Human Entities 2022: Wendy Hui Kyong Chun

Human Entities Podcast

Organized in partnership with the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon, Communication Design and of Multimedia Arts departments

Discriminating Data, a conversation with Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
Canada 150 Chair in New Media, Director, Digital Democracies Institute

In Discriminating Data [2021], Wendy Hui Kyong Chun reveals how polarization is a goal—not an error—within big data and machine learning. These methods, she argues, encode segregation, eugenics, and identity politics through their default assumptions and conditions. Correlation, which grounds big data’s predictive potential, stems from twentieth-century eugenic attempts to “breed” a better future. Recommender systems foster angry clusters of sameness through homophily. Users are “trained” to become authentically predictable via a politics and technology of recognition. Machine learning and data analytics thus seek to disrupt the future by making disruption impossible.

In this conversation, Chun will discuss the themes of her book with Andrea Pavoni, assistant research professor at DINAMIA’CET and then take questions from the audience.

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is the Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media at Simon Fraser University, and leads the Digital Democracies Institute. She studied Systems Design Engineering and English Literature, which she combines in her current work on digital media, and is the author of Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (2006), Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (2011), Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (2016) and, more recently, Discriminating Data (2021).

https://www.sfu.ca/communication/team/faculty/wendy-chun.html
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/discriminating-data
https://twitter.com/whkchun

Human Entities is a public programme of talks organised by CADA.