
the role that gender assigns us is also a form of alienation (NiUnaMenos.org
2017).

Latin American feminists’ intersectional approaches to organizing thus

contrasted sharply with contemporary US approaches that have grounded
recent pro-choice organizing and arguments in liberal frameworks around
individual freedoms and choice, and the privacy of decisions made between

150 • chapter FIVE

a patient and doctor. Latin American feminists emphasized abortion as an
issue of broad social relevance to public health and justice-based interests
alike. Stressing how the poor and minoritized populations were most likely
to encounter unsafe conditions for abortions, they placed a spotlight on
structural conditions where, as one popular demonstration chant put it, “Las
ricas abortan, las pobres mueren/The rich abort, the poor die” (Pozzo 2020).
Dubbing their national campaign as one for the Right to Legal, Safe and Free
Abortion (Campaña por el Derecho al Aborto Legal, Seguro y Gratuito),
feminist activists argued that without legal abortion, unsafe, clandestine
abortions would continue and would remain one of the leading causes of
maternal death around the world.
In Argentina, feminists leveraged data to stress that criminalizing abor-
tion would create differential safety barriers for pregnant people, particularly
those living outside of large cities or relying on the public health system. Data
circulated by varied civic organizations thus emphasized the socioeconomic
and regional biases that quietly exacerbated abortion access in Argentina. The
Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales (Center for Legal and Social Studies)
stressed data that revealed that while middle- and upper-class women are
able to access relatively high-quality, sanitary conditions and rarely suffer
postabortion complications, “[p]oor women, and in many cases teenag-
ers, are the ones who must expose themselves to precarious facilities and
practices.” Feminists cited reports from global reproductive rights research
­organizations like the Guttmacher Institute that showed some 40 percent
of clandestine abortions result in complications that require treatment, with
the highest rates of maternal mortality typically caused by illegal abortions
in the regions characterized by the highest poverty rates in the country.
They likewise circulated data from the World Health Organization estimat-
ing that up to 13.2 percent of maternal deaths every year were attributed to
unsafe abortions, that 75 percent of abortions performed in Latin America
between 2010 and 2014 were unsafe, and that most maternal mortalities
could be avoided through sex education, the use of effective contraception,
or the provision of safe, legal abortion and proper emergency treatment. By
using data to move the discussion away from frames grounded in personal
freedoms or questions surrounding the viability of life and providing evi-
dence that it was the poor and working class who died at disproportionately
high rates due to clandestine abortions, Latin American feminists drew
focus to collective interests around social and economic justice implicated
in abortion’s decriminalization. As Latin American feminists argued, the

Coa l i t ion a l L i v e s of Data Plu r a l i s m • 151

d­ ecriminalization of abortion was essential for the full protection for human
rights, which entailed the right to life, health, physical integrity, and dignity,
and freedom from cruel, inhuman, discriminatory, and degrading treatment.
Thus, the data tactics adopted by Green Wave organizers to promote
new forms of public literacy and visibility around abortion access as a social
justice issue echoed the parallel tactics developed to grow Ni Una Menos
years earlier. Ni Una Menos’s cross-national, multigenerational alliance of
feminist forces, which included artists, journalists, organizers, and academics
among the movement’s diverse knowledge agents, creatively leveraged data
to make feminicide and related forms of structural, gender-based violence
a shared “matter of concern” across the Americas. They circulated reports
from recognized global policy sources, including groups like the Feminicide
Watch group of the United Nations Studies Association, who demonstrated
that while murder may be on the decline globally, feminicide is on the rise,
with the estimated number of feminicide victims in 2017—eighty-seven
­thousand—nearly equal to the eighty-nine thousand people killed world-
wide in armed conflicts that year (with the key difference being that the vast
majority of feminicide victims were killed by people they knew). They also
reminded publics that while the United Nations first recognized feminicide
as an international crime in 1976, nearly half a century later there remains
little public literacy around the varied forms of feminicide that were outlined
then by the UN; these included not only intimate partner–related killings,
but also “honor” and dowry-related murders, forced suicide, female infanti-
cide, and targeted killings of women in war.
Alongside such resources, Argentine feminists circulated local and
national grassroots activists’ own newly formed data resources around femi-
nicide. This included Argentina’s first National Index on Sexist Violence (El
Primer Indice Nacional de Violencia Machista), drawn from the citizen-run
“Argentina Counts Sexist Violence” campaign, which circulated an online
survey of 186 questions via affiliated Ni Una Menos accounts. They also
shared resources from other citizen-run projects launched by researcher activ-
ists around the world, such as Annita Lucchesi’s Sovereign Bodies, which
included mappings of murdered and missing Indigenous/Native women in
Canada and the United States that Lucchesi launched as a student at Alberta
University, as well as the WomenCount project organized by Dawn Wilcox
in Texas, which, since 2017, has crowdsourced the collection of data on
­feminicides in the United States stretching back to the 1950s.

152 • chapter FIVE

 In the one-hundred-page report that followed Argentina’s survey, its
coordinators—Ingrid Beck, a feminist journalist credited with being one
of the early organizers of Ni Una Menos’s 2015 events, and sociologist
Martín Romeo—indicated how their efforts built on such works of past
feminist data efforts in the country: “One of the central complaints the
#NiUnaMenos movement of June 3, 2015 established was the creation of a
National Registry of Femicides—a task undertaken until now (and since
2008) only by the civic association, Casa del Encuentro. Days after the [June]
protests and as a response to their demand, Argentina’s Supreme Court cre-
ated the National Registry of Femicides, developed by the Women’s Office
of the Justice System” (Beck and Romeo 2016, 9). About sixty thousand
responses were received from women and transgender women from all over
the country, with nearly 86 percent of respondees reporting they had never
begun or completed a university degree. Beyond the state’s compiled data
that a feminicide occurred every thirty-seven hours in the country, the survey
results revealed the heightened normalization of related forms of gender-
based violence. Over 97 percent of respondees reported suffering some kind
of gender violence, 20 percent reported being raped, while only 5 percent
said they reported the attacks to police. The survey’s coordinators underscored
that the respondees’ education, socioeconomic, and gender-identification
backgrounds heightened victimization rates, with 25 percent of poor women
and 72 percent of transgender women reporting being the victim of rape.
Despite the project’s broad reception, its coordinators insisted that the project
remain necessarily independent from public or private institutions, which
they defined as entangled in facets of gender-based violence. As specified on
Argentina’s Ni Una Menos’s website, violence against women and gendered
minorities is seen in domestic violence; but it is also seen in the violence of
the market, debt, and capitalist property relations, in the violence that results
from discriminatory policies against LGBTQ people, mass incarceration,
and criminalizing migratory movements, and indeed, in the violence that
results from abortion bans and the lack of access to free health care.
Even as media networks celebrated such activist milestones in data collec-
tion, Latin American feminist collectives underscored how their work had
only started to scratch the surface, and how little, indeed, had begun to be
recorded. They echoed critical race and feminist data studies scholars who
have stressed the long silence of “missing bodies”—and the extensive stories
and voices excised from “official” records and datasets (D’Ignazio and Klein

Coa l i t ion a l L i v e s of Data Plu r a l i s m • 153

2019; Onuoha 2018) that come to archive a narrow set of dominant interests
as the base from which knowledge gets derived (Trouillot 1995). Consistently,
feminist data activists emphasized that the scale of data they collected was
less their objective than other commitments around refusing relations of
domination and cultivating alternative infrastructures for accountability in
knowledge relations. Their efforts thus aimed to empower other pathways
for how we come to settle “given knowns” about the real world in its var-
ied gender-based ­dynamics, particularly in an age increasingly defined by
“big data.”

Feminist Resistances to Data Apartheid

Over a generation ago, US third world and decolonial feminists were among
the first to voice critiques over how dominant forms of knowledge practice
separated and divided the intellectual labor of people of color, feminists,
and other marginalized peoples. Observing the intellectual and disciplinary
­divisions maintained by dominant knowledge institutions, they critiqued
university systems for maintaining such atomizing architectures that socially
segmented relations and prevented minoritized scholars from building
resistant practices together. Furthermore, they called for new orientations
that could undo the forms of “intellectual apartheid” (Sandoval 2000) that
undermined future potentials for multifaceted solidarities. Such new ori-
entations would press beyond the dominant forms of seeing and filtering
relations that had been imposed under what María Lugones called “the mod-
ern colonial gender system” (Lugones 2010). Under that system, pluralistic
notions of sex and gender, like other forms of intimate and everyday relating,
were silenced and erased, so that only the “hierarchical and dichotomous”
(Lugones 2010) social categories necessary to sustain conditions of colo-
nial rule remained legible. Such erasures not only negated the varied lived
­experiences of oppressed and subjugated individuals, but they also actively
worked, as decolonial feminists argued, to circumvent and prevent the open
possibilities for oppressed peoples to collectively interweave new forms of
social life, resistant practice, and intimate relating together.
Decades before predatory data became embedded in everyday spaces
driven by big data’s social filtering and classification functions, decolonial
feminists pushed back on how modern knowledge infrastructures misrecog-
nized, reduced, and invisibilized the plurality of their experiences. Pressing

154 • chapter FIVE

for more inclusive languages that would recognize the multiplicity of forms
by which feminists of color and diversely minoritized populations came to
know and experience the world, they worked to develop new frameworks
to foster alternative orientations to self and others. Gloria Anzaldúa famously
argued for epistemologies rooted in the space of the “borderlands” as a site of
“racial, ideological, cultural and biological cross pollenization” (1987, 99) from
which a new “alien” consciousness could emerge. Such a consciousness could
draw from its mixed, cross-pollenated positionality as a creative and genera-
tive space for new knowledge production. Or as Anzaldúa wrote, “La mestiza
constantly has to shift out of habitual formations; from convergent thinking,
analytical reasoning that tends to use rationality to move toward a single
goal (a Western mode), to divergent thinking, characterized by movement
away from set patterns and goals . . . [t]he new mestiza copes by developing
a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity. . . . She has a plural
personality, she operates in a pluralistic mode . . . [that can] sustain contradic-
tions, [and] turns the ambivalence into something else” (1987, 79). In conjur-
ing a borderland thinking, Anzaldúa drew focus to the “split” consciousness
described by decolonial scholars and intellectuals—from W. E. B. Du Bois
to Franz Fanon, Audre Lorde, Chela Sandoval, Paula Gunn Allen, and
Trinh T. Minh-ha—as productive sites, ideal for diagnosing ­contemporary
political conditions and for challenging the stability of modern orders to
enable other futures to emerge.
Over a generation later, decolonial feminists’ imagining of such explicitly
pluralistic, coalitional knowledge practice has renewed salience, as p­ redatory
data’s algorithmically driven platforms and “predictive” architectures have
massified reductive classification schemes. Surveillance studies scholars
in particular have underscored how the expansion of big data assemblages
has enabled the datafication of subjects to grow, multiplying the creation of
decorporealized data doubles (Haggerty and Ericson 2000), whose digitally
assigned identity markers and “values” accommodate algorithmic sorting, clas-
sification, and prediction. Indeed, as these scholars have pointed out for more
than a generation, the datafication of subjects—and now the translation of
them into new algorithmically processable selves—is no innocent act (Gandy
1993). As Anna Lauren Hoffman points out, “[T]he disaggregation of people
in the form of data is never merely descriptive [but] is always implicated in
broader systems of power, norms, and normalization” (Hoffman 2021, 3544).
US critical race and surveillance studies scholar Simone Browne thus
underscores the simultaneously discriminatory and self-estranging logics

Coa l i t ion a l L i v e s of Data Plu r a l i s m • 155

that underpin datafication under contemporary surveillant assemblages.
Writing on the algorithmic capture and reprojection of racialized identi-
ties through data systems, she critiques what she calls operations of digi-
tal epidermalization. Such processes, she writes, “alienat[e] the subject” by
producing an alleged “truth about the racial body and one’s identity (or
identities) despite the subject’s claims” (2015, 11), while reifying racially
determined boundaries. Algorithmically “inferred” from individuals’ online
interactions, datafication’s identity assignments are applied over individu-
als without regard for subjects’ voluntary identification or sense of personal
history. By imposing what he calls an “algorithmic caricature” by various
identity classifiers, US critical data studies scholar John Cheney-Lippold
describes datafication’s identity assignments as “corrupting” individuals’
own sense of identity by fabricating a convenient (even if false) “univocality
that flattens” (2017, 8) the complexity of self-knowledge and lived experience.
Cheney-Lippold observes, for instance, how Google’s platform reads his use
patterns in ways that classify him as an “older” “woman” in its system.
While the purpose is to translate the breadth of human experience into
“measurable types,” massively applied datafication systems (such as those
used by Google and mainstream social media companies on their users)
encode, deploy, and project “traditional” classifiers across their platform. All
users are mined for data to enable such platforms to fix (and later target)
the identity of their users and define “types” around what platforms deter-
mine are meaningful value-making markers—from what it means to be a
“man,” “woman,” “gay,” “straight,” “old,” “young,” “African American,”
“Hispanic,” “Democrat,” “Republican,” “citizen,” “foreigner,” “criminal,” or
“terrorist.” However, it is the lives of already politically marginalized, vul-
nerable, and oppressed users whose “algorithmic caricatures” place them at
highest risk for real-world harm and discrimination. Rather than taking such
harms seriously, predatory data’s agents treat such risks as collateral damage
that can be tolerated so long as value continues to be extracted and the larger
technical system still evolves and thrives.
Even in the face of evident harms to minority users, predatory data will-
ingly continues to scale platform operations in the name of system evolution,
irrespective of their indexicality to the “real lives” of subjects in the empiri-
cal world. Their primary fidelity is to instrumentalize patterns of behavior
that can essentialize identity markers into concrete, measurable—and thus
algorithmically manipulable—data records, so that subjects can be ren-
dered processable into what Luke Stark calls the “scalable subject” (2018), or

156 • chapter FIVE

v­ ersions of their digital selves that lend themselves to the system’s scalability.
While critical data studies scholars have emphasized datafication’s impact on
individual users’ identities and the conversion of individuals into malleable
and manipulable “data doubles,” a predatory data framework draws added
attention to datafication’s work to turn the relationships that surround and
define individuals into artifacts of control and interventions. This is the case
whether the relationship pertains to a past or future version of the user to
themselves, to the actors they are invisibly and automatically grouped and
associated with through datafication, or to the vast spectrum of past, present,
and future others whom users already, or might have, defined themselves
in relation to. It is not individual users or the integrity of the relationships
they define that predatory data prioritizes, however. They are operational-
ized instead to optimize other dominant interests—whether commercial
gain (Stark 2018) or public safety and national security (Amoore 2009).
Their work to segregate and sort populations (Gandy 1993) thus creates and
entrenches valuations on the human that remain hidden behind proprietary
data systems, even as they casually fix projections of “essentialized” types
and hegemonic forms of relating that can encode “misrecognition” into the
everyday architectures of digital life.
Beyond alienating and fragmenting subjects’ sense of self, predatory data’s
instrumentalization of human relationships stratifies and fragments popula-
tions across “given” forms of relating and predetermined social hierarchies.
Decolonial feminist critique reminds us that datafication’s violence targets
not only the integrity of self-knowledge (and the relationship of self to iden-
tity), but also the relationships between and among actors, stabilizing divi-
sions grounded in given hierarchies and foreclosing potentials for other forms
of relating to emerge. To circumvent the stratifying impacts of predatory
data—and the conceit that they can come to accurately “know” or safely pre-
scribe a self to individual users—requires far more than ­“correcting” datasets
or recoding algorithmic solutions to provide “fairer,” “anti-discriminatory”
forms of assessment. As Anna Lauren Hoffman argues, such attempts to
redesign or audit algorithmic systems in the name of “fairness” have to date
only replicated one-dimensional, single-axis forms of reading ­oppression that
overfocus on the disadvantages vulnerable populations experience, while leav-
ing unanalyzed the systematic production of privilege (2019). Furthermore,
the application of redesigned algorithms in the name of “­ fairness” and
“anti-discrimination” still projects, as she writes, a “‘ground truth’ of
static and pre-given—rather than contingent and constructed—social

Coa l i t ion a l L i v e s of Data Plu r a l i s m • 157

categories” (Hoffman 2019, 1). Such categories as functions of proprietary
algorithms, she stressed, still disable marginalized populations from exercis-
ing critical intervention.
To forge alternatives to big data’s predatory operations, I point to deco-
lonial feminists’ technological interventions to “see from below” and their
arguments to foster a “coalitional consciousness” that were theorized over
a generation ago as a means to cultivate “dissident forms of globalization”
(Sandoval 2000). Framing a contemporary world and living selves already
suffused with boundary-defying information technologies, feminist sci-
ence studies scholar Donna Haraway drew directly, too, from decolonial
feminists’ theorizing to develop the “blasphemous” political method of the
cyborg (1985). For Haraway, both the cyborg and the forms of oppositional
consciousness argued for by Chela Sandoval and US third world feminists
offered a timely means to imagine new progressive futures responsive to
a world shifting “from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous,
information system” (1985, 80). Such a future could look beyond framings
of revolution and change still centered around Western ideals of the ratio-
nal individual subject. In such a context, decolonial feminists’ rejection
of a politics grounded in a search for pure, natural origins and organically
reverent, “essential unities” was ideally poised to respond to what Haraway
diagnosed as a growing need for mixed and messy coalitions, affinities, and
joint k­ inships that could press for new futures where the world could at last
be imagined as moving beyond Western conceptions of “gender” with their
foundations in binaristic thinking. Such new kinships, however, would be
far from automatic. Rather, as Sandoval underscored, they would require
dedication to developing “technologies” and “skills that permit the con-
stant, differential repositioning necessary for perception from ‘subjugated
standpoints’” (2000, 175)—or, as she put it, citing Haraway, developing the
techniques and technologies committed “to see[ing] from below” (2000, 175).
Such skills would insist on new kinds of social exchange that have the power
to forge a dissident transnational coalitional consciousness across dispersed
global sites and bring forth a new kind of “objectivity” and knowledge prac-
tice grounded in the shared translation of knowledges among distinct com-
munities. Indeed, as Lugones argued, “One does not resist the coloniality of
gender alone. One resists it from within a way of understanding the world
and living in it that is shared. . . . Communities rather than individuals enable
the doing; one does with someone else, not in individualist isolation . . . being
in relation rather than dichotomously split over and over in hierarchically

158 • chapter FIVE

and violently ordered fragments. These ways of being, valuing and believing
have persisted in the response to the coloniality” (Lugones 2010, 754).

Feminist Data’s Dissident Forms of Globalization

This chapter has not offered a conventional historical excavation of either

Ni Una Menos’s cross-continental movement or Latin American feminists’
decades-long abortion rights struggle. I have not attempted either to provide
any comprehensive mapping of the contemporary flourishing of feminist,
collaborative data initiatives. Adopting a cross-generational lens to trace
decolonial feminists’ commitments to developing new tools and techniques
to dismantle the architectures of intellectual apartheid, I have aimed to
demonstrate how such work continues through the coalitional knowledge
practices of contemporary Latin American feminist networks. Through
their coordinated public actions around the Green Wave and Ni Una Menos,
Latin American feminists have actively challenged the narrowness of what
dominant institutions had represented as given knowledge about the gen-
dered lives of marginalized populations. Through their social campaigns and
their creative, coalitional work around data in recent years, they were able to
broadly animate and scale out demands for structural transformations that
would eventually prompt a wave of legal transformations across the region.
As importantly for organizers, their coalitional efforts allowed new demands
for alternative forms of refusal and accounting—and interrelating among
knowledge practitioners and the represented alike—to flourish.
Their work, however, appears far from finished. In the short time since the
legalization of abortion was won in Argentina and set off a cascade of
regional legal reforms in late 2020, Green Wave channels have remained
as active as ever. Their work since has quickly turned to raising awareness
of the limits of legal gains by themselves and highlighting the varied active
cases across national contexts where abortion’s criminalization persists.
Among them was that of Miranda Ruiz, a young doctor in the small city of
Tartagal, Argentina, who was accused by the family of a patient of having
performed an abortion without the patient’s consent. Another case involved
a thirty-year-old woman and mother of two in Esquina, Argentina, who was
known only as “Ana” in online campaigns and was charged with homicide
after delivering a stillborn child. Despite the lack of medical evidence sup-
porting the accusations against either woman, both were imprisoned—Ana

Coa l i t ion a l L i v e s of Data Plu r a l i s m • 159

for eight months—before charges were eventually dismissed. Feminists
note their cases are emblematic of the unevenness of the law’s recognition across
the country, where more than fifteen hundred criminal cases were opened
against individuals—thirty-six against medical professionals—for abortions
and other obstetrics-related events in the first year after the law’s passage.
Such developments have brought networks to respond by adding new
research objectives to new works that monitor abortion access across the
nation in recent years. In their continued campaign work, feminist organiz-
ers have come to stress the centrality of information politics, underscoring
how a lack of access to basic information, such as abortion rights and law,
where to access safe abortions, and regarding the procedure itself, can enable
significant lapses in protections. But they have also opened questions about
the limits of the law without larger accompanying structural changes, point-
ing to reports of the lack of training and information around abortion and
its legal protections, as well as the lack of medical professionals willing or able
to provide service or answer basic questions regarding abortion, particularly
in rural and economically marginalized regions (Mason-Deese 2022). They
have also noted indicators such as the lack of basic information even at health
care facilities, pointing to recent studies from Project Mirar of the Center for
the Study of State and Society, and Ibis Reproductive Health, who launched
a new abortion access tracking tool in 2021 and whose data stressed the con-
tinued experience of abuse and harassment by women and other feminized
subjects in the medical system, underscoring how such experiences were
especially high among young, adolescent, Indigenous, poor, and working-
class patients (Romero et al. 2021). Beyond pressing for information access
alone, feminist anthropologist Liz Mason-Deese notes, “[T]he movement
continues to call for improvements to the country’s health care system so that
quality abortion care will be truly accessible to all” (Mason-Deese 2022). The
National Campaign for the Right to Legal, Safe and Free Abortion’s calls for
gender-sensitive training for all health care teams in parallel have demanded
increased funding for the public health system, especially in underserved
areas, with a focus on women’s health. And while feminists have noted
the significance of a new hotline for sexual and reproductive health run
by the state’s Ministry of Health—which received nineteen thousand
abortion-related inquiries in the eleven months following the passage of
the new law—they have also noted abortion-seekers’ continuing reliance on
organizations like Socorristas en Red (Lifeguard Network), a feminist and
transfeminist network that were sought out to accompany more than fifty-six

160 • chapter FIVE

hundred patients in abortion and postabortion care in the same time period
(Romero et al. 2021).
Outside the health care system, feminist campaigns in recent years
have energized initiatives to integrate updated curricula on sexual and
­nonreproductive rights into public schools’ standard sexual education peda-
gogy. Their work has entailed creating and promoting updated curricula,
with a focus on bodily autonomy and knowledge about rights and respon-
sibilities, hosting discussion around the abortion law and how to access safe
and legal abortion, as well as trainings of teachers and school staff to facilitate
the implementation of curricula to empower students around their rights.
Refusing to prioritize a single version of violence against “women” in any
narrow sense, Latin American feminists’ calls to end the varied forms of
gender-based violence were consistently connected back to the lives of the
working poor, LGBTQ, Indigenous, Black, and youth communities who
were directly implicated. Their work to cultivate new global feminist imagi-
naries around data pluralism implicated a range of social justice concerns
that related gender inequities with the continuity of everyday social violence
against disempowered gendered populations more broadly. Moreover, their
enacted critique of predatory data’s global spread and threat to vulnerable
populations, and the concrete global political precedents they have earned
through their novel approaches, demonstrate the world-shaping potentials
of data engagements driven by global actors other than the large corporate
internet firms and Western knowledge institutions who have been overnar-
rated as the central protagonists behind today’s data ecologies. Indeed, in
public spaces all across Latin America, feminists continue to declare that
another future is possible.
And as the next chapter covers, they have been far from alone in such
situated endeavors.

Coa l i t ion a l L i v e s of Data Plu r a l i s m • 161

 SI X

Community Data
Pluri-temporalities in the Aftermath
of Big Data

In observing the growth of digital divide frameworks across the

two decades she has dedicated to civil rights and social service work in East
Central Illinois, Stephanie Burnett has become well practiced at what infor-
mation and technology studies scholars would recognize as a certain “broken
world” analysis (Jackson, Pompe, and Krieshok 2012; Jackson 2014; Tsing
2015). Well before we began working together on community data projects in
the region, Stephanie had already diagnosed the magical thinking that had
come to be pervasive in computing initiatives targeting marginalized house-
holds and Black and Brown communities through so-called “digital divide”
initiatives. She recalls how quickly the belief spread that such ­programs were
catalysts for change for marginalized households in the United States, and
how convictions seemed to quickly compound, even while there remained
a basic absence in tracking the actual impacts of the ­information and com-
munication technology (ICT) programs funded.
Across the years of her work with local families—first as a young social
worker counseling youth in the Boys and Girls Club, then in after-school
advocacy a decade later, and now, as a mother of three herself, working in pub-
lic housing with the Housing Authority of Champaign County (HACC)—
she has cultivated a patience for the messages of digital ­boosters and private
sector funders. Such messages would later get echoed from an ever-wider
spectrum of funding entities, from state institutions to public offices and
foundations, who increasingly joined tech companies in endorsing a focus
on “closing gaps” in digital skills and technology access as the best expedi-
ent (over universal child care, health care, basic income, or criminal justice
reform) to combating inequality. More than simple incantations of project
goals, such messages were invitations to step into the innovation ­timescape

162
channeled by ICT projects. With their emphatically future-fixated, progress-
insistent percussions, ICT projects registered a special promise for public
service workers, whose care work has come to define “unproductive time.”
There, in contrast to innovation time, time is expended to “merely” support
vulnerable lives and those unable or unwilling to generate new value through
change (Puig de la Bellacasa 2015). Emphasizing innovation and future-readi-
ness endorsed by funders, ICT-centered projects insisted upon the promise of
transformation—of converting matter at hand from less to more productive
value-making states. But for Stephanie, their messages, imbued with growing
references to “data-driven” techniques as the cornerstone of state and tech
companies’ knowledge work, registered differently. For her, they underscored
the lack of evidence to bolster the boosterism surrounding ICTs as tools for
reducing social and economic inequality. As she put it, naming one long-
standing breakdown, “There’s no real trying to see how people are benefiting
from gaining access [to technology]. . . . You have all this money available,
but it’s still not [clear it’s] getting to the people who need it.”
The amplified funding from her vantage instead fed outsized expectations
that local organizations could do the “impossible” with ICT hardware or
service provision, even when compressed time lines and minimal program
funds were involved. In communities like East Central Illinois, where
poverty rates for local counties like Champaign and Vermillion had hovered
for decades above state and national averages (at 14.9% and 20.9%, respec-
tively, compared to state and national averages of 12.1% and 12.8%, according
to the US Census Bureau’s 2021 American Community Survey data), such
magical thinking seemed to hold special sway. Her eyes widened recalling a
recent $12,000 state-based grant received to expand broadband connectivity
for two thousand low-income households she worked with after joining the
HACC. She added, naming another breakdown, “We were supposed to do
all these miraculous things. But it was only $12,000 [for one year]. It was just
kind of impossible.”
She recounts pivoting to another strategy—one that aimed to address
the explicit absence of data by investing funds in a local community-scaled
survey tailored to HACC households. Even if small, such an effort might
offer a localized snapshot and begin to establish a baseline understanding of
broadband practices and needs among underserved households (in the way
that efforts around the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey
had begun working to do since 2013 for locales with populations of sixty-five
thousand or more). Importantly, it might also begin to create some oversight

Com m u n i t y Data • 163

around the unspoken future-based fixations and evident breakdowns in
dominant institutions’ ICT programs. In other words, it might allow expec-
tations to be reset around the local reality and operational tempos working
households—rather than the funders’ imagined users—actually encountered
on a day-to-day basis. Stephanie describes one need for the reset work in
the survey’s design: “If we asked our residents if you have internet access,
people will say yes. But they’re not talking about a broadband connection at
home with a laptop. . . . Most, 70 to 75 percent, were using their smartphones.
For everything . . . online classes, work, applying for work, for benefits, even
their children being able to get assignments done at home.”
For more than a decade, feminist and postcolonial scholars have cri-
tiqued the selective tracking of ICT programs in economic development
contexts and the condition of default missing data (Onuoha 2018) that
has resulted around them. Repair studies scholars note how an emphasis
on the “new” in scholarship on ICTs has emphasized diffusion rates and
growth statistics, over accounts of the breakdown of products and services
when they fail to meet local needs (Jackson, Pompe, and Krieshok 2012).
Furthermore, such emphasis on diffusion does not account for the extent
of organizing that is required to repurpose, manage, or sustain the use of
old and aging technologies among populations with diverse and often
underserved needs. Critical information studies scholars point to how little
evidence, then, there has been to prove that investments in digital skills
and ICT and data access are reliable means to producing widespread eco-
nomic mobility. And they have instead observed how the growth of economic
stratification, homelessness, and stagnating wages followed the expansion
of high-tech economic development plans (Eubanks 2011) and the growth of
technology sectors (Greene 2021) across varied US cities.
The persistent absence of basic tracking measures around the failures
of ICT programs in the wake of such trends speaks volumes about where
breakdown is deemed worthy of being left uncounted and unseen. Much like
the simultaneous rise of digital monitoring systems targeting marginalized
populations undeniably reveals where errors and breakdown are guaranteed
to always be made to count. From systems that assess eligibility for social ser-
vices to those enforcing compliance with law enforcement, such widespread
and commonplace designs speak loudly about whose errors are allowed to
count, where responsibility must be extracted, and whose failure becomes a
matter of permanent record.

164 • chapter SIX

 Stephanie’s insistence that technology programs and their design
­assumptions be subject to questioning was a modest means to push back on
the veneer of inevitability that accompanied the missing data around break-
down in ICT programs and to turn the given accountability framework on
its head. For her, channeling program funding into data collection opened
an opportunity for a temporal reset, one that could begin to resist the void
of oversight around funded ICT deployments and disrupt the compounding
assurances that there is no value in revisiting and interrupting a productivity-
paced deployment when it came to tracking ICT failure among underserved
populations. Her pushback questioned the logic that the only worthwhile
temporal orientation would be a forward moving one, redirecting funders’
intentions for a unidirectional plan for service delivery toward a means for
critical feedback and a chance for local residents and organizers like herself
to activate another kind of conversation around technology. Her redirection
defended not only a conviction that there was indeed something more to see
and account for, but also defended local residents’ right to redefine the pace
of projects so that they might be represented on other terms—including ones
that could push back on funding institutions and the “knowledge” they pre-
sumed to stabilize around ICT breakdown and success—and by extension,
care and collaboration.
Stephanie’s dedication to translating the lived experiences and practical
knowledge of local underserved residents into tools that could challenge and
temporally reset the invisible assumptions baked into technology programs
has, in recent years, led her to seek out new collaborations and research cooper-
ations around data beyond domains focused on low-income housing. It’s how
she and I came to work together as partners in a broadband equity research
project hosted at the University of Illinois, shortly after she joined HACC.
Along with media justice organizer and Cunningham Township supervisor
Danielle Chynoweth (featured in chapter 2), after-school program advocate
Kimberly David of Project Success of Vermillion County, and public health
advocate Julie Pryde of the Champaign Urbana Public Health Department,
we formed a local research team in 2020 to work with local households to
address unmet broadband needs in East Central Illinois and to map data in
ways that might push back against the hardening future-fixated consensus
that funders and dominant knowledge institutions narrowly reified.
These efforts by community organizers to use data work to redirect ICT
programs toward a community-based form of technology assessment and

Com m u n i t y Data • 165

oversight are not solitary outliers. Across a growing range of local sites, com-
munity data projects have emerged as responses to the failure and breakdown
of dominant knowledge institutions to meaningfully speak for local commu-
nities’ needs around technology and to address the complexity of historically
marginalized populations’ experiences around datafication (Holden and Van
Klyton 2016; Kennedy 2018; Lewis et al. 2018). Spanning grassroots projects,
intersectional organizational coalitions, and novel research-oriented part-
nerships, their efforts are channeled through a diverse range of structures
that share a commitment to retemporalizing data work around a vitaliza-
tion of community life. Refusing to adhere to dominant ICT paradigms
defined by the digital economy’s hyperproductionist time and progressive
imperative (Puig de la Bellacasa 2015), where drives to extract greater value
and efficiency propel compulsions for individual optimization and rest-
less self-improvement, they choose to invest in another kind of knowledge
practice instead. Insisting that a future of technology access and use might
still be imagined to defend the empowerment and collective vitality of his-
torically marginalized communities, their work channels questions around
what happens when community renewal, collaborative living, and connec-
tive interrelation—rather than efficiency, rationalization, and individual
competition—become the organizing logics and tempos behind the design,
use, and repair of information technology and data-driven infrastructures.
They necessarily ask, too, how can we begin to account for the damage
inflicted via data practice when urgencies around individual optimization and
productivity are maintained as priorities above all else?
This chapter attends to the growth of such projects, and the coordination
they have brought together, to retemporalize data work and the d­ ominant
innovation imperative that surrounds it. To retemporalize data work today
would mean decentering the givenness of the “move fast and break things” pace
of competitive innovation that has driven big data and AI-based i­ ndustries,
and channeling and repacing data work toward a vitalization of community
life instead. Gaining recognition in recent years for broadening the inclu-
sion of new publics in debates around the politics of data, and u­ nderscoring
the power of situated data practices to advance calls for accountability
(Chan and Garcia forthcoming), community data projects have drawn from
critical traditions in intersectional feminist (Garcia et al. 2022; D’Ignazio
and Klein 2019; Rosner 2020), Black (Benjamin 2019, 2022; Gaskins 2021;
Milner 2020), Indigenous (Carroll et al. 2020; Christens 2018), decolo-
nial (Couldry and Mejias 2019a; Hassan 2023; Lin 2023; Milan and Treré

166 • chapter SIX

2019; Ricaurte 2019; Yang et al. 2023), and labor-allied (Irani 2015; Nguyen
2021; Roberts 2019) data practices to demonstrate the d­ isproportionate
harms that contemporary datafication systems have had on marginalized
communities. From a diversifying range of contexts, their voices multiply
frameworks—from data sovereignty (Global Indigenous Data Alliance,
US Indigenous Data Sovereignty) to abolishing big data and data capital-
ism (Data for Black Lives), vernacular technology (Boston South End
Technology Center), counter data (Datos Contra Feminicidio/Data against
Feminicide), data body defense and consentful technologies (Our Data
Bodies, Detroit Community Technology Project, Los Angeles Community
Action Network), and anti-spying organizing (Stop LAPD Spying Coalition,
Mijente), among others, that counter narratives of datafication in the age of
big data as a preeminent engine of universal progress.
This chapter speaks to the growth of community data initiatives as they
have worked to mobilize collective efforts to cultivate new tempos around data
that can speak back to a history of harms that have resulted from the extrac-
tive, segregationist logics of dominant data systems. Focused on community
data practitioners’ temporal investments, this chapter builds on chapter 4
and 5’s explorations of the varied forms of data work—including developing
relational infrastructures and cultivating coalitions for data pluralism—that
marginalized populations have undertaken to refuse and remake the terms
of dominant knowledge institutions across generations. Following a review
of community data’s pluri-temporal defense work in relation to techniques
of care time, broken world thinking, and collaborative survival that feminist
and postcolonial studies scholars have explored, I address in this chapter how
such temporal arts reverberate across the justice-oriented commitments of
community data practitioners as they have worked to develop localized, com-
munity-responsive models of situated data practice as critical alternatives to
dominant knowledge institutions. I then bridge a conversation with the past,
tracing the roots of community data’s growth to past justice-oriented and
locally engaged social movements, where critical orientations against anti-
pluralistic data methods were channeled into calls for structural and insti-
tutional reforms in the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. I close this chapter by returning to East Central Illinois, reflecting
on how spaces outside of (and often said to be “left behind” from) innovation’s
accelerated productionist time can cultivate local tempos that channel into
commitments to retemporalize data work around ethics of patience, care, and
accountability. This includes a project I partnered with as a faculty member at

Com m u n i t y Data • 167

a US-based public university. The research effort demonstrates the potentials
of community data collaborations to instantiate accountability acts and tem-
poral resets at state-level public offices and universities. Even while fleeting,
they carry reminders that such acts have the potential to accrue into mean-
ingful transformation if commitments to community life and renewal were
centered by knowledge institutions as situated actors themselves.
As an exercise of solidarity with community data, notably, this chapter
gives voice to community data practitioners’ accounts of the harms and grad-
uated violences that have accrued across a history of extractive relations, seg-
regations, and silenced voices in technology and data work—as well as how
such histories are collectively recalled, accounted for, and recorded through
acts of collaboration. Far from seeing extractive exploits as outcomes uniquely
tied to the spread of contemporary data and technology systems, community
data initiatives connect such trends to a history of technical developments
that have been driven by the narrow interests of dominant knowledge insti-
tutions and their long-standing exclusion of, and disinvestment from, com-
munity interests in the pursuit of global scale and profit. This chapter is a
call for greater attention to the local and to forms of situated investments in
critical data practice as productive sites for cultivating strategies on how to
push back on datafication processes that have often been abstracted at the
level of the global and a projected universal time. It is a reminder of how long
marginalized populations have worked to mount local defenses and to speak
through forms of critical practice to steer knowledge processes toward other
futures and away from the inevitability of globally extractive, segregationist
forms of datafication. This chapter is a call to listen to the strategies fostered
to insist on pluri-temporal relationalities—and not just productionist time’s
percussive insistence on control and profit—as the projected aims of tech-
nological design and data work. And it is a reminder of the possibilities that
emerge when we attend to the interconnective ­cultivations community data
practitioners have brought to life across generations.

Community Precarity and the Expulsion

of Regressive Time

At first blush, technology initiatives and innovation paradigms don’t make

themselves obvious as counter-forces to community life. The continued
stream of investment technology initiatives have poured into designated

168 • chapter SIX

productive sites and economic centers, after all, appear alongside celebrated
instantiations of community-focused ICT programs and high-tech diver-
sity programs that provide the cover of equality of interest and inclusion
(Hoffman 2021). Amplifications of Big Tech leaders’ messages that their
data-driven products can deliver “community” to broad global bases of digi-
tal users and consumers (Zuckerberg 2017)—while simultaneously optimiz-
ing individual personalization (Pariser 2011)—can make the “falling behind”
of growing classes of marginalized populations and the regression of those
who simply can’t “keep up” to the periphery appear as if they were inevi-
table, natural outcomes, rather than programmed stratifications and designs
that filter and elevate the future-worthy from those deemed undeserving of
investment and irredeemable of value-extraction.
But if community data practitioners inhabit the time of aftermath—of
attention to and care for what was left behind—they remind us how inhab-
iting such time spaces can be (or perhaps, necessarily must be) a connec-
tive affair. Their efforts echo postcolonial and feminist technology studies
scholars who have underscored the centrality of care time, repair worlds, and
multispecies survival to break out of the master narratives of individualist
progress and competitive growth that have dominated innovation para-
digms. While such work frames our present as a time of life “after” broken
worlds, it also defies a straightforward narrative of decay and hopeless social,
economic, and ecological ruination, underscoring instead how worlds of
tentative hope—in the ecologies of “collaborative survival” (Tsing 2015) and
counter-breakdown—have emerged despite the “weight of centrifugal odds”
(Jackson 2017). They press us, then, toward cultivating new “arts of noticing”
and “subtle arts of repair” practiced around socio-technical infrastructures,
inviting us to sustain a wonder and curiosity for the ongoing work that allows
collective living and shared worlds to be maintained in the face of precarity,
instability, and indeterminacy. Their lenses offer a means to see outside the
binary of large-scale growth or destruction and collapse (at least for all but
the narrowest classes) as inevitable temporal trajectories. And they move us
beyond the figure of the rational individual, which has been heroized for too
long as Western history’s key to economic growth, progress, and intellectual
and political enlightenment, and as the best bet for the future of democracy,
science, and economic abundance alike.
Underscoring emergent collaboration, they point us instead to sites
and actors who span the multispecies world of Matsuzaka mushrooms:
the burned landscapes where “humans, pines and fungi work together to take

Com m u n i t y Data • 169

advantage of bright open spaces and exposed mineral soils . . . [and] make
living arrangements simultaneously for themselves and others” (Tsing 2015,
22); the favela LAN Houses where semistable digital access spaces and social
meeting grounds are maintained by owners and residents through “a mix of
personal relations, informally acquired knowledge, and cheap parts” (Nemer
2022, 52); and the permaculture and biodynamic practitioners who engage
with food web-friendly soil care techniques recognized “as innovations [even
when] . . . some of the ‘new’ technologies that they implement are a thousand
years old, integrating knowledge from contemporary indigenous modes of
re-enacting ancestral cosmologies” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2015, 709). These
are figures who operate under a mix of temporal orientations, not always
forward moving, and who labor against dominant productionist tempos and
urgencies (Philips and Matti 2016; Puig de la Bellacasa 2015) that insist on
extracting ever-more value and efficiency. Their interest instead is to push
against such dominant forces to create care time and cultivate resistances
that, despite all, gather intents in efforts to “stay with” (Haraway 2016;
Martin, Myers, and Viseu 2015) the ever-growing terrains and tempos of the
un- and under-valued.
Like the varied actors and relations that populate such sites, those that
situate the work of community data practitioners remind us of the landscape
of complex relations that are necessary to coordinate (and cultivate) to bring
together stability in the face of pervasive unpredictability and uncertainty.
They underscore the expanse of agents and forces whose interests must be
negotiated to bring together meeting grounds—across and despite differ-
ences—that forestall breakdown. This labor of creating coordination and
managing complexity across social, material, and temporal divides required
for countering breakdown is constant. It demands a sustained vigilance
and art of rapid responsiveness that generally goes unrecognized, even though
it is unrequired in contexts where formal systems and dependencies keep
unpredictability and uncertainty to a minimum. The labor of counter-break-
down and coordination, and the contradictory invisibilization of its pres-
ence despite its constant extraction from marginalized classes, is part of the
“ordinary violence” channeled through contemporary data i­nfrastructures
that emphasize speed, scale, and volume over all other assets. It is a through
line that maintains inequity as a central logic of our contemporary technol-
ogy cultures and that has ensured that exploitation, oppression, and cultural
imperialism remain primary driving forces in the information age (Eubanks
2018; Greene 2021; Nemer 2022; Noble 2018).

170 • chapter SIX

 Community data’s work to retemporalize data work in a contemporary
age of big data is not simply a matter of slowing down time. Rather, it entails
a fundamental recognition of how dominant models of datafication that
have fed big data regimes have eroded temporal worlds. They work to expel
unproductive time and exterminate regressive temporal orientations—ones
that in the most pernicious framings are allegedly not merely wasted time,
but work as degrading, retrogressive forces that block the future itself from
proceeding. The authors of the popular text Big Data: A Revolution That
Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think (2013), Kenneth Cukier, data
editor of the Economist Magazine, and Oxford Internet Institute professor
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger animate such a logic, underscoring the hard but
necessary exterminationist decisions that will have to be made to unleash big
data’s revolutionary potential. Projecting big data’s arrival as “the moment
when the ‘information society’ finally fulfills the promise implied by its
name,” they write that its potential is conditional upon society “shedding
. . . its obsession for causality” and interest in “knowing why”—prioritizing
instead a new epistemological commitment for “predict[ing] the future.”
In such a radical remaking, they tell us, outdated fixations around “knowl-
edge as an understanding of the past” must be excised, so that the power of
knowing through “simple correlations” can be unleashed—“not knowing
why but only what” (2013, 7). In big data’s existential time scape, innovation
is not simply a process that opens new futures, but becomes a conditional
future itself—one whose outcomes rest on the contingency of radically
reformed information practices and the prompt expulsion of regressive
­tendencies, including those of now outdated knowledge professions.
The editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, Chris Anderson, provides another
snapshot of this exterminationist logic of big data temporalities at work.
Pressing his audiences to ready themselves for what he described as the
radical transformations of “the Petabyte Age,” he stated that it would bring
about the rapid demise of knowledge and data methods from “out-moded”
disciplines. As he wrote, “Out with every theory of human behavior, from
linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who
knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track
and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the num-
bers speak for themselves . . . [in this new] world where massive amounts of
data and applied mathematics [now] replace every other tool that might be
brought to bear” (2008). He spoke boldly for not only the active embrace
of new knowledge paradigms oriented around the pursuit of big data and

Com m u n i t y Data • 171

future prediction, but also for the very virtue of a radical unmaking of past
disciplinary methodologies, out-evolved by more efficient, universalist tools
for data processing. Under such projections, almost all modes of knowledge
practice on human behavior—“every theory” from linguistics to sociology
to taxonomy, ontology, and psychology—are argued to be out-evolved by
more efficient tools for universal data processing. In this new world order,
resources for knowledge making are only wisely spent when invested nar-
rowly in growing the mechanisms for tracking and measurement, enabling
processes oriented toward allowing data and numbers to simply “speak for
themselves” and on amplifying and prioritizing questions of the what while
silencing those fixated on the past around why. To expend resources on
anything else would be an unnecessary distraction that would only crowd
information ecologies with more “noise” at best, and at worse, advance
epistemological suicide.
Community data’s commitment to retemporalize data work, however,
should remind knowledge professionals that the work to expel and exter-
minate “regressive” temporal orientations has been long going. Community
data practitioners’ work underscores how dominant models of datafication
have deleteriously impacted community life, eroding temporal worlds as
the harms of datafication have disproportionately impacted marginalized
classes. Sharing values and goals with broader data justice and data activism
movements worldwide (Dencik et al. 2022; Redden, Brand, and Terzieva
2020; Milan and Van der Velden 2016), community data initiatives high-
light how contemporary data systems and a long history of data violence
couple to amplify the harms marginalized communities have faced in the
era of big data—from an expansion of forms of economic exploitation and
identity-based discrimination to the loss of privacy and autonomy, political
manipulation, and physical violence (Benjamin 2019; Cottom 2020; Couldry
and Mejias 2019a, 2019b; Eubanks 2019; Hoffman 2021; Noble 2018; O’Neill
2016; Onuoha 2018; Ricaurte 2019). While community data initiatives have
gained notice for interventions in technology policy debates, their critiques
go beyond policy reform, by targeting the politics of dominant knowledge
institutions—that is, powerful commercial, academic, and state actors whose
creation of data-driven knowledge sets and data voids alike have accelerated
the control, commodification, and classification of populations (Crawford
2021; Davis, Williams, and Yang 2021; Sadowski 2019; Zuboff 2019). Like
justice-aligned data journalism projects that have focused efforts around
translating datafication processes to diverse publics (Trere, Hintz, and Owen

172 • chapter SIX

2022), community data projects highlight the need to cultivate new methods
to engage diverse stakeholders and to respond to the varied temporal orienta-
tions of marginalized communities.
What distinguishes the engagements of the community data practitioners
is the commitment to not merely respond to but also to stay, be, and think
with particular marginalized communities, while retemporalizing data
work. Their defense of community life is grounded in the work of situating
data practice within a temporal order that unfolds outside of the accelerat-
ing, efficiency-demanding, universal temporal regime insisted upon by big
data. From such a vantage, datafication processes can be read not so much
as necessarily abstracted processes whose global takeover and grip on the
future is already a given; instead, they can recognized as uneven and locally
contingent processes that get differentially paced and shaped across locales by
the specific forms of resistance and investment of time and care by s­ ituated
actors. From this vantage, dominant knowledge institutions don’t exist
as decontextualized global forces, but are understood and treated instead as
entities whose stability relies on sustained coordinations across specific
sites (of particular research clusters, commercial divisions, or public offices,
among other extensions), where local forms of disruption or dissent can still
meaningfully register.
And much as community data practitioners have demanded more nuanced
framings of data and technology, they have likewise resisted simple readings
of “community,” grounding their work instead in understandings of com-
munities as complex social bodies made up of a plurality of actors who are
nonetheless bound and sustained by an active reproduction of shared space,
values, interests, or concerns. Community thus refers less to a homogenized
body of organically unified actors and more to a complex network of actors
whose coherence can only emerge from the sustained labor of coordination
and investment of care work. This labor, from the dominant productionist
vantage of innovation time that insists upon the extraction of ever-greater
value and efficiency, can only be dismissed as reproductive (rather than genu-
inely productive) labor. Practitioners acknowledge that while some commu-
nities are tied to local space and place, others span across a network of sites
that activate a common sense of belonging through a cultivation of situated
forms of relating and renewals of connection. They recognize that while
communities, from the outside, might appear homogeneous, differences exist
within that are constantly negotiated and that can result in relative forms
of privilege and marginalization. Community, seen from this vantage then,

Com m u n i t y Data • 173

is not presumed to be a natural given entity, but is a form of relating that
requires work, care, and time to cultivate. And so, too, can its existence be
made vulnerable and precarious, despite such investments.
Community data efforts underscore the deleterious impacts that the
accelerating segregations and automated classifications of contemporary data
systems have had on the pluri-temporal coordinations of communities across
varied formations. They highlight how the amplification of discriminatory
and stratifying operations under datafication have threatened the continu-
ity of community life that extends through pluri-temporal vibrancy and the
safety of marginalized populations to securely cultivate new interrelational
connections (Adams 2021; Crooks and Currie 2021; Emmer et al. 2020;
Eubanks 2018; Gangadharan 2015; Madden et al. 2017). They draw focus,
then, to the overlooked precaritization of community-driven social connec-
tivity, as the forms of collective coexistence they foster across a plurality of
relational capacities are increasingly undermined.

Repacing Data for Interrelational Connection

Far from seeing data harms as discrete outcomes tied only to the spread of
contemporary datafication systems, community data initiatives connect
such trends to a history of technology developments that have been driven
by the interests of dominant knowledge institutions and their long-standing
exclusion of, and disinvestment from, community interests in their pursuit
of global scale and profit. Community data is thus grounded in an endur-
ing critique—at least over a century long (Battle-Baptiste and Rusert 2018;
Chan 2020)—of dominant knowledge institutions’ roles in amplifying
social vulnerability. Such harms extend from dominant knowledge institu-
tions’ projection of universal knowledge production, despite their failure
to meaningfully know, speak for, and address the lived experiences of diverse
marginalized populations. Community data initiatives’ renewed calls for
more accountable knowledge practices and research infrastructures instead
recognize the importance of local context in developing and analyzing the
impacts of data systems in ways that center the priorities, voices, and his-
tories of lived experiences of marginalized communities (Akinwumi 2023;
Benjamin 2019; Costanza-Chock 2018; D’Ignazio and Klein 2019; Eubanks
2011; Gangadharan and Niklas 2019; Gaskins 2021; Irani et al. 2010; Lewis
et al. 2018; Shaikh 2023; Walford 2018). Echoing calls to more intentionally

174 • chapter SIX

center context in design (Escobar 2018; Gangadharan 2020; Irani et al. 2010;
Lee and Petty 2021; Rosner 2020), community data work has underscored
the growing tensions around the historic exclusion of marginalized popula-
tions from determining how dominant knowledge institutions use, collect,
and selectively filter data, even as such communities have remained among
the most common subjects of data extraction (Arora 2016, 2019; Eubanks
2018; Greene 2021).
Community data initiatives respond to the need for new forms of situated
data practice and community-accountable research infrastructures as alter-
natives to the control, commodification, and classification of populations by
commercial, academic, and state actors (Haraway 1988). In doing so, activ-
ists, organizers, and researchers who engage in community data initiatives
speak for the possibility of alternative knowledge practices that counter the
polarizing and socially stratifying impacts of datafication and the restless
imperative of a universal innovation time. They redirect data processes
toward a renewal and strengthening of community relations and self-
determination—refusing critical scholarly frameworks that position data as
inevitably harmful, while also refusing frameworks that see technology and
data production as democratizing simply for being placed in the hands of
communities (Ahmed 2012; Crooks and Currie 2021; Fuchs 2013).
Community data work is conditioned on a sustained commitment to
redirect data practices toward a defense of communities’ open capacities
for collective coexistence and pluri-temporal relational connectivity. Such
redirection efforts entail not only prioritizing greater accountability to mar-
ginalized communities and redefining power relations around data practice,
in response to long-standing critiques of the exclusion of communities in
knowledge production, but they also entail redefining of the very terms of
data work itself, shifting the focus away from elite actors (Kennedy 2018).
Prioritizing a reinvestment into community life and local relations results
in data practices that exceed the terms and interests of dominant knowledge
institutions: community data are often small, contextual, qualitative, and
creative; highlight storytelling, community documentation, and memory
work; and are grounded in locally based archives and situated histories.
What matters is not the scale, speed, and volume of data captured, but the
possibility of meaningfully engaging the lived experiences of marginalized
community members. What is valued are the diverse means to recommit
to an empowerment of local community life through activating local forms
of relationality, connecting collective histories, and committing to the

Com m u n i t y Data • 175

patient—and often unpredictable work—of cultivating new relationships of
reciprocity and accountability.
In distinct contrast to dominant knowledge institutions’ ventures, com-
munity data initiatives do not solely value data for their economic value
or competition- and independence-enhancing utility. They instead draw
intentional focus to the social aspects and relational potentials inherent in
the infrastructures (Star 1999) and collective research processes that sur-
round data. Community data projects look distinct from site to site, being
responsive to local needs, potentials for relationship building, and problems
around data infrastructures and datafication systems. As such, community
data initiatives take on a range of functions, from promoting reinvestments
into community life and marginalized communities’ pluri-temporal rela-
tional capacities (Escobar 2018) to developing inclusive and locally engaged
research methods to extend accountability to communities and enhance new
channels of self-determination around data and technology. While distinctly
shaped by their local contexts, community data initiatives emphasize shared
priorities around situated forms of interrelating and community-centered
research practice that underscore how patient forms of data work strengthen
knowledge practice by fostering conditions for shared accountability.
And even while contemporary developments have brought new focus
to community data work as emergent phenomena tied to recent digital
developments, practitioners often view their efforts as interlinked with past
justice-oriented reforms and data work stretching back more than a century.
Community data efforts draw from a range of earlier justice-based reforms
and social movements’ data methods—from abolition movements, intersec-
tional feminism and anti-sexual violence campaigns, and immigrant and
labor rights organizing to movements for Indigenous sovereignty in varied
regional national and local instantiations, among others. By drawing on
prior justice-based reform efforts, community data practitioners underscore
long histories of alternative data methods that bridge the work of activists,
community members, and scholars to counteract oppressive forms of knowl-
edge power. They further draw focus to the varied alternative knowledge
infrastructures and resources developed by the collaborative work of gen-
erations of marginalized actors (Gaskins 2021), which have frequently been
overlooked and invisibilized by innovation narratives that narrowly celebrate
the “disruptive” profit-generating products of high-tech firms and the inven-
tions of lone (and typically White, male, and Western) “genius” individuals
or heteronormative, male-dominated institutions (Broussard 2018; Crawford

176 • chapter SIX

2021). Under such frameworks, marginalized communities are excluded as
agents in knowledge production and more likely to be framed as sources of
problems to be solved, or as sites or objects of experimentation from which
data needs to be extracted (Cifor et al. 2019), than as knowledge agents.
By contrast, community data practitioners recognize marginalized com-
munities as having long been central to the development of new knowledge
practices and data methods focused on the needs, interests, and concerns of
the people most directly harmed by dominant norms of knowledge produc-
tion. Whether through the late nineteenth-century feminist and immigrant-
authored surveys and labor studies of Hull House (Chan 2020), the early
twentieth-century data journalism of Ida B. Wells, the data visualizations
and sociological publications of W. E. B. Du Bois (Battle-Baptiste and Rusert
2018), the statistics-based nursing advocacy and medical reform work of
Florence Nightingale, or the mid-twentieth-century origins of accessibility
design and educational research (Brown 1992), community data practitioners
link their work to past interrelational coordinations and organizing efforts
led by marginalized communities that challenged and redefined the norms
of dominant knowledge institutions. Significantly, they point to how such
past, locally centered collaborations of critical data practitioners not only
generated new data methods, but also demonstrated the potential to seed
larger social and institutional transformations, underlining the vital role of
alternative knowledge infrastructures in such work. Sites such as Chicago’s
Hull House, W. E. B. Du Bois’s Atlanta Sociological Laboratory, the Black
Panthers’ national network of People’s Free medical clinics, and immigrant
communities’ alternative health clinics demonstrated the range of possible
research-based outputs in the United States alone when the priorities of inno-
vation or growth were displaced as priorities in research practice. Supporting
the extension of justice-based infrastructures, such sites highlighted the rich
possibilities of alternative research futures that have been imagined through
fostering retemporalized understandings of data as a relational knowledge
resource and expression, not merely instrumental or utilitarian.
Such efforts underscore how local communities and grassroots networks
have long worked to cultivate alternative knowledge infrastructures to
enable a form of data work that might be more accountable to marginal-
ized communities (Chan 2021; Eubanks 2011; Gaskins 2021). Whether
developing mutual aid networks such as in Indigenous, Black, and LGBTQ
health networks or feminist safe houses (Brown 2017; Spade 2020),
­improvising work-arounds for technological systems that do not meet diverse

Com m u n i t y Data • 177

needs (D’Ignazio and Klein 2019), or figuring out how to scale existing
resources to provide nurturing and care (Precarity Lab 2020), such groups
committed time and care to foster multisectoral collaborations at local and
global scales to uncover and redress the negative impacts of dominant data
practices on marginalized communities (Amrute, Singh, and Guzman 2022;
Carroll et al. 2020; Gorur 2023; Irani 2021; Kukutai and Taylor 2016; Lewis
et al. 2018; Nguyen 2021; Petty 2018; Ricaurte, Nájera, and Maloof 2014).
They are active reminders of the long-standing work of organizers who occu-
pied care time, cultivating and coordinating a shared patience across networks
of difference to negotiate and hold together varied time scapes. Existing as
alternatives to predatory data tempos, they forged paths to break away from
an insistence to always move forward and faster, or to simply accept being left
behind. Each call for accountability they architected together was hard won,
but if they could accrue, they might layer into meaningful, lasting reforms.
Recognizing such opportunities, then and now, required a willingness to
“stay with” the process in order to refuse the restless tempo of innovation and
to step into another patience.

Community Data in East Central Illinois’s

Aftermath Time

Noticing the work of retemporalizing data by community data practitio-

ners in the contemporary can be challenging. It requires that we commit to
denaturalizing the imperatives of innovation time and that we reorient selves
to a different kind of patience for recognizing the varied forms of collective
work that have emerged to counter innovation time’s violences. It means
we recognize, too, how innovation imperatives have long drawn from other
logics of segregation and stratification to feed global growth, parasiting on
and amplifying such hierarchies as needed in the name of creating greater
efficiencies for those deemed most “future worthy.” And it means dedicating
time to cultivating new means of accounting for the local forms of vitality
sustained through community data when care time—rather than the con-
ventional profit-generating tempo of innovation’s productionist time—is the
rhythm adopted to orient collaborators’ “value” creation.
Community data practitioners’ care work around data reminds us that
the ever-intensifying calls of innovation to reorient all data practice toward
an acceleration of production-oriented efficiencies have not extinguished

178 • chapter SIX

all other temporal orientations associated with data practice. Listening to
community data practitioners, then, allows us to create space—temporal,
social, and otherwise—for the active defense of pluri-temporalities that
they channel through data collaborations as care work that decenters and
denaturalizes the imperatives of datafication’s innovation imperative. This
final section returns to East Central Illinois to hold space for the care time
invested through local data work and the research partnership I was a part of
with Stephanie Burnett and other regional leaders in social services and com-
munity organizing to address the broadband equity needs of diverse mar-
ginalized households in Illinois. The labor of care time and ­multitemporal
relational cultivations invested around data work make plain how much data
is read as more than just “raw material” to exploit—with greater speed or
scale—in the interest of profit generation. They reveal the variety of data
formats and tempos that can be drawn from to develop critical alternatives to
innovation time and its violent percussions, including through the archives
of personal memory and the lived experiences of historically marginalized
community members. More than just markers of the past, such records help
inform and connect us to the alternative futures community data practi-
tioners imagine for data cultures and the possibilities of their practice as a
means of enacting technologies of care.
For instance, when Stephanie speaks about what she credits for fostering
her own critical orientations to contemporary data technology projects, it
doesn’t take her long to reground herself in her hometown of Danville, a
city in East Central Illinois that, like so many others, is rarely read in rela-
tion to hi-tech futures, even as it is threaded through with multiple tempo-
ralities. Indeed, from the vantage of innovation’s high productionist time,
Danville would be a city that would be said to have been largely “left behind”
decades ago, outpaced by a global economy increasingly temporalized around
­computation’s ceaseless processing time. Danville was once a growing indus-
trial center, with coal beds and a railroad hub that supported its growth as a
manufacturing site in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, drawing
a thriving African American population that still makes up a third of the
city’s population of thirty thousand. The city began to see its population
dwindle as mines closed and later as midwestern manufacturers like General
Motors began to depart. But in the midst of such outward migrations and
following her graduation from Cornell University over two decades ago as
one of the first members of her family to earn a college degree, Stephanie
recounts how she returned to Danville, explaining the decision by simply

Com m u n i t y Data • 179

stating, “Yeah, Danville changed a lot after the [GM] plant closed. It was a
totally different place.”
While dominant economic narratives resigned Danville to the past of
industrial time and rationalized migration out of the city, from Stephanie’s
narration, Danville’s transition to the explicit “afterlife” of productionist
tempos spurred another kind of decisive moment and marked the city’s
movement into a space inviting restoration and repair from neighbors like
herself. From such vantage, it could be read not so much as a site that was
“left behind” or one that receded into unproductivity, but as a space that
instead defied innovation time’s binarization of worlds into future-oriented
and regressive. For neighbors and residents like Stephanie, it was a site worth
returning to and investing in for a different kind of orientation around the
“future”—one where the lived experiences of residents and the commitment
to a present sense of community and survival now allowed temporal spaces
of care time to patiently emerge. In sites like Danville, in stark and quiet
contrast to innovation culture’s relentless insistence to keep moving forward
in pursuit of future opportunity (Puig de la Bellacasa 2015, 694), anxiety over
the risk of falling into unproductive time dissolves.
This comes to mind as Stephanie recalls her first memory of her family’s
decision to stay in Danville, which came after her father’s job of forty years
was transferred to another GM site out of state following the Danville plant’s
closing in the 1990s. Noting her father’s own cultivated patience, she recounts
his practice of weekly commutes from Central Illinois to a GM plant in
Defiance, Ohio, and how he would repeat this travel across midwestern states
for years to keep Stephanie and her siblings from being uprooted from school
and their network of family relations in Illinois. And she recalls how the
same steady commitment came into play as he later enrolled in night courses
year after year to gradually accrue course credits until he was able to complete
a bachelor’s degree. “It took him ten years,” she says with admiration. In the
time since, as she worked with Black and Brown youth at the Boys and Girls
Club, with underserved youth and families in largely rural schools and after-
school programs at Project Success, or in public housing program develop-
ment at the Housing Authority of Champaign County, she has cultivated
her own steady, committed approach to her work. She paces her “progress”
around the relational and focuses on the repetition of working side by side
with households, most often to create temporary work-arounds for systems
that fail to adequately align with household capacities and r­ outinely punish
households in failing to anticipate temporal and economic barriers. “I see

180 • chapter SIX

families who take an hour-and-a-half trip on the bus just to get here to drop
paperwork off” because they lack means to access email digital forms. In the
end, she says, “It costs money [for households just] to get [and maintain] ben-
efits. People who don’t have the money to get all the steps they need done [to
simply apply for benefits], don’t get the benefits. It’s a double-edged sword.”
Such recognition is partly what seems to ground the version of patience
she has chosen to cultivate around the outsized projections and promises of
technology programs. Even when the program funders’ focus on the “new”
means that they miss obvious opportunities to recognize the absence of other,
more basic infrastructural needs, such as transportation, child care, or hous-
ing, Stephanie stresses she has not given up on partnering around technology:
“My main thing is trying to make sure that our families in our communities
and our children are set up for success. I’m always going to be on board with
that.” Her cultivated patience stands in stark contrast to the calls for “future
readiness” and projections of heightened crisis and urgency to act “now” that
feminist science studies scholars underscore as diminishing the “present of
action” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2015, 694) and that funders’ and innovation cul-
ture’s future-focused orientations rely on. In the space of care time, however,
the present is instead “distended, thickened with a myriad of demanding
attachments,” so that, as Maria Puig de la Bellacasa writes, “even when care is
compelled by urgency, there is a needed distance from feelings of emergency,
fear and future projections in order to focus on caring well” (2015, 694).
Far from simply automatic, the work of cultivating care time also entails
work to suspend the ever-pressing demands to prepare for the future and
to create instead the space and means to focus on commitments to the past
and present alike, including through architecting acts of accountability. This
ethic is adopted by the local research team that was formed by Stephanie
and myself for a community data project around broadband equity in
2020, which included media justice organizer and Cunningham Township
supervisor Danielle Chynoweth, after-school program advocate Kimberly
David of Project Success of Vermillion County (featured in chapter 3), and
public health advocate Julie Pryde of the Champaign Urbana Public Health
Department. Working with local households in East Central Illinois, we
aimed to undertake data collection around unmet broadband needs in ways
that might push back against funders’ and dominant knowledge ­institutions’
hardening consensus around a future-readying framing of technology and
data needs as already defined and worked to reorient the temporal presump-
tions embedded into programs’ dominant access-focused frameworks.

Com m u n i t y Data • 181

The accountability work that community data collaborations like ours
aimed to bring forth didn’t occasion instant and heroically revolutionary
change. Funded with a $50K grant from the state of Illinois’s new Office
of Broadband, we began our work together in 2020 recognizing our limita-
tions. Invested in the means by which institutional accountability on smaller,
shorter scales, however, might still be practiced, we committed ourselves to a
collaboration—modestly focusing our work on addressing the missing data
around technology failures related to support around state-supported broad-
band initiatives—with the prospect that any gains we might make could
carry the potential to layer into other changes and stabilizing reforms.
The data collection process we knew we wanted to undertake thus aimed
to collect information beyond the number of new laptops and data access
devices distributed to households that state agencies and funders emphasized.
Rather than taking the progress-enhancing power of technology for granted
or enabling funders’ immersion in innovation’s time scape to allow us to
adopt its future-focused and future-driven orientations uncritically (with
their insistence that there were few things passed worth stopping forward-
moving projects’ advancement for), we aimed to pose other questions. We
prioritized, then, allowing marginalized households and community groups
to question the unexamined logic behind the access doctrine and to speak
directly back to how the spread of digital devices actually impacts them in
the short and long term—as sources of potential risk or liability—rather than
presuming them to be automatic enhancers to households’ quality of life. We
further aimed to examine the local impacts of digital divide frameworks in
diverse communities and critically attend to the local opportunities missed
when technology companies continued to be exceptionalized as unques-
tioned sources of “universal” solutions for all populations—so much so that
any problems or gaps in technology use were typically read more as failures
of the marginalized communities and households themselves rather than as
failures of technology design, markets, or policy.
Centering local accountability as a value, our team designed a research
protocol that mimicked a pilot for the Office of Broadband’s statewide
distribution plan. Adopting the same hardware provider—the nonprofit
PCs for People (PC4P)—that Illinois’s Office of Broadband announced it
expected to use for a statewide broadband equity initiative and leveraging
the federal government’s newly launched Emergency Broadband Benefits
(EBB) and Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), as was also anticipated
for its projected statewide deployment, we worked with project partners

182 • chapter SIX

over the first phase of the project to design a local distribution plan for five
hundred low-income households in East Central Illinois (EC-IL). Over six
months, we worked with EC-IL partner organizations—Project Success of
Vermillion County, Champaign-Urbana Trauma & Resilience Initiative,
Cunningham Township, Champaign-Urbana Public Health Department,
and the Housing Authority of Champaign County1—to design and deploy
six different events to supply a refurbished laptop and a new hot spot device
to five hundred local households they worked with (who averaged annual
incomes of roughly $11,000 in Champaign County and roughly $23,000
in Vermillion County). These in-person events allowed households to also
be enrolled into the EBB or ACP federal government programs launched
in 2020 and 2021 to subsidize low-income households’ monthly internet
connections and at-home data use.2
On top of Connect Illinois’s anticipated statewide distribution plan,
however, our team added a new program feature: a family support and
outreach team that would gather ongoing feedback from the five hundred
participating households on the support they required in the months follow-
ing their receipt of refurbished laptops and new hot spot devices, and ACP/
EBB enrollment. In parallel with our work to design hardware distribution
events, we developed a Tech Buddies Program that employed and trained
a nineteen-person team (composed of ten UIUC students and nine local
community members) to support households’ continued connectivity needs
in the months following their receipt of hardware. Once every two weeks,
tech buddies extended personalized calls to simply check in with house-
holds, answer questions, and address any complications that emerged in the
two to six months after a distribution event took place. Sustained feedback
from households provided our team with a guide for evolving concerns
around households’ data and digital connectivity needs and allowed
households to register their own observations around a local test scenario
for Connect Illinois future expansion plans. Most importantly, it allowed
households to collectively register reports and critiques around unanticipated
outcomes—including the unexpectedly high number of hardware and service
failures associated with the program’s technology providers—and to pose
questions about how policy leaders intended to cope with such outcomes.
The documentation process we established made our team accountable for
reporting back to state funders on the liabilities of their anticipated ­program
design. This included the overwhelming instances of hardware failure and
problems with renewing monthly broadband subscriptions with EBB or

Com m u n i t y Data • 183

ACP, which led hot spot devices to fail.3 Roughly half of the tech buddies’
total working hours over the course of six months of the program’s operation
was spent addressing hardware failures alone, which ranged from assisting
households in contacting hardware suppliers (either PC4P or T-Mobile) to
reporting and replacing nonfunctional hardware4 and assisting with EBB/
ACP renewal processes online.5 Households reported experiencing long and
frustrating wait times when attempting to contact providers’ own tech sup-
port hotlines in hopes of resolving problems themselves,6 and they reported
that issues that required multiple calls to resolve further compounded their
frustrations. While programs like Tech Buddies typically are not included in
standard technology initiatives (where access is given the primary or exclusive
focus), our final report to Illinois’s Office of Broadband (Chan and Smith
2022) stressed how essential the program became in addressing marginalized
households’ specific needs (whether expediting resolutions around equip-
ment failures or simply providing a personalized channel for intermedia-
tion between technology hardware and service providers and households).7
We further stressed that community organizations’ efforts to highlight the
importance of developing meaningful accountability mechanisms to track
gaps in support from technology providers demonstrated its importance to
the research collaboration’s data infrastructure, collection process, and find-
ings—allowing outsized failure rates to be diagnosed and amplified to policy
makers in ways that could guide plans for state-scale technology plans.
Like the kinds of archival silences (Trouillot 1995) and missing datasets
(Criado Perez 2019; D’Ignazio and Klein 2019; Onuoha 2018) that decolonial
historians and feminist information studies scholars have unpacked before,
the kinds of historical absences and exclusions in data work that these kinds
of community data efforts point to are omissions sustained against a back-
drop of data accumulations happening around other “data-driven” plans of
the state and dominant knowledge institutions. Far from accidental, missing
data are what African American feminist data scholar Mimi Onuoha has
described as “blank spots that exist in spaces that are otherwise data-saturated
. . . where no data live . . . [even when] it should” (2018). Like gaps in global
femicide data or missing accounts of subaltern resistances, they point to the
missing records responding to possible but concealed questions and proposi-
tions that allow a status quo to remain in place. Adjacent to sites of designated
data abundance, the voids that result settle in places when present ­conditions
are meant to go unqueried, keeping the possibility of alternatives in the
shadows to obscure another present and future alike. These are not, then,

184 • chapter SIX

 empty spaces. Neither do they channel justifications for more d­ atafication in
the hands of contemporary big data actors and dominant knowledge institu-
tions, as if generating more data would resolve the problem that created the
silences around their mattering in the first place. As outlines of queries that
might have been—and might still be—asked, missing data are instead carri-
ers of critical potential, reminding us where, as Onuoha writes, “that which
we ignore reveals more than what we give our attention to” (2016).
For community data practitioners, the invitation extended is not one to
merely fill the void of missing data. Theirs is a call to reformulate the terms
of questioning instead, so that it might be possible to ask why what was
missing remained that way at all and what might begin to emerge instead
if historically marginalized communities determined what questions,
terms, and tempos of their asking could be encoded into research and data
­infrastructures instead?

Conclusion

What happens when community renewal, collaborative living, and connec-

tive interrelation—rather than efficiency, rationalization, and individual
competition—become the organizing logics and tempos behind the design,
use, and repair of information technology and data-driven infrastructures?
And how do we begin to account for the damage sustained via data practice
when urgencies around individual optimization, innovation, growth, and
productivity have been sustained as priorities above all else? I argue here that
recognizing the import of these questions has been a domain and ethical
commitment adopted by more than just information and technology studies
scholars. I’ve explored too how cultivating temporal methods for connec-
tion and interrelation among such multisited nodes of thinking as responses
have been differentially developed by community data practitioners. Their
efforts to organize data work around these questions can be one means of
refusing the insistences (and seductions) of innovation time and fortifying
practices for community repair, survival, and perhaps even accountability in
its aftermath.
This chapter has aimed to underscore the work of marginalized communi-
ties as sites of solution-making to counter the violences of innovation time
and their accelerations through dominant datafication processes driven by
industry and large knowledge institutions. Community groups’ commit-

Com m u n i t y Data • 185

ments to local forms of care work that extend from their data work—even if
local and gradual—can heighten new opportunities for accountability acts
through situated forms of community data work. Such commitments are
obscured in a world where the dominant means to value and recognize real
“work”—whether in the economy or politics, or around data and knowl-
edge practices—have turned around the capacity to measure some version of
change or quantified value-making. Within digital industry domains, such
manner of designating “work” has increasingly demanded that the time
and labor investments of “rational” individuals translate into the mastery,
dominance, or conquering of large-scaled systems that can convert matter
into more “optimal” states. Developing norms to recognize “work” in other
domains that have required the kinds of slow, iterative, gradual, and long-
term investments that are needed to sustain life and collective being (rather
than attempt to optimize them) has been something we have comparatively
ignored (like recognizing and tracking long-term impacts, whether around
investments or disinvestments in public education and health care, air
and water quality, or climate change). We follow numbers around growth and
loss, assigning value to such movements as indicators that spur anxiety
and crisis, or hubris and celebration, but we invest in and have developed far
fewer means to assess what it means to simply stay and to evaluate i­ nvestments
in collective survival and community. And this, despite the fact we live in an
age when we can no longer take either for granted as social matterings.
In the face of such developments, community data projects have refused
to simply be resigned to the space of regressive time. Community data
­practitioners remind us of the host of other questions we might ask, and the
array of other possibilities and problems we could explore, were attentions
and imaginaries not narrowly fixed on the temporal paradigms of innovation
regimes. Ever more narrowly defined by dominant knowledge institutions,
the given terms on which success and survival, risk and experience, come to
be framed and understood under innovation regimes silence and discount
the alternative care work fostered through community data. What else might
we attend to, foster data accounts around, or create new bonds of affect
and affinity around were there not the decoy of finance-driven campaigns
around value and value extraction? How then might we remake economies of
attention toward other ways of collective knowing with data and encounter
mutual experience in pluralistically entangled worlds?

186 • chapter SIX

 Conclusion
Data Pluralism and a Playbook for Defending
Improbable Worlds

In November 2023, billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk, among

the world’s wealthiest individuals and owner of a host of data-driven, indus-
try-disrupting companies, including Tesla, Space X, X/Twitter, and the AI
company x.AI, set off a global firestorm with a short message he posted to
the X/Twitter social media platform he had purchased just a year earlier.
He wrote, “You have said the actual truth” and copied a post from another
X/Twitter account. His repost voiced agreement with a racist, anti-immi-
grant, anti-Semitic conspiracy theory—the great replacement theory—that
White supremacist and eugenic propaganda around “White race suicide”
had invoked over a century ago in promotion of their radically anti-pluralist,
monoculturalist social project. It amplified to Musk’s 160 million followers
an earlier post from a far-right X/Twitter account that claimed Jewish and
left-wing groups sought to “replace the White race” with inferior races from
South America, Africa, and Asia. Before receiving Musk’s approval, that
account had posted earlier that “Jewish communities have been pushing . . .
dialectical hatred against Whites” through “hordes of minorities . . . flooding
their country.”
Musk’s repost quickly went viral among neo-Nazi and White suprema-
cist groups, with figureheads such as America First movement leader Nick
Fuentes underscoring his actions’ resonance with the 2017 Unite the Right
Rally in Charlottesville. He stated, “[M]archers [there] said, ‘Jews will not
replace us!’ . . . [Now] Elon Musk . . . [is] regularly talking about White
genocide, anti-White hatred and the role of Jewish elites!” (Crosse 2023).
Noting the impact of Musk’s increasingly routine endorsements of White
genocide conspiracy theories online, he added, “You open up one of the social
platforms and it’s so hot so fast it changes public opinion virtually overnight,

187
and really in our favor” (Anarchist Federation 2023). Indeed, earlier that
year, Musk claimed, without providing any substantiation, that ad revenue
on Twitter had decreased 60 percent due to critiques and pressure on
advertisers from the Jewish nonprofit the Anti-Defamation League
(ADL). Insisting he would not fall victim to this form of persecution and
channeling his best attempt at White billionaire fragility, Musk accused the
ADL of “trying to kill this platform by falsely accusing it & me of being
anti-Semitic” (Novak 2023). He added he planned to sue the ADL for lost
X/Twitter revenue (Milmo 2023).
Several months later, as corporations including Apple, Disney, Warner
Bros. Discovery, Paramount Global, Comcast, GM, Sony, Verizon, and
IBM announced that they would suspend advertising on X/Twitter follow-
ing Musk’s amplification of White replacement conspiracy theories, Musk
doubled down. Broadening his accusation of organizations working to “kill”
and “blackmail” his company, he explicitly extended his anti-pluralist para-
noia to the corporate sector as he spoke on stage at the New York Times’
DealBook Summit. He said, “What this advertising boycott is going to do
is . . . kill the company. And the whole world will know” (New York Times
DealBook Summit 2023). Promising to document the so-called corporate
assassination of Twitter/X’s otherwise value-generating platform, he ensured
his comments made global headlines as he repeated how little he assessed the
comparative value of boycotting companies to be. And he alarmed audiences
by not only repeating his depreciation of such companies’ actual worth but
stating with indignant emphasis—and in profanity-laced terms—what he
thought those companies could “go [do to] themselves.”
Musk, of course, seemed to be doing just fine on his own in single-hand-
edly setting the social media company he had purchased only months earlier
on a fast track to self-destruction. He had, within a few months of assum-
ing ownership of Twitter/X, fired 80 percent of its employees, dissolved the
company’s Trust and Safety Council and the verification system that helped
authenticate accounts, and reactivated the accounts of known US White
supremacists and their sympathizers, including Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson,
and Donald Trump. And he had made headlines for his predatory relation-
ship with female employees, and his creepy insistence that “civilization” will
crumble if “we” (as in techno-elites) don’t have more babies (Palazzolo &
Safdar 2024).
When it comes to amplifying eugenic messages in the twenty-first century
for monocultural remaking—and normalizing disinformation on White

188 • Conc lus ion

persecution and the “reasonable necessity” of segregation and even political
violence against uncontained minority threats—datafication platforms, pre-
diction systems, and the profit-seeking actors behind them have unquestion-
ably played defining roles. And Musk, for all his frequent outbursts, has been
only the tip of the iceberg. In the wake of globally expanding AI industries
and investments from Silicon Valley to turn their prediction systems into
complete models for social reality, techno-eugenics and the impacts of preda-
tory data have only intensified.
Indeed, at the height of the new millennium’s so-called data revolution,
eugenic-age zeal for targeted minority segregations, excisions, and even
wholesale population exterminations in the name of majoritarian self-
defense have returned with a global vengeance. At a time more flush with
data streams and self-consciously defined by technological advancements for
a new era of AI-driven revolution, how has techno-eugenics seemed to so
quickly rise to define the present as predictable content on the world’s most
popular data platforms and to such an extent that their visible dominance
now often reads as mundane? How is it that both within and outside the
West, contemporary datafication systems have become ample (even antici-
pated) channels for distributing radically anti-pluralist extremism? Such
dynamics have spread new variations of old eugenic conspiracy theories that
once again claim race replacement theory as the true reality pushing majority
populations into race suicide.
It is worth asking, too, if these dynamics are not the product of the
­contemporary alone, what’s kept us so fixated and frozen on the “now” of
datafication and prediction systems’ present harms as if they were. What
actors, creative forces, and propluralistic forms of accounting have we missed
around these intensifying dynamics as they have reappeared again and again
across generations? What has occupied our focus instead? What would it
look like to take action and cultivate new, shared practices to center alterna-
tive voices as a means of recovering data pluralism and changing the present
course of prediction-based platforms? And what have we seen about con-
temporary AI systems and their associated harms that suggest such tactics
for collective intervention and solidarity building against datafication and
prediction systems are now more critical than ever?
This conclusion is an invitation to explore such tactical possibilities for
what I argue for as “improbable worlds.” I underscore improbability here as
not based on a politics of possibility. Indeed, this conclusion highlights that
however exceptional it might seem to confront the challenge of predatory

data plur alism • 189

data’s expanding infrastructures in the present, we have never been alone
in the fight against data harms—and the struggle against them remains
vibrantly possible across a range of contexts. Improbability instead is used
to refer to—and refuse—statistically determined forms of likelihood based
on assessments of probable, majority-based outcomes. Such approaches are
commonly used by data-driven and AI industries today to produce predic-
tive assessments that work by projecting “probable outcomes” for the largest
possible set of users. Moreover, keeping populations blind to other “improb-
abilities,” especially that of the still ever-present potentials for solidarity
building around data pluralism, and enabling techno-eugenicists’ segre-
gationist logics to remain intact by appealing to majority populations has
been a central strategy to enable predatory data’s infrastructural advances.
Keeping populations separated into a hierarchy of discretely valued classes
and making such dividing classifications broadly legible as the dominant
system, after all, has been a driving ambition of eugenic agendas across gen-
erations. Imagining that techno-eugenic extractions would contain them-
selves and would only impact discrete minoritized populations, then, has
never been a good gamble.
In the twenty-first century, in the wake of new AI-driven prediction sys-
tem expansions, in particular, there is no question that ever-broader classes
are targeted for predatory data’s exploits. They are not only subject to con-
tinuous monitoring, data profiling, and their extending abuses, but are also
targeted for exclusion from the privileges reserved for populations classified
as deserving. Whatever protections a relative separation from the “undeserv-
ing” or proximity to “meriting” classes were once projected to provide middle
classes, it is evident today that, increasingly, security is ever more narrowly
justified for only narrower versions of the elite. Now, that is, even general
populations (women and youth, for instance, as broad classes) are routinely
denied what techno-eugenicists read as the unwarranted expense of user pro-
tections online. In other cases, they are simply deemed more profitable for
platform owners when such broad classes are disafforded securities. Under
such conditions, predatory data’s extractions, exclusions, and dispossession
are no longer experiences confined to historically minoritized populations
alone, but become the foundation of a new generalized logic impacting
­ever-larger populations and user bases.
Predatory data as an increasingly indiscriminate application to broaden-
ing populations, however, also signals new potentials for cultivating shared
critical sensibilities and renewed solidarities across conventionally defined

190 • Conc lus ion

lines of difference. Even as predatory data’s infrastructures work to segment
populations and amplify the segregating logics necessary to sustain techno-
eugenic futures, data pluralist alternatives have never been extinguished.
Yet now, as generations earlier, the question has been how to recognize and
respond to such alternatives. And how do we do so against the newly inten-
sifying conditions of techno-eugenic outcries, now oriented around the rise
of AI as a singularized imperative to future making?
Building on the chapters of this volume, this conclusion maps data plu-
ralism’s resilient vibrancy in the context of new AI developments, offering
a playbook for strengthening critical literacies for resisting data-driven
­segregations and fortifying solidarities. The same tactics likewise defend
improbable worlds that, as I’ll outline here, resist and exceed the operations
of AI prediction systems. They underscore how to listen past the amplify-
ing noise of predatory data to recover alternative possibilities of life in
common in an age of growing techno-eugenic stratifications and AI-based
experiments around prediction that collapse future possibilities into a single,
­hierarchically organized path.
The playbook offered here starts with an invitation to collectively diagnose
and defuse techno-eugenics’ segregationist future-casting as a first tactic, rec-
ognizing the narrow means by which it amplifies claims for monocultural
survival by hyping the existential threat posed by everyone—from minori-
tized populations to civic defenders of pluralism. It then extends a critique
of techno-eugenic claims to stand for life and abundance, even as it calls
for ever more limited protections for diverse populations and rationalizes
the expendability of users and producers in the AI economy. It closes with
a reminder of how the data pluralist project, and the extensions it has culti-
vated across generations that were covered in this book, have worked to foster
alternative sensibilities and common orientations around time, geographies,
communities, and organizing epistemologies to counter eugenics’ segregating
logics as they have persisted across generations. Such creative work and labor
are reminders that however much techno-eugenic strategies for colonizing
imaginaries saturate mainstream data channels with radical imperatives for
monocultural futures and majoritarian probabilities, data pluralist cultiva-
tions and investments in improbable worlds continue to multiply. The tactics
outlined below channel lessons offered across generations into the contempo-
rary; they also offer a renewal of solidarities in the face of growing, AI-driven
stratifications and projections of an exclusively probabilistically driven and
defined world.

data plur alism • 191

 Tactic 1: Defy Data Monoculturalism

Read against the eugenic strategies of the past century covered in earlier
chapters, techno-eugenics’ contemporary amplification of majoritarian delu-
sions around the necessity of abandoning democratic ideals to secure future
survival rings familiar. Alongside the viral spread of far-right disinformation
campaigns on US social media channels, pitched forms of existential p­ aranoia
have resurged internationally once again among majoritarian populations,
with a key distinction today being the intensified speed and scale of their
viral spread. Eager champions can now be found seemingly everywhere as
AI-platformized and profit-driven forms of xenophobic extremism and pro-
monocultural nationalisms scale online, rapidly crossing site after site across
the globe. Conservative political leaders have likewise newly found ready
amplification for extremist forecasting across information channels as they
mainstream online demands for the eradication of minoritized classes and
propluralistic institutions. In the United States, this includes resuscitating
once unheeded calls for eliminating the public education system writ large,
including the Department of Education itself (Lonas 2023), and energizing
campaigns to eradicate “liberal” universities (Binkley and Balingit 2024)
that have, not coincidentally, been seen to foster critical public l­iteracies
around right-wing propaganda and disinformation.
Such AI-intensified developments now make what for decades remained
largely marginal, dormant arguments to demolish propluralistic public insti-
tutions into routine content actively amplified on mainstream platforms
and in national political campaigns. Indeed, in the months leading up to
the 2024 US presidential election, former US Republican president Donald
Trump was widely broadcast as he loudly championed White persecution
narratives and eugenic claims of US immigrants as “vermin” who “poison the
blood of our country” (Kurtzleben 2023; Layne 2023). While such eugenic
arguments were just decades ago only heard among radical pockets of free
market libertarians and anti-welfare policy right-wing extremists (Bauman
and Read 2018), today their automated amplification across media platforms
as content in presumed demand among majoritarian populations propels
the agendas of White supremacist figures such as Trump into the national
mainstream. As one late 2023 post from Trump on Truth Social read in ref-
erence to US immigrants, “They poison mental institutions and prisons all
over the world, not just in South America. . . . [And t]hey’re coming into our
country from Africa, from Asia, all over the world” (Gibson 2023).

192 • Conc lus ion

 Throughout Silicon Valley’s leadership corridors, too, techno-elite
­existential paranoia and extermination fantasies have amplified. Routinely,
the AI industry’s White male corporate heads—from Peter Thiel to Marc
Andreessen, Sam Altman, and other enthusiasts of the AI accelerationist
movement—project a crisis of Western technological stagnation (Andreessen
2023; Thiel 2023) credited to governments’ overprotection of pluralism. From
such perspectives, “deranged” government regulations (Andreessen 2023)
and democratic policies only work to protect unfit and underperforming
populations from projected technological harms. Worse yet, government
efforts to check tech companies’ advancements to defend underperformers
jeopardize the higher-order strength of Western technology leaders and the
future of the West’s data and AI industries. In what accelerationists define as
a “deadly race” for the future of technology and capitalism alike,1 some have
even labeled the current moment as a twenty-first century “Sputnik moment”
with its pending threat of US technological demise in a globally escalating
AI “arms race.”2
The absurdity of such projections, however, can and should be named as
a core symptom of techno-eugenics and its efforts to colonize perceptions
of reality through fear mongering. Likewise, the repeated claims around
the persecution of tech geniuses and entrepreneurs made by Silicon Valley’s
most wealthy elites should readily indicate how deeply a profound narcissism
and pathological drive for self-preservation propel White male techno-elites’
claims around insecurity. While tempting to dismiss, it would be a mistake
to not take seriously their effect and their design to distract from the actual
vulnerabilities that have amplified for other parties all around. Being forced
to focus on techno-eugenicists’ survival, that is, means paying less atten-
tion to the narrowing terms for survival and support they have created for
­everyone else.
Defying such terms, then, entails actively refusing the “probable,” mea-
surably majoritarian outcome as the most evolved future. It means defend-
ing data pluralism and support for the vitality of not only diverse systems
of knowing and accounting for the real beyond techno-eugenic terms but
recognizing the deep damage done when reality and the course of history
are framed exclusively around the language of competitive survival, hierar-
chy, and scarcity. Such terms actively work to foreclose alternative futures,
keeping publics frozen in the precarity of self-preservation instead. Rejecting
techno-eugenic frames thus opens possibilities for registering the present
and future on new terms altogether, rather than projecting the wholesale

data plur alism • 193

r­ejection of technology as the only true alternative to techno-eugenics.
Engaging accounts that underscore the persistent possibility of (and deep
longing for) solidarity and collective vitalities around data fortifies techno-
logical alternatives that, as other data collaborations in this book explore,
have never been fully captured by techno-eugenics’ monoculturalist agenda.

Tactic 2: Counter Techno-Eugenic

Self-Preservation with Solidarity

It is no surprise that in the name of self-preservation techno-eugenic attacks

on minoritized populations and on defenders of democratic norms have
rapidly escalated. This has been accompanied with depictions of such
­populations as not so much victims of data-driven harms, but rather (in
true eugenic form) the primary perpetrators and threat to the security of
majority populations. By today’s techno-eugenic allegations, minoritized
groups’ and democratic defenders’ growing reports of online harms and
system-wide discrimination on platforms are not merely guilty of drawing
investments away from invaluable data-driven platforms and innovations.
Instead, by merely reporting online abuses and evidence of bias, minor-
ity groups—­techno-eugenicists fabulate—demonstrate their willingness
to block ­technological advancement and compromise the existence of
­profit-making platforms altogether.
Prominent US venture capitalist Marc Andreessen thus penned and circu-
lated a long manifesto in late 2023 to document the “lies” being told by pro-
“stagnation,” “socialist enemies” of AI and its corporate d­ evelopers (Andreessen
2023). By Andreessen’s account, AI’s “techno-capitalist” a­ccelerationist
­promoters—represented by leading tech entrepreneurs such as himself—work
in defense of “technology, abundance, and life” itself. As he insisted in his
manifesto, “anti-merit” forces (that apparently e­ ncompass anyone who doesn’t
endorse accelerationism’s vision for a no-holds-barred approach to ­technology
development) threaten to devastate technological acceleration as what he
called “the glory of human ambition and achievement” and the realization
of the tech sector’s potential (Andreessen 2023).
Opening ominously with the warning to beware of the negative messages
about technology’s destructive power that tell techno-entrepreneurs “to
denounce our birthright—our intelligence, our control over nature, our abil-
ity to build a better world”—Andreessen’s manifesto insisted that the real

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truth of techno-capital’s evolutionary innovation market was that it “spirals
continuously upward” and “makes natural selection work for us in the realm
of ideas.” Stressing intelligence as the “ultimate engine of progress” now
under attack by accelerationism’s enemies, Andreessen closed by asserting
AI as a force that can save lives. And he darkly insisted that “any deceleration
of AI” through regulating Big Tech surveillance or limiting the aggressive
datafication of user and producer activity “will cost lives” (Andreessen 2023).
If such shameless reality distortion and polarizing disinformation sounds
familiar, it is because it has now become the day-to-day experience of the
profit-driven digital content global publics of all ages are now forced to navi-
gate on the very platforms and digital properties accelerationists own and
control. Everywhere, it seems, publics have been prompted to rise to defend
the existential stakes around stagnation and “wake up” to the only “truth”
worth attending to, to see the war being forged against evolution and abun-
dance by “anti-merit,” propluralistic forces. This is a war, we are reminded,
where nothing less than the fate of the rightful global order—defined in
the image of a radically unregulated, unconstrained techno-capitalistic
market and the continuity of unchallenged Western and White patriarchal
­dominance—lays in the balance.
The evident irony of such calls, of course, is that despite the claims of
defending life and abundance, everyone and everything proves to be dispos-
able and expendable except the Western(ized), largely White male elites at the
very apex of techno-capital’s own innovation markets. By AI accelerationists’
monoculturalist revision of society, even traditional Fortune 500 companies
and advertisers on datafication platforms like X/Twitter can be reminded of
their disposability. Only the owners, funders, and leaders of the tech sector’s
most valuable and allegedly innovative AI properties and data platforms are
truly assured or deserving of a share of the full material bounty, credit, and
security that is promised in the face of the disruptive change they promote.
It is this concentrated cluster of owners and self-appointed, future-oriented
visionaries who see themselves as doing the heaviest lifting—and creating the
largest value generation and evolutionary push—when it comes to universal
datafication and the creation of prediction systems. Parties that stand in the
way of such pursuits are themselves only obstacles to life and abundance.
The ongoing precarity of and reduced protections for minoritized popula-
tions that we’ve witnessed grow while Big Tech has prioritized a singular
pursuit of accelerated innovation cycles and profit-making interests readily
demonstrates how broadly such racialized, exclusionary logics run.

data plur alism • 195

 Techno-eugenicists, however, still routinely deny charges of racism by
defending their actions as driven by other, allegedly higher ideals. Making
grandiose claims that they act in defense of innovation and technological
advancements around datafication, and that the commercial data-driven
platforms they run are built to save humanity (Brooks 2023; Isaacson 2023),
they project such systems as now the culmination of technological genius
that must, at whatever cost, be enabled to fully realize. By their framings,
it has been innovation centers alone that have been behind datafication
­systems’ advancement. And it is they who should rightfully be recognized as
the principal protagonists in the history and the evolution of global society.
Moreover, their obsessive demands for continual technological revolution
have powerfully worked to drown out all other alternative paths for future
worlding in the contemporary—so much so that broadcast accounts of the
given centers of the data economy in the mainstream media now portray
industry and innovation-seeking centers as so fundamental to the evolv-
ing digital future that now awaits the rest of the world that to refuse such a
future can virtually equate to refusing the future itself.
Even when AI-based deployments have prompted growing concerns over
the unprecedented pace of change and the impacts on the security of vast
populations and economic sectors around the world, dominant discursive
frameworks have continued to reify industry and knowledge-sector leaders’
emphasis on the imperative to innovate. Public attention is turned toward a
focus on the responsibility of individuals and economic players alike to pre-
pare for an inevitable AI revolution. Quietly excised from such discussions
have been questions around what alternatives varied globally distributed
institutional actors, policymakers, and knowledge producers might invest in
to cultivate other futures. As significant, of course, has been the absence of
and silence around a parallel set of questions around not merely what oppor-
tunities for intervention there might have been in the past, but what actors
and collective actions might have summoned distinct imaginaries around
alternative data futures—and who benefits from continuously silencing such
past records.
It is clear, then, that to reset imaginaries around other possible worlds
and narrative frames will require interventions beyond that of liberal insti-
tutions, the experts they employ, and mainstream media networks. It will
demand the agency and engagement of everyday actors and communities. It
will require alternative ways of understanding collective being in the world
based on solidarity and pluriversal intersectionality, rather than the massive

196 • Conc lus ion

data extractions that techno-eugenicists use to justify their claims to knowl-
edge and prediction, even as they have always failed to represent the full-
ness of reality or account for the vitality of improbable worlds that continue
to emerge.

Tactic 3: Resist Expendability

and the Probable Futures of AI

Whatever AI systems’ evident failures in prediction and application, how-

ever, there is no question that in the coming decades they will continue to
apply the designation of “undeserving” to ever-broader populations. Already
we have witnessed the kind of unapologetic hostility that once primarily
targeted minoritized populations now routinely experienced by general user
populations and consumers of technology on data-driven platforms.
As surprising has been the increasingly public shows of abuse that even
elite knowledge workers and creative content and intellectual property pro-
ducers endure from the largest US media companies they work for. The 2023
Writers Guild of America and US actors’ union SAG-AFTRA (Screen Actors
Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists) strike was
emblematic of corporations’ public display of expendability of even the most
familiar celebrity actors and writers of popular programs. The strike began
in the summer 2023 over a labor dispute with the Alliance of Motion Picture
and Television Producers (AMPTP) caused by streaming and its effect on
residual compensations to artists, as well as other new technologies such as
AI in the reproduction of digital likenesses. Even tech workers at Silicon
Valley’s most prominent companies—once coveted as specialized knowledge
­workers—have faced abuse from displeased tech CEOs. Recent headlines of
high-profile tech companies’ (e.g., Twitter, SpaceX, Google) mass firing
of high-ranking employees who were critical of company leadership and
­policies readily demonstrated the expendability (Scheiber 2024; Tiku 2020)
of once-coveted expert laborers and producers of high technological value.
Perhaps the most telling development around what the new terms of
AI-based inclusion now entail was OpenAI’s recent replacement and ­public
shaming of most of its four-person, nonprofit-designed board of ­directors. The
unprecedented move in November 2023 came after the original board—two
women and the company’s chief scientist, all selected to initially prioritize a
separation of AI development from profit-based motives—fired the former

data plur alism • 197

CEO of the company, Sam Altman. Altman’s aggressive pursuit of profits
and commercial fundraising goals before the nonprofit’s founding mission
to maintain human-centered principles and safety over profits (Allyn 2023),
and growing perceptions of him as an advocate “for rapid AI innovation”
(Varanasi 2023), had come to generate unabated concerns over his ability
to protect OpenAI’s founding mission. Altman, however, was rapidly rein-
stated as CEO and accompanied by a new board that included ex-Salesforce
co-CEO Bret Taylor and former US treasury secretary and president of
Harvard University Larry Summers, ensuring strong ties to Wall Street and
US policymakers. Altman’s reinstatement was hailed as not only a win for
Big Tech’s profit-based pursuits but for the very no-holds-barred approach to
AI developments championed by accelerationists (Mims 2023).
In a world of AI-driven consumption, where the recommendations of
­algorithms can be read as more decisive than users’ independent decision-
making in determining outcomes, companies see less and less need to culti-
vate user loyalties and choice. Similarly, a world of AI-produced or replicated
content that is understood to perform comparably to human-produced con-
tent has made the value of knowledge work harder to sustain and harder to
read as anything more than excessive.
We should beware, however, that AI systems’ claims to accurately predict
the future of consumer need and producers’ output are based on calcula-
tions for probable futures based on past data. Such datasets are used to build
models of what future outcomes will most likely and probabilistically turn
out to be. While the forecasts that result can often be relatively innocuous,
even when they might be slightly off mark, there are many scenarios where
the desired future outcome is explicitly not the probable outcome. This is true
not only in the case of predicting the likely reality to be faced by minoritized
populations—where datasets are too limited or misrepresentative to innocu-
ously or accurately project future outcomes—but is also the case in contexts
that involve the protection of minoritized value systems. These include civil
rights, feminism, or decoloniality, where majoritarian ­values and beliefs
(whether around White supremacy, patriarchy, ­heteronormativity, or colo-
nial hierarchy) can often be overrepresented in existing datasets and predic-
tive models. In such cases, it is precisely the probable outcome that should be
avoided from projecting into the future.
Such cases remind us how, in a range of scenarios, it is instead exactly
models for improbable outcomes that we would want to build into future
worlds. Indeed, making room for the emergence of improbable worlds applies

198 • Conc lus ion

to varied scenarios far beyond platform cultures—for example, to medical
diagnostics, where diagnostics for minoritized populations and understud-
ied diseases or populations often fall outside the probable models developed
for majority populations. Even the emergence of planet Earth, in a universe
where still little evidence for other planetary life is known to exist, appears to
have emerged as an improbable world. Collective sustainability, that is, may
depend precisely upon improbability.
This should also remind us why given datasets and models that overrep-
resent majoritarian populations have yielded pernicious impacts. Through
biasing toward probable outcomes, prediction systems have provided a means
to actively amplify majoritarian worldviews into the future. Little wonder,
then, that the overblown anxieties of majoritarian populations, patriarchal
nationalists, and far-right radicals in context after context across the globe
seem to have appeared so suddenly empowered overnight. In the timespace
of AI-based predictive systems, the future is just a matter of following the
numbers and projecting probable outcome.

Tactic 4: Refuse the Disposal

of Users and Producers

It is worth pausing for a moment to account for how the amplification of prob-
able worlds has played out in AI-driven predictive systems’ a­ bility to make
digital users and producers appear suddenly disposable in the i­nformation
present. For decades following the rise of personal computing, digital users
and producers were uniquely valued, pursued, and even fetishized members
of the networked economy. Celebrated as new engines of value-generating
growth, digital users and their loyalties to new platforms and products were
read as metricizable, empirical indexes for verifying the viability of new digital
start-ups. Digital producers were heroized too as the creators of ­spectacularly
new forms of economic value, intellectual property, and knowledge that
accelerated productivity in ways that surpassed traditional labor.
Today, however, the pursuit of datafication and prediction systems, rather
than the cultivation of global userships, is the fundamental technique by
which the contemporary digital economy expands and colonizes. As I’ve
argued throughout these chapters, datafication and prediction functions
remind us of the inseparably eugenic origins of the information economy. As
the twentieth century’s first powerful and popular datafication m ­ ovement,

data plur alism • 199

eugenics spread through promising a means (controlled by the elite male
knowledge professionals of their day) to universally measure and predict
human value and fitness and the worth they would generate (or cost) into
the future. By extending data methods that projected an empirical basis
for the present and future value of well-born classes (and the absence of value
within the so-called unfit), eugenicists could assure themselves that they were
uniquely deserving of privileges denied to others. They could assuage their
anxieties that their proximity to increasingly diverse classes would funda-
mentally threaten existence, defined by their access to exclusive privileges
in the present and future. Such explicitly racialized techniques for classify-
ing, stratifying, and creating hierarchies between global populations beyond
White patrician elites alone likewise helped eugenics grow its popularity, as
its adoption by broad, globally expansive users attested to.
A century later, datafication and prediction in the digital economy has
provided an altogether distinct advantage for techno-elites. If digital growth
in recent decades had secured a clear path for expansion that relied on the
growth of users, personal devices, hardware, and digital consumer markets,
twenty-first-century datafication and prediction systems adopt a distinct
approach. A past reliance on digital consumers meant that global growth
necessitated active online consumers and users—ones who later were cel-
ebrated as even enterprising “prosumers” of digital products in an online
marketplace. It could include a diverse spectrums of users, so long as they
were enthusiastic, consenting participants in an allegedly more democratic
kind of digital techno-capitalism.
Contemporary datafication and prediction systems, however, have made
a critical break from those earlier logics of digital growth. Most dependent
on processes of automated decision-making and massified data collection—
and now more efficient because of it—their core functions no longer rely on
or require the active consent of consumers to explicitly elect to use specific
digital systems. Today, datafication and prediction can occur regardless of
whether subjects are active, consenting participants. Datafication, prediction,
and classification take place seamlessly, often without notice or market spec-
tacle, and frequently without requiring subjects’ active consent. Automatic
facial recognition, body scans, and the use and correlative repurposing of
previously collected and archived offline records—whether state and law
enforcement records, health and purchase data, or other forms of digitizable
identity records—all circumvent a reliance on users’ active, knowing, and
elective “participation.” Likewise, their classification and predictions around

200 • Conc lus ion

the risk they carry take place by overriding a dependence on digital consum-
ers’ consent. Without a need to cultivate consumer loyalties and persuade
users’ adoption, datafication and prediction economies have been made more
frictionless, automated, and efficient on the one hand and unapologetically
“extractivist” and detached from user preferences on the other.
It is no accident, then, that the contemporary data economy and tools of
AI and big data have become the chosen resources for authoritarian, national-
ist, and explicitly antidemocratic movements, states, and politics. It should
be no surprise either that they have likewise given rise to a growing model of
techno-eugenic digital capitalists, who, unlike the “do no evil” internet-as-
benevolent messengers of an earlier pre–big data age, can now skip over user
persuasion and any pretense of a kinder internet-age capitalism. Identifying
and cultivating users’ democratic choice can now be replaced with the prob-
able prediction of consumer behavior—so much so that investing in growing
the consumer loyalties of diverse publics can come to be read as an exces-
sive, unnecessary feature of markets rather than an obligatory channel for
expansion. Now able to operate without the distraction of cultivating user
demand and adoption, techno-eugenicists can focus singularly on expanding
profitability and getting rid of excessive investments. They can likewise now
categorize and calculate investments in users and even creative producers as
potentially excessive expenditures, no longer needed in an age of prediction-
based AI. Under such calculations, creative producers can increasingly be read
as replaceable by AI systems that generate likenesses of creative output based
on data amassed on past behavior. Likewise, investing in traditional forms of
cultivating user loyalty can be seen as increasingly obsolete when users’ prefer-
ences and market behaviors become predictable entities under dataification
systems. Indeed, early twentieth-century eugenicists argued for a vigilance
against such wasteful expenditures early on, introducing their ­calculation
a century ago that some users “were born to be a burden on others.”
And yet, however extreme such developments, I stress this is not an argument
for returning to past models of capitalist production and consumption or for
fortifying the market-based logics around individual consent. Such options
would be insufficient for recovering a justice-driven model of pluralism in
today’s prediction-driven data economy. At best, they would only return
­publics to economic or legal models that narrowly define protections for
vulnerable populations facing eugenic policies and markets. What is needed
instead is a politics of feminist and decolonial refusal (Cifor et al. 2019;
Simpson 2017) that can reimagine technological worlds and data practice and

data plur alism • 201

that can decenter logics of either economic productivity or legal individual-
ism to ground and resituate relations of shared, renewable accountability.
We don’t have to stay locked in liberal frames under the pretense that they
are the best options against techno-eugenic thinking that we can hope for.
Indeed, if anything, the preceding chapters have explored the proximity and
occasional overlaps between liberal and eugenic rationales. To break out, I’ve
argued, requires cultivating a historical consciousness around datafication
and prediction and an embrace of pluralistic practices that emerge outside
the realms of liberal law and markets. It requires tactics (de Certeau 1980),
that is, that would work in defense of improbable worlds.

Tactic 5: Defending Improbable Worlds

Despite all odds, improbable worlds exist all around us. They are the statisti-
cally or politically minoritized contexts, conditions, and outcomes that in
their emergence and existence defy probability and the metrics of scale. In
their minoritized status, however, they find a means to thrive in the face of
given, dominant systems, drawing support from unlikely and unpredictable
resources and allies and cultivating new solidarities for such ends. Although
they might exist improbably—with other outcomes more likely by numerical
or political measure to emerge—they are not less valuable or meaningful.
Whether the emergence of unlikely outcomes such as planet Earth in a uni-
verse that’s largely hostile to life or the thriving of minoritized communi-
ties when dominant forces might condition assimilation or incorporation,
improbable worlds powerfully shape the heterogeneity and plurality of pos-
sible ways of life and being.
This has been harder to notice, however, in a world increasingly defined
by digital systems’ amplified projections of probable outcomes and futures.
This, after all, has been the impact of new prediction-driven AI systems as
they have grown to become mundane, loudly self-signally incorporations
into everyday environments. The ever-more prolific real-time recommenda-
tions such ­systems deliver provide their assessments to users based on their
calculations around a given dataset and the most probable solution sought
by users at scale or (less often) a particular user over time. They are delivered
via numerous mapping and consumer platforms, large language models and
social media, and digital identification and self-driving technologies, among
many other AI-based prediction systems that now operate across varied

202 • Conc lus ion

everyday ecologies. Probable world solutions, for this reason, bias toward the
reproduction of dominant worldviews and what has been or can be statisti-
cally most represented in a dataset.
While such recommended outcomes can, in some cases, provide users
with recommendations that appear to be the safest bet, there are many others
for which generating probable outcomes as projected futures empirically fails
when compared to real-world outcomes. In other situations, such probability-
based outcomes would be undesired for reproducing majoritarian worldviews,
biases, and discriminatory hierarchies. The over- or underrepresentation of
either majority or minoritized populations can lead AI systems to over- or
underpredict real-world outcomes, for instance. This was the case when
the AI system COMPAS, used by judges in several US states, was found to
wrongly overpredict Black individuals’ and underpredict White ­individuals’
likelihood to commit future crimes (Angwin et al. 2016). This was the case,
too, when students of color and with visual impairments at the University
of Illinois were found to be overflagged as cheating by the facial recogni-
tion and online proctoring platform Proctorio (Flaherty 2021). AI systems’
­probabilistic readings of user tastes in music and arts-based platforms have
led creative producers to even critique how systems are encouraging more
formulaic, predictable approaches to composition that have narrowed the
possibilities for artistic expression as producers are nudged toward design-
ing for tastes that have been measured at scale (Jax 2023). In the meantime,
creative producers are pressed to grapple with the numerous other possible
forms of expression and creation that are being extinguished through the
quiet work of automated prediction.
Such increasingly narrow, monoculturalist terms for inclusion, legibility,
and existence within predictive, AI-driven platforms are among the new
pathologies publics now navigate as technological evolution and intelligence
return to the majoritarian, probable world terms of techno-eugenicists.
However, then, as now, accepting such terms is far from inevitable. There
continue to be signs and spaces that indicate just how deeply a defense of
improbable worlds that enable and multiply minoritized worldviews would
be embraced. I have also argued that such inflated cries of existential c­ risis and
xenophobic paranoia are not only age-old strategies used to justify authoritar-
ian practices and resecure majority populations’ dominance. The book sig-
nals, too, the rising influence of a powerful new generation of techno-eugenic
promoters whose darkly cast depictions of present t­echnological decline
now operate alongside the more familiar forms of celebratory hype that for

data plur alism • 203

decades had made industry enthusiasm the dominant force in public fram-
ings of technology. Both, however, depend on the spread of a probable world
and the continued empowerment of dominant classes as the outcome of AI
systems. Little wonder that growing publics have come to call for resistance
to such systems for increasing bias and limiting the creative possibilities for
an independent, unprescribed future.
This book is a reminder, then, of the vast ecologies of multivalent, mul-
titemporalized forms of data work, practice, and studies that resist the
monofuturist projections of AI and big data temporalities through explicitly
data pluralist practices in defense of improbable worlds. The diversity of rela-
tionalities represented across their multisited, multimethod approaches not
only defend data pluralism as a vibrantly active feature of research practices
that exceed the norms of knowledge and innovation centers, but work to
retemporalize and diversify dominant data regimes. Across such spaces we’ve
seen researchers, artists, and activists cultivate local data relations within
a multiplicity of transnational sites, interfacing diverse epistemologies and
representing pluriversal possibilities. Responding to local needs, projects
can take on a variety of aspects and forms. And bringing data together
requires the patience and careful labor of committed relationship building
across lines of difference that defies big data’s restless adherence to an urgent,­
production- and extraction-demanding innovation time.
Data pluralist commitments emerge from the recognition of the i­ rreducibly
varied data methods, formats, tempos, and histories long cultivated and still
sustained by practitioners across local worlds. Calling out the false c­ onceit of
technological revolution’s—and now big data and AI’s—projected universal-
ism, they take seriously not only the violence enacted in attempting to deny
or disguise the full diversity of data, information, and knowledge possible
through probable world readings and reductions. They also remind us of the
situated nature of alternative justice-oriented data practices and the varied
improbable worlds they support. They remind us that seeing data from below
and grounded within local contexts, and rejecting what Donna Haraway
called the “god’s eye view from nowhere” (1988), is a necessary ­ethical stance.
It may indeed be our best bet for enabling relations of accountability and
collaborative being to be centered in data work and diverse local worlds.
Data pluralists’ commitment to retemporalize data work in support of
improbable worlds, however, should remind knowledge professionals that the
work to expel and exterminate regressive temporal orientations has been long
going. Indeed, data pluralism’s projects recognize how dominant models of

204 • Conc lus ion

datafication have deleteriously impacted marginalized communities and col-
lective life, eroding temporal worlds as their harms have disproportionately
targeted marginalized classes. This dates back over a century and includes
eugenicists’ obsessive work to dataify immigrants, people living in poverty,
and large populations deemed to be mentally, morally, or physically unfit,
degrading, and dysgenic. Sharing values and goals with broader data justice
and data activism movements worldwide, however, data initiatives operating
in defense of improbable worlds have worked to highlight how a long history
of silenced data and the ongoing datafication work of dominant knowledge
institutions couple to amplify harms marginalized communities face in the
era of big data. These harms include the expansion of forms of algorithmic
discrimination to the loss of privacy and autonomy, political manipulation,
and in extreme cases, organized physical violence.
Working as agents to formulate alternative data futures, however, defend-
ers of improbable worlds and practitioners of data pluralism covered in this
project highlight the need to cultivate new methods to engage diverse stake-
holders. They respond to the varied temporal orientations of marginalized
communities, in particular. It is the commitment to not merely respond to,
but to stay, be, and think with marginalized communities—in what feminist
scholars have called the tempos of “care time”—that anchor data pluralists’
engagements. Their defense of pluri-temporal, improbable world making is
thus grounded in the work of situating data practice in a temporal order
that unfolds outside that of big data’s insistence on a universal temporal
regime. From such a vantage, datafication processes can be read not so much
as a necessarily abstracted process whose global takeover and grip on the
future is already a given inevitability. It can be recognized instead an uneven
and locally contingent process that gets differentially shaped across locales
by specific forms of resistance and investment of time and care by situated
actors. From such a vantage, too, dominant knowledge institutions that have
been ­recognized as driving big data regimes aren’t read as decontextualized
global forces. Instead, they are entities for which stability relies on sustained
coordination across local sites and activities (by specific research clusters,
commercial divisions, or public offices, among other local extensions), where
local forms of disruption or dissent can still meaningfully register.
Such work, stretching back generations, is a reminder of how long
­marginalized populations have invested in mounting local defenses and
speaking through forms of critical practice to steer knowledge processes
toward other futures that would not center globally extractive, segregationist

data plur alism • 205

forms of datafication as inevitable architectures. This book is a call, then, to
listen for the tactics fostered to insist on pluri-temporal relationalities and
not just productionist time’s percussive insistence on control and profit as
the aims of technological design and data work. This is a call to foster a closer
recognition of the interconnective cultivations such tactics brought forth
that made new possibilities come to life across generations.
Such critical reorientations center the experiences, perspectives, and sto-
rytelling (Singh, Guzmán, and Davison 2022) of marginalized populations,
and in doing so, advance new frameworks in defense of improbable worlds.
These include, among others, calls for the abolishment of big data (e.g., Data
for Black Lives), data sovereignty (e.g., Global Indigenous Data Alliance),
vernacular technology (e.g., Boston South End Technology Center), counter
data (e.g., Datos Contra Feminicidio/Data against Feminicide), data bodies
defense (e.g., Our Data Bodies, Detroit Community Technology Project,
Los Angeles Community Action Network), antispying (e.g., Stop LAPD
Spying Coalition, Mijente), and collective benefit (e.g., US Indigenous Data
Sovereignty). As forms of situated data practice, the local data encounters
they foster engage what feminist science studies scholars argued for as
­situated knowledge practices that recognize the need for fostering partial and
embodied modes of seeing to challenge unlocatable and irresponsible modes
of knowledge practice (Haraway 1988). They also reveal, I argue, the inher-
ent multiplicity of potentials for interpretation that surrounds any dataset
that users are often encouraged to only see as given and predetermined
by the lens of probability.
Such commitments to improbable worlds remind us that dislodging our
contemporary imaginaries around data-and AI-driven economies and their
singular focus on the privileged sites of “high innovation” is long overdue.
Such fixations have artificially kept attentions focused on operations taking
place inside the exclusively bounded sites of Silicon Valley firms and research
campuses behind the architectures used to digitally process user data. The
outsized attention given to the extraordinary singularity of speed and scale
in information processing that again and again has been championed as the
digital age’s highest achievement have only reified probable world castings
around big data and AI. And in doing so, they draw attention away from the
day-to-day repair and restoration work necessary to contend with the global
ecologies of exclusion Big Tech has accelerated and the ever-narrowing terms
of vitality and security all around.

206 • Conc lus ion

 We need to reject such distractions and empower new imaginaries and
freedom dreams—including improbable worlds around global technolo-
gies and society alike—that are not driven by the survivalist fantasies and
paranoid anxieties around self-preservation of White, Western(ized) techno-
elites and ruling classes. The call here to think across time and space reminds
us how much work has been and continues to be committed to dismantle
Western technology’s deadly master narrative and to reclaim the aims of
pluralistic solidarity, restoration, and repair that diverse marginalized com-
munities around the world have cultivated in data and information work.
Other forms of global knowledge futures have long been imagined, too. How
to see ourselves in relation and accountable connection to them and decenter
the given terms of technology’s individualistic use and competition in the
name of new solidarities is the challenge of improbable world building we
can choose to step into.

data plur alism • 207

 Not es

Introduction

1. See epigraph for the full quote and link back to the citation. Thiel was also
an early investor in Facebook and was an outspoken supporter of Donald Trump,
donating $1.25 million to Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016. See https://www
.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-who-is-peter-thiel-20180215-story.html.
2. See World Population Review, “Facebook Users by Country 2022,” accessed
May 17, 2022, https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/facebook
-users-by-country.
3. See Mark Zuckerberg’s 2017 blog post, “Building a Global Community,”
posted to Facebook.com on February 17, 2017, https://www.facebook.com/notes
/mark-zuckerberg/building-global-community/10154544292806634.
4. See World Population Review, “Facebook Users by Country 2022,”
accessed May 17, 2022, https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings
/facebook-users-by-country.
5. A 2019 Human Rights Watch report cites that 254 incidents of religious
identity-based crimes were reported between January 2009 and October 2018, in
which at least 91 persons were killed and 579 were injured. About 90 percent (229)
of these attacks were reported after May 2014, when the BJP-led government was
elected to office at the national level. Of the incidents reported, some two-thirds, 66
percent, occurred in BJP-run states. Muslims were victims in 62 percent of the cases
and Christians in 14 percent.
6. As of April 2022, Narendra Modi held the most popular Twitter account
of any global head of state actively in office, with 78.2 million followers. Former
US president Barak Obama had 131.4 million followers and Elon Musk had 91.8
million followers on the same date. See https://www.tweetbinder.com/blog/top
-twitter-accounts/.
7. The report cites that in July 2016 Facebook and Myanmar Post and Telecom-
munications jointly launched “Free Basics” and “Facebook Flex” in Myanmar, which
provided access to basic services without data charges on mobile phones, through

209
free access to a limited number of sites, including Facebook. Free Basics was discon-
tinued in Myanmar in September 2017. As the report states, “The relative unfamil-
iarity of the population with the Internet and with digital platforms and the easier
and cheaper access to Facebook have led to a situation in Myanmar where Facebook
is the Internet. It has become the main mode of communication among the public
and a regularly used tool for the Myanmar authorities to reach the public.”
8. Facebook launched “Free Basics” and “Facebook Flex” in Myanmar in 2016,
products that, respectively, enable subscribers to have a text-only version of Face-
book without incurring data charges and provide access to basic services without
data charges via mobile phones. The products provide free-of-charge internet service,
but with access to only a limited number of sites, including Facebook. Free Basics
was discontinued in Myanmar in September 2017.
9. In 2018, New York Times reporters noted that some twelve hundred mod-
erators were employed in Germany, where a history of political genocide and
hate speech laws require vigilant content review. Reporters noted that in order to
achieve the same ratio of users to moderators in Myanmar, Facebook would need
to have around eight hundred reviewers in the country. See Roose and Mozur 2018.
10. See Alex Warofka’s post, “An Independent Assessment of the Human Rights
Impact of Facebook in Myanmar,” posted to the Facebook Blog on November 5,
2018, https://about.fb.com/news/2018/11/myanmar-hria/. Warofka specifically
emphasized how the company would work to help “maximize the opportunities
for freedom of expression, digital literacy, and economic development” and would
point to how Facebook’s policies “are developed with an eye towards international
human rights principles, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and
the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.” He would further specify
that the company’s membership in the Global Network Initiative committed it “to
upholding the human rights standards” set out in the GNI’s Principles and Imple-
mentation Guidelines. See https://globalnetworkinitiative.org/gni-principles/ and
https://globalnetworkinitiative.org/implementation-guidelines/.
11. See “Update on Myanmar,” posted by Facebook’s Sara Su to the Facebook
Blog on August 15, 2018, https://about.fb.com/news/2018/08/update-on-myanmar/.
Aside from the enhancement of new automated disinformation detection tools in
Myanmar, this included solving basic technical challenges in global markets, such as
font recognition in non-English languages, and hiring more local language reviewers
to handle user reports.

Chapter ONE

1. The “ledger” kept by John T. Mason, justice of the peace and constable
of Downieville, was started in 1890 to surveil the Chinese population there. In
2022, the Chinese Historical Society launched the exhibit “Chinese Pioneers:
Power and Politics in Exclusion Era Photographs” that featured the ledger as
part of the collection. The aim of the exhibit, as the CHS stated on its website,

210 • No t e s
was to present “a visual history of the social, political, and judicial disenfran-
chisement of Chinese Californians in the decades before and after the 1882
Chinese Exclusion Act.” See https://californiahistoricalsociety.org/exhibitions
/chinese-pioneers-power-and-politics-in-exclusion-era-photographs/.
2. Injunctions against marriages between the Chinese and Whites developed
after a referendum proposed at the 1878 California Constitutional Convention.
Nayan Shah notes that a delegate to the convention, John F. Miller, speculated that
only the “lowest, most vile and degraded” of the White race were most likely to
“amalgamate” with the Chinese, resulting in a “hybrid of the most despicable, a
mongrel of the most detestable that has ever afflicted the earth” (2001, 97). Laura
Curry likewise writes that “[a]lthough originally designed to prevent relationships
between black and white people, anti-miscegenation laws were revised to prevent
relationships between Chinese and white people as well . . . [making] the only path-
way to citizenship for Chinese people . . . to be born in the United States following
the Fourteenth Amendment” (2021, 14).
3. To compile his data, Galton notably selected only Western sources:
Sir Thomas Phillips’s “The Million of Facts,” from which 605 entries were analyzed;
the biographical dictionary compiled by Mr. C. Hone, from which 1,141 entries were
analyzed; Walford’s Men of the Time, from which 85 names were analyzed; Bryan’s
Dictionary of Painters, from which 391 entries were analyzed; and the Biographie
Universelle des Musicien, from which 515 names were analyzed. Galton’s method
was to count relations between recorded men of “talent”—a ratio that he found
to be as low as one in six, where a distinguished man “has a father, son or brother”
(1865, 161) of similar distinction. This was offered by Galton as statistical proof for
the inheritance of mental capacity, talent, and intelligence.
4. Leveraging his role as a statistician, he narrated to his readers that “[b]
etween 1790 and 1830 the nation grew from less than four millions to nearly thir-
teen millions—an increase, in fact, of two hundred and twenty-seven per cent, a
rate unparalleled in history. That increase was wholly out of the loins of our own
people” (Walker 1896). He warned, however, that “at the present time, we have not
in mind measures undertaken for the purpose of straining out” the worthy from the
“degenerating” immigrants.
5. This divided races into Whites, Blacks, and Asians (or Caucasoids, Negroids,
and Mongoloids), and further subdivided European Whites into three distinct
races—Nordics (from northern Europe and England), Alpines (from central and
eastern Europe), and Mediterraneans (from southern Europe, North Africa, parts
of Ireland and Wales, and the Middle East).
6. By his assessment, “Romanians were 41 percent more likely than the average
American to be criminal. Italians were 57 percent more likely to be insane. Immi-
grants from Russia and Poland were more than twice as likely to be tubercular. . . . A
Serbian [was] six times more likely to be inadequate (in any category) than someone
of any other ethnic strain” (Okrent 2019, 581).
7. Published accounts like “The Chinese and the Social Evil Question,” included
in the 1871 Report of the California State Board of Health by board organizer and

No t e s • 211
cofounder of the California Medical Association Dr. Thomas M. Logan, likewise
circulated medical arguments of the Chinese as “inferior in organic structure, in
vital force, and in the constitutional conditions of full development” (1871).
8. By 1873, all vessels arriving from China were further required to dock and
have their passengers subjected to a personal examination by the quarantine officer
of the San Francisco Board of Health. And a decade later, city regulations were
intensified to require that all vessels arriving from Asiatic ports be detained for
inspection, fumigation, and disinfection.
9. Underscoring how identity photographs came to be strongly associated with
criminality during this period, as “prior to Chinese registration, suspected and con-
victed criminals formed the primary group of people being photographed by the
state for identification purposes” (Pegler-Gordon 2006, 58), photographic historians
have stressed how the mere appearance of state portraiture “signaled a subject who
fell outside the middling range of respectability” (Pegler Gordon 2006, 58).
10. Aggregated in the 1890s into the Annual Report of the Commissioner General
of Immigration, individual cases are still compiled today, Luibhéid reminds us, in the
Statistical Yearbook of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
11. Peffer details the examination that one San Francisco port authority scripted
for the Chinese women leaving from Hong Kong, and to be reissued again upon
their arrival at his port, that was used for the generalized rejection of their requests
for entry (1986): Have you entered into any contract or agreement with any person
or persons whomsoever, for a term of service within the United States for lewd and
immoral purposes? Do you wish of your own free and voluntary will to go to the
United States? Do you go to the United States for the purposes of prostitution? Are
you married or single? What are going to the United States for? What is to be your
occupation there? Have you lived in a house of prostitution in Hong Kong, Macao,
or China? Have you engaged in prostitution in either of the above places? Are you
a virtuous woman? Do you intend to live a virtuous life in the United States? Do
you know that you are at liberty now to go to the United States, or remain at home
in your own country, and that you cannot be forced to go away from your home?
12. Although the Page Act’s segregationist sponsor, Horace Page, was report-
edly disappointed in his initial “[inability] to convince legislators of the need for
full Chinese exclusion” (Luibhéid 2002, 34), it would seed more significant impacts
in the coming years, setting the stage for not only the exclusion of Chinese men
with the 1882 and 1892 Exclusion Acts, but more broadly signaling how, well beyond
just the Chinese, “lawmakers could exclude certain racial groups from America if
done by relying on a supposedly neutral factor” (Curry 2021, 1) such as criminal or
diseased status, naturalized into empirical fact.
13. Formerly known as Toland Medical College.
14. By 1925, another nine states in the United States would pass sterilization
laws: Idaho, North Carolina, Alabama, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Montana, ­Virginia,
Utah, and Maine.
15. The first bill, passed in Indiana in 1907 and which stayed in place until 1974,
stated that it applied to “criminals, idiots, rapists, and imbeciles in state custody

212 • No t e s
residing in state institutions.” Some twenty-five hundred sterilizations were carried
out in Indiana while sterilization legislation was active—48 percent on males and
52 percent on females—with the vast majority, over twenty-four hundred people,
sterilized for reasons of “mentally deficiency” or “mental illness” (Kaelber 2011;
Stern 2005).
16. Even in 1938, as news of the Nazi pogram of Kristallnacht carried out against
Jewish homes, businesses, hospitals, schools, and synagogues across Germany and
Austria spread around the world, the Eugenics Record Office remained steadfast
in its support for the Nazi regime. By then, the Carnegie Institution had begun to
signal its concerns with the solidity of the ERO’s scientific pursuits, and its unfalter-
ing support for the Nazi Party, and had placed it under extra review for continued
funding. Unlike US organizations like the American Eugenics Society and Eugen-
ics Research Association that had begun to distance themselves from race-focused
arguments, and even the term eugenics, in attempts to distance themselves from
Nazis, the ERO and its leadership remained committed to the Nazi program
throughout the Third Reich.
17. The Eugenics Record Office’s support for the Nazi regime continued even
after the Third Reich passed the Nuremberg Laws in September of 1935 that stripped
German citizens of Jewish ancestry of their civil rights, when Eugenical News and
the Cold Spring Harbor eugenics establishment “propagandized that the laws were
merely sound science” (Black 2003, 1065).
18. In the 1970s, Indian Health Service physicians carried out a program of
Native American sterilization that, according to the US General Accounting Office,
sterilized 3,406 women and 142 men in hospitals in just four cities between 1972 and
1976 (Black 2003).

Chapter TWO

1. Part of this shift was less voluntary than compelled. The start of World War
II and concerted critiques by anthropologist Franz Boas (1925, 1936) and geneticist
Thomas Henry Morgan (Barkan 1992; Rydell 2010; Spiro 2009), among other biolo-
gists and social scientists, helped foment what could appear as an official “retreat”
from public endorsement and support of eugenics by political leaders and public
figures in the United States in the 1930s.
2. This included Bel Geddes’s modern stove redesign in the 1930s and a famed
radio redesign by Loewy reported to have increased its sale by 700 percent that
was later credited for “arous[ing] wide interest in the new profession” of industrial
design (Bush 1974, 311).
3. The Eugenics Record Office’s support for the Nazi regime continued even
after the Third Reich passed the Nuremberg Laws in September of 1935 that stripped
German citizens of Jewish ancestry of their civil rights, when Eugenical News and
the Cold Spring Harbor eugenics establishment “propagandized that the laws were
merely sound science” (Black 2003, 1065).

No t e s • 213
 Chapter THREE

1. Danielle has spent her life proposing an alternative vision for media and tech-
nology use to counter its deployment for domination, control, and the bureaucratic
veiling of the violence of logics of superiority. “Media and technology, when in
the service of participatory democracy,” she writes with Elizabeth Adams in the
forthcoming book Democratize! How We Make the World We Want, “enable us to
communicate globally, feed everyone, labor less, control reproduction, use sustain-
able energy sources, and recognize everyone in their full humanity.” Back in 2000
she proposed a vision for the Urbana Champaign Independent Media Center that
has become definitional for digital justice initiatives—providing “space, resources,
and atmosphere to draw community members together to investigate local prob-
lems and to design solutions; where collaboration, cross pollination, and serendipi-
tous interaction are encouraged; where youth can participate in a creative ‘third
space’ as an alternative to home or school; where consumers can be producers; and
where the power of art, media and technology to transform our community could
be realized.”
2. See epigraph for the full quote and link back to the citation. Thiel was also
an early investor in Facebook and was an outspoken supporter of Donald Trump,
donating $1.25 million to Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016. See https://www
.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-who-is-peter-thiel-20180215-story.html.

Chapter FOUR

1. The League’s founders—Prescott Farnsworth Hall, Charles Warren, and

Robert DeCourcy Ward—were all Harvard alumni from old New England families
and all from Harvard’s graduating class of 1889. Among the alternative names they
proposed for their organization before they settled on the Immigration Restriction
League was the Eugenic Immigration League.
2. Ross’s speech was reprinted in full in the San Francisco weekly publication
Organized Labor in its May 19, 1900, issue. Ross would defend himself to Jane Stam-
ford by proclaiming that Stanford President David Starr Jordan, a friend of Ross’s,
had asked him to make the speech.
3. Using the Inflation Calculator (at https://www.officialdata.org/us/inflation),
the value of USD$5.00 in 1895 would be USD$173.98 in 2022; and the value of
USD$260.00 would be USD$9,046.73 in 2022.
4. Using the Inflation Calculator (at https://www.officialdata.org/us/inflation),
the value of USD$1.23 in 1895 would be USD$40.80 in 2022; the value of
USD$150.00 would be USD$5,219.27 in 2022; the value of USD$225.00 would
be USD$7,828.90 in 2022; the value of USD$4.32 would be USD$150.31 in 2022;
the value of USD$2.88 would be USD$100.21 in 2022; and the value of USD$7.50
would be USD$260.96 in 2022.

214 • No t e s
 5. Using the Inflation Calculator (at https://www.officialdata.org/us/inflation),
the value of USD$5.00 in 1895 would be USD$173.98 in 2022; and the value of
USD$10.00 would be USD$347.95 in 2022.
6. This is according to the US Department of Health and Human Services
data from 2022. See https://aspe.hhs.gov/topics/poverty-economic-mobility
/poverty-guidelines.
7. In California, the Chinese population had grown from 450 in 1850 to 20,026
in 1852. See Shah 2001.
8. In 1870, as the total population of San Francisco grew to 149,473, the Chinese
population had grown to over 12,000. By the 1880 census in San Francisco, the
Chinese population stood at 21,745, out of a total of 233,979. See Shah 2001.
9. Historian Nayan Shah documents that these began with the 1854 inquiry by
the San Francisco Common Council (the precursor to the San Francisco Board of
Supervisors) that reestablished the municipal Board of Health. This was followed
by the investigation that resulted in the 1869 report of the San Francisco health
officer, C. M. Bates. In 1871, Dr. Thomas Logan led an investigation for the secretary
of the California State Board of Health. In 1880, an inspection by the Board of
Health declared Chinatown a “nuisance.” The 1885 survey of Chinatown by the San
Francisco Board of Supervisors was the longest of the reports.
10. Both Willard Farwell (1829–1903) and John Kunkler (1832–1889) were mem-
bers of the Board of Supervisors at the time.
11. See the Nevada State Journal of Reno, Nevada, on March 5, 1886.
12. The 1917 act broke ground for arguing for and later imposing the first
national “test”—a literacy exam designed by eugenicists—to set minimum standards
for adequate “character and standards” for new entrants into the United States.
Decades of active political advocacy by US eugenicists around immigration quotas
to limit entry of migrants from “undesired” nations finally came to fruition with
the passing of the 1924 Immigration Act, which drastically reduced immigration
into the United States via a “national origins quota”—set at 2 percent of the total
number of people of each nationality as of the 1890 US national census. It ensured
that the largest number of slots would be reserved for what promoters framed, in
direct consultation with US eugenics leaders like Charles Davenport of the Eugenics
Record Office.

Chapter SIX

1. Intentionally, all organizations were based in the two counties of the six in
EC-IL with the highest poverty rates: Champaign and Vermilion Counties, whose
poverty rates—at 20 percent and 18.9 percent, respectively, according to 2019 US
Census data—are nearly double the US poverty rate of 10.5 percent and Illinois
poverty rate of 11.5 percent. Champaign and Vermilion Counties’ 2019 poverty
rates were also well above those of the other neighboring EC-IL counties of Ford

No t e s • 215
(13.9%), Iroquois (12.5%), Douglas (10.8%), and Piatt (5.2%). Importantly, too, all
the organizations had rich prior experiences developing or deploying technology-
related programs for the households they served before—and none saw technology
as either a simple product or a magical, ready-made solution for the layered inequi-
ties and diverse challenges marginalized households faced. Far from understanding
technology as a static, ahistoric thing “cut off from social relations” (Eubanks 2011,
21), the community organizations that were part of our research team approached
technology as ambivalent—and a relational kind of artifact that, as community
and technology activist and scholar Virginia Eubanks puts it, “embodies human
relationships, legislates behavior, and shapes citizenship” (Eubanks 2011, 21). As
community partner Trent Eisenbarth, the technology manager for the Georgetown-
Ridge Farm School district in Vermilion County and Project Success collaborator,
underscored, when developing technology programs that genuinely engage and
respond to the needs of local teachers and families (where nearly one in five families
qualifies for SNAP benefits), “[r]elationships are the most important thing. . . . It’s
about coming in and listening and building those relationships [and] working side
by side . . . to make [technology] a safe place. . . . [It’s] not about coming in and
changing everything.”
2. A total of six different distribution events (four in Champaign County
and two in Vermilion County) were held, at a pacing of roughly one distribution
event per month (except during January 2021, when UIUC was on winter break).
Events generally distributed one hundred laptops to households across two back-
to-back half-day events. Project partners worked closely in the months leading up
to ­distribution events to plan (a) the selection of an event site that would be acces-
sible and inviting to participating local households and open/ample enough to store
one hundred hardware packages while host partner teams (roughly ten to fifteen
people per event) worked at a safe distance per COVID-19 protocols; (b) selection
protocols with partner organizations to ensure participating households qualified
for the EBB or ACP program; (c) the design of communication materials for par-
ticipating households to ensure they were adequately informed of program benefits,
research protocols, and what to bring to a distribution event to finalize their entry
into the program; (d) coordination of intake data and the design of a survey for par-
ticipating household heads to complete at a distribution event; and (e) how to apply
lessons from past distribution events to refine the distribution designs with the aim
of processing households as quickly and efficiently as possible. It was discovered, for
instance, that many household heads could only rely on public transportation, had to
find childcare, or had to use work time lunch hours to attend distribution events.
To meet households’ needs, the project team worked to plan distribution sites at pub-
lic bus terminals or places of residence (for HACC residents) and aimed to complete
households’ on-site processing in less than thirty minutes (scheduling appointments
and asking households to complete some paperwork in advance of events).
3. Of some 120 distinct clients who raised hardware issues during their out-
reach calls, nearly half (44%) reported critical hardware liabilities that made their
equipment inoperable for extended periods of time. This included nonfunctional

216 • No t e s
laptops (fifteen reports from 120 clients) that required replacement, laptops that
functioned so slowly as to appear inoperable or discouraged use (four reports from
120 clients), nonfunctional hot spots (two cases of 120 clients), and a failure to renew
Emergency Broadband Benefits or Affordable Connectivity Program subscriptions
(thirty-two cases of 120 clients) due to clients not knowing renewal was required,
errors/unclarities in the renewal process online despite attempting to renew, clients
being discouraged from renewing due to a complicated/unclear process, forgetting
required passwords, or forgetting to renew or not receiving reminders sent via
PC4P. Households’ frustration with the program’s hardware failures and long wait
times required to resolve or replace nonfunctional hardware resulted in decisions to
return all equipment and unsubscribe from the program in at least three of the 120
contact calls in which hardware issues were directly raised.
4. The process could take more than a month, as households had to report the
issue to PC4P, have a box with postage paid shipped to them so they could send back
broken hardware, and wait for new hardware to be shipped to them.
5. This process could entail a variety of steps, from reminding households of the
necessity of a monthly renewal itself to helping households contact PC4P when
households forgot the username and password required to sign into the renewal
platform or contacting hardware providers when a hot spot was in need of total
replacement. Tech buddies were also helpful for more individually tailored support
needs. One participant requested help for a digital literacy exam they were required
to take to qualify for a job they were applying for. Another participant asked for
advice on graduate programs they were interested in.
6. PC4P confirmed that their hotline has a typical wait time of over thirty
minutes before a caller would speak to a representative.
7. Tech buddies were also essential for more routine technology troubleshooting
around mundane issues, from how to create digital reminders for issues like EBB/
ACP renewal in digital calendars to tips on how to charge a hot spot. Because of the
outsized need households had to address technology failures, significantly less time
than community partners had initially hoped or anticipated was spent addressing
other issues technology households could have raised.

Conclusion

1. In Peter Thiel’s 2009 essay “Education of a Libertarian,” published on April

13 in Cato Unbound, the monthly publication of the libertarian Cato Institute, the
radical libertarian and famed cofounder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies frames
the future of a free technology and capitalism as under threat from the misguided
investments and regulations of democratic states. This explains the stance he adopts
at the opening of the essay: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are
compatible.”
2. The framework largely warns of the threat from Russia and China in displac-
ing US technological and economic dominance through AI developments. See, for

No t e s • 217
instance, “The West in Unaware of the Deep Learning Sputnik Moment,” written by
Carlos Perez, author of Artificial Intuition and the Deep Learning Playbook, published
in April 2017, https://medium.com/intuitionmachine/the-deep-learning-sputnik
-moment-3e5e7c41c5dd. See also “A Sputnik Moment for Artificial Intelligence Geo-
politics,” published on the Council for Foreign Relations blog in September 2017,
https://www.cfr.org/blog/sputnik-moment-artificial-intelligence-geopolitics. And
see also “Will America Squander Its New Sputnik Moment?,” published in January
2022 by the Washington, DC–based Center for Strategic and International Studies,
https://www.csis.org/analysis/will-america-squander-its-new-sputnik-moment.

218 • No t e s
 R ef er ences

Adams, Mark. 1990. The Wellborn Science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil, and
Russia. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Adams, Rachel. 2021. “Can Artificial Intelligence Be Decolonized?” Interdisciplin-
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 I n de x

1875 Page Act, 34, 50–53, Big Tech, 5, 12–16, 20–23, 107–8, 138, 145,
1939 World’s Fair, 25, 61–64, 70. See also 169, 195, 198, 206
Futurama exhibit Bill and Melinda Gates’s Foundation, 84, 86
2023 Writers Guild of America and Binet, Alfred, 93–95. See also intelligence
SAG-AFTRA strike, 197 quotient (IQ)
Breckinridge, Sophonisba, 137
Abbott, Edith, 137 broadband equity, 165, 179, 181–82
abortion rights, 140–41, 148, 159–60; broken world theory, 162, 167, 169
grassroots activists, 152 Buck v. Bell, 119. See also Holmes Jr.,
Addams, Jane, 111, 113, 124, 135 Oliver Wendell
algorithm, 16, 22, 31, 145, 155–57, 205–6; Burnett, Stephanie, 162–65, 179–81
algorithmic caricature, 156; algorithms
of oppression, 22; algorithmic violence, California Historical Society, 29, 30fig.
22; proprietary algorithms, 156 care time, 167, 169–70, 178–81, 205
Altman, Sam, 193, 198. See also AI Champaign County, 163, 183, 213n1, 216n2
accelerationist Chicago, 111–14, 120–21, 125–26, 133; 19th
American Eugenics Society, 44, 85fig., 98 Ward, 111, 113, 116, 120, 124–25, 135, 137
Andreessen, Marc, 193–95. See also AI Chinatown, 51–54, 117, 128, 129fig.,
accelerationist 130–33, 215n9
anti-spying, 167, 206 Chinese Exclusion Acts, 33, 72, 119, 128
artificial intelligence (AI), 1, 5, 58, 90, 146, Chinese Immigration and the Physiological
191–99, 201–4; AI accelerationist, Causes of the Decay of a Nation, 52, 56
193–95, 198 Chinese women, 30, 34, 50–54, 57,
130–31, 212n11
Bel Geddes, Norman, 61, 64, 69–70 Chynoweth, Danielle, 84–87, 108–9, 165, 181
Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure coding, 77, 80
in American Life, The, 100–104, 107. cognitive elites, 15, 26, 89, 106
See also Herrnstein, Richard and collective benefit, 206
Murray, Charles community, 173
Bemis, Edward, 121 Community Data, 27, 162–86
big data, 23–24, 37, 59, 138, 145–47, 154–55, community organizing, 136, 179
158, 166, 171–73, 204–6; abolishment of, community precarity, 168
167. 206 COMPAS, 203

243
complex communication, 148 eugenics publications, 46–48; Atlantic
counter data, 167, 206 Monthly, The, 46, 118; Blood of the
criminology, 17, 38 Nation, The, 118; Essay on the Inequality
Cunningham Township Supervisor’s of Human Races, 56; Heredity in ­Relation
Office, 85 to Eugenics, 45; Natural ­Inheritance, 43;
cyborg, 158 Sterilization for Human Betterment: A
Summary of Results of 6,000 Operations
Danville, IL, 179–80 in California, 1909–1929, 119
Darwin, Charles, 17, 42–43, 91, 118; social Eugenics Record Office (ERO), 44, 93, 119,
Darwinist, 113–16, 127 132, 213nn3,16,17
data apartheid, 154 evolutionary biology, 38, 66
data bodies defense, 206
data economy, 1–2, 5, 16, 18–20, 22, 26–28, Facebook Manifesto, 12–15
196, 201 facial recognition, 23, 200, 203
datafication, 1, 5, 16, 24, 32, 34, 38–39, 58, feminicide, 150, 152–53, 167
68, 72, 75, 82, 89, 92, 145–46, 155–57, feminist activists, 142, 149, 151
166–68, 171–76, 179, 185, 189, feminist data, 149, 153–54, 159
195–96, 199–202, 205–6 Futurama exhibit, 25, 61–69. See also 1939
data monoculturalism, 192 World’s Fair
data pluralism, 20, 24, 26–27, 143–45, 161,
167, 189–91, 193, 204–5 Galton, Francis, 17, 23, 33, 40, 42–44, 48,
data solidarities, 21, 114 91–93, 118, 211n3
data sovereignty, 167, 206 Galton Society, The, 44
data visualization, 4, 114, 117, 132–33, 177 Gates Foundation. See Bill and Melinda
David, Kimberly, 165, 181 Gates’s Foundation
decoloniality, 198; decolonial scholars, 18, genetics, 17, 38, 104, 118
22, 58, 107, 144, 166, 184; decolonial Goddard, Henry H., 94–99. See also
feminists, 143–47, 154–59; decolonial Kallikak Family, The
knowledge futures, 148 God’s Eye Trick, 138
digital divide, 162, 182 Google Foundation, 84, 86
Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Gould, Stephen Jay, 47, 56, 94
Organization, 140 Grant, Madison, 4, 47–49, 132. See also
Downieville, CA, 29, 30fig., 32–33, 35–37, Passing of the Great Race, The
42, 58, 210n1 Green Wave, 141, 148, 150, 152, 159
Du Bois, W. E. B., 113, 137, 155, 177
Hamilton, Alice, 137
East Central Illinois, 162–63, 165, 178–79, Haraway, Donna, 20–21, 138, 158, 204
181, 183 Harper, William, 111, 113–14, 121
Eaton, Isabel, 137 Harvard University, 118–21. See also
Eliot, Charles William, 118, 122 eugenics in academic institutions
Ellis Island, 96–97 Herrnstein, Richard. See Bell Curve:
epistemic infrastructures, 82, 123 Intelligence and Class Structure in
eugenics authors: See Grant, Madison; American Life, The
Holmes Sr., Oliver Wendell; Jordan, Holbrook, Alice Sinclair, 126–27
David Starr; Loewy, Raymond; Pearl, Holmes Jr., Oliver Wendell, 119. See also
Raymond Buck v. Bell
eugenics in academic institutions, 117–19 Holmes Sr., Oliver Wendell, 118–19

244 • I n de x
Housing Authority of Champaign County, Musk, Elon, 86, 105, 187–89
162, 180, 183 National Origins Act, 66
Hull House, 26, 111–17, 120–22, 124–27, Nazi party, 57, 213n16
133–38, 177, Maps and Papers, 112fig., 115, necropolitics, 18, 107
117, 121, 123–25, 134–35, 137 new eugenics, 101
Human Betterment Foundation, 119 Ni Una Menos movement, 148, 150,
152–53, 159
ICT programs, 162, 164–66, 169
Illinois’s Office of Broadband, 182, 184 Obama, Barack, 79
immigrant enclaves, 130, 133 Official Map of Chinatown in San
Immigration Acts of: 1903, 55; 1907, 55; 1917, Francisco, 130
48–50; 1924, 48–50, 55, 72, 119 Onuoha, Mimi, 184–85
Immigration Restriction League, 118–19 OpenAI, 197–98
improbability, 189–90, 199
improbable worlds, 189–91, 197–99, Passing of the Great Race, The, 4, 47–49, 55,
202–7 132. See also Grant, Madison
industrial design, 17, 65, 67–71, 74 Pearl, Raymond, 88
information class, 4, 17, 25, 31–32, 35, 39 pluralist feminist orientation, 143
intelligence data, 89 pluralistic research methods, 115
intelligence quotient (IQ), 3, 93–95, 98, pluri-temporalities, 179
100–103 poverty: public understanding of, 116
intersectionality, 25, 145, 196 predatory data, 2–3, 5, 27, 31–32, 37–39, 113,
invest in a girl campaigns, 82 143, 145–47, 154–57, 189–91
prediction systems, 189, 191, 195,
Jordan, David Starr, 44, 46, 118–19, 199–200, 202
122, 132 Proctorio, 203
productionist time, 167–68, 178–79, 206
Kallikak Family, The, 95. See also profiling, 3, 7, 30, 36–37, 114, 190
Goddard, Henry H. Project Success, 165, 180–81, 183
Kelley, Florence, 125–26, 134–35, 137 prostitution, 51, 95, 130–31, 212n11
knowledge economy, 26, 84, 86, 89–90, 99, Pryde, Julie, 165, 181
101, 103–8
knowledge futures, 20, 26–27, Race Betterment Foundation, 44
148–49, 207 Races of Europe, The, 45, 47
race suicide, 4, 25, 46–47, 122, 133, 187, 189
labor, 68, 102, 113, 116, 120–22, 125, 134–35; racial hierarchies, 88, 115
crises, 116; organizing, 120 rational individual, 158, 169, 186
Laboratoria, 75–82 refusal, 21, 111, 113, 114, 127, 135, 142–43,
Lathrop, Julia, 137 147–48, 159, 201
Loewy, Raymond, 64, 68, 70–74 regressive time, 186
Relational Infrastructures, 21, 26, 114, 116,
market economy, 72 117, 122–24, 137–38, 167
Mason, John T., 30, 33, 35–36 repair studies, 164, 169
Media Justice, 85 replacement theory, 187, 189
Murray, Charles. See Bell Curve: Report on the Defective, Dependent and
Intelligence and Class Structure in Delinquent Classes of the Population of
American Life, The the United States, 45

I n de x • 245
retemporalizing data, 166–67, 171–73, Tech Buddies Program, 183–84
178, 204 techno-elites, 193, 200, 207
Right to Legal, Safe and Free Abortion, techno-eugenics, 16, 189, 191–94
151, 160 technological utopianism, 104
Roe v. Wade, 140 Thiel, Peter, 5, 104–7, 193
Trump, Donald, 13, 105–6, 188, 192
San Francisco, 34, 51–54, 117, 122, 128–30, Twitter/X, 187–88, 195, 197
133. See also Chinatown
scalable subject, 156 UN 2018 report, 10–11
scientific objectivity, 136 undeserving poor, 26, 86–87, 89–90, 97,
self-monitoring, 68, 75–76, 80, 82 108–9
self-preservation, 52, 193–94, 207 University of Chicago, 111–12, 114, 120–21,
settlement house, 113–14, 116, 123 125, 136, 138. See also Hull House
sexual education, 141, 151, 161 urban planning, 17, 38
situated data, 27, 166–67, 175, 206
situated knowledge, 21, 138, 206 venture philanthropy, 84, 108–9
social monitoring, 20, 31, 37 Vermillion County, 165, 181, 183
social services, 84, 86, 108, 164, 179 vernacular technology, 167, 206
smart cities, 25, 66, 68, 75
smartness, 68, 75–77 western liberalism, 5, 18, 107
statistics, 17, 23 white male elites, 115, 195
sterilization laws, 39, 56, 72–73, 122
streamlining, 61–65, 68–72, 75, 80, 82–83 Zuckerberg, Mark, 12–15, 79, 86
Sweatshop Act of 1893, 125 Zueblin, Charles, 121

246 • I n de x
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 DRAWS A DIRECT LINE BETWEEN THE DATA AND PREDICTION TECHNIQUES OF PAST

CHAN
EUGENICISTS AND TODAY’S OFTEN VIOLENT AND EXTRACTIVE “BIG DATA” REGIMES

Predatory Data illuminates the connections between the nineteenth century’s

anti‑immigration and eugenics movements and today’s sprawling systems of techno‑
surveillance and algorithmic discrimination. Historical and globally multisited, the
book examines how dispossession, misrecognition, and segregation are being magni‑
fied by dominant knowledge institutions in the Age of Big Data.
Technological advancement has a history, including efforts to chart a path for
alternative futures. Anita Say Chan explores these important parallel stories of
defiant refusal and liberatory activism, such as how feminist, immigrant, and other
minoritized actors worked to develop alternative data practices. Their methods and
traditions, over a century old, continue to reverberate through global justice‑based

predatory
data initiatives today. Predatory Data charts a path for an alternative historical con‑
sciousness grounded in the pursuit of global justice.

“Anita Say Chan highlights the power of community‑based alternatives to extractive data
that are rooted in feminist, people of color, and Indigenous perspectives. An essential book

DATA
for anyone looking to envision more equitable technological futures.”—SHAKA M c GLOTTEN,
author of Virtual Intimacies
“An essential retelling of how data happened that also rethinks whose futures really matter in
the worlds that data and AI are now building.”—NICK COULDRY, coauthor of The Costs of
Connection
“Chan inspires us to understand the power and politics of data, and how to fight for an inde‑
pendent and inclusive future without compromising our humanness.”—MARY L. GRAY,
MacArthur Fellow and coauthor of Ghost Work
“Predatory Data is the framework that we have been waiting for—to refuse, resist, and reimag‑
ine new possibilities as a part of decolonizing algorithmic and data practices.”—NISHANT
SHAH, Associate Professor and Director of the Digital Narratives Studio, Chinese University
of Hong Kong

ANITA SAY CHAN is a feminist and decolonial scholar of science and technol‑
ogy studies and Associate Professor of Information Sciences and Media Studies
at the University of Illinois Urbana‑Champaign.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, WWW.UCPRESS.EDU
Cover design: Lia Tjandra.

University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program.

Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.
ISBN: 978-0-520-40284-3
Cover illustrations, top to bottom: mid‑1920s interactive eugenics exhibit by the American Eugenics

ANITA SAY CHAN

Society (Science Photo Library/Alamy Stock Photo); wage map of Chicago’s West Side, published
in the Hull‑House Maps and Papers volume in 1895 (Newberry Library); view of Futurama’s stream‑
lined world (General Motors, New York World’s Fair/Manuscript and Archives Division, the New
York Public Library). Author photo: College of Media, University of Illinois Urbana‑Champaign. 9 780520 402843