Data & Society

On September 22 in a discussion moderated by Kit R. Roane, senior producer at Retro Report, Maia Woluchem, program director of Data & Society’s Trustworthy Infrastructures program; Alejandra Martinez, The Texas Tribune environmental reporter and Pulitzer Center grantee; Brian Crawford, Texas resident with the non-profit Protect the Paluxy Valley; and Ginny Marcille-Kerslake, Pennsylvania resident and Senior Organizer, Food & Water Watch, discussed what the facts on the ground might mean for the future. This panel is co-organized by Data & Society, Retro Report, and The Pulitzer Center.

On September 23, professor, researcher, and Data & Society founder danah boyd delved into her research and its implications with historian and author Dan Bouk, in a conversation moderated by Data & Society Executive Director Janet Haven.

On August 20, 2026, the primer’s authors, Ranjit Singh and Samir Passi, joined Margaret Mitchell, chief ethics scientist at Hugging Face, and Madeleine Claire Elish, head of evaluations, responsible development, and innovation at Google Deepmind, to discuss why putting a human in the loop is insufficient and what builders and deployers must do to make oversight meaningful.

On March 19, 2026 in a conversation moderated by D&S AI on the Ground program director Ranjit Singh, Kristin M. Branson, Lisa Messeri, and Nicole C. Nelson discussed the impact of machine learning tools on the nature of proof, inference, uncertainty, and error in scientific workflows today.

In a conversation moderated by researchers Livia Garofalo and Briana Vecchione, Luca Belli, AI safety lead at Spring Health; Miranda Bogen, founding director of the AI Governance Lab at the Center for Democracy & Technology; and psychiatrist and psychotherapist Marlynn Wei, discussed the profound shifts in how people seek help and support, and how mental health professionals, policymakers, and tech designers are navigating these shifts now.

On February 17, Akanegbu, TechEquity Senior Vice President of Labor Programs Tim Newman, and Bard Computer Science Professor Annabel Rothschild held a critical conversation on the policy stakes of AI-focused workforce development at the state and national level. This conversation was moderated by D&S Policy Manager Serena Oduro.

After a turbulent first year, this discussion featured experts — academic and policy advisor Alondra Nelson, independent writer and editor Edward Ongweso Jr., and WIRED reporter Vittoria Elliott — who have been closely monitoring and making sense of the Trump administration’s policies on AI and digital technologies. This conversation was moderated by Data & Society policy director Brian Chen.

In this closing session of 'Understanding AI', The City Executive Director and journalist Nic Dawes discussed with D&S Labor Futures Program Director Aiha Nguyen, AI Now Institute Co-Executive Director Amba Kak, Michelle Miller, Director of Innovation at the Center for Labor and a Just Economy, and Writers Guild of America East Executive Director Sam Wheeler about the value of human labor in increasingly automated workplaces.

For the third event of the 'Understanding AI' series, Data & Society Executive Director Janet Haven hosted a critical discussion about AI accountability and the public interest, featuring professor Charlton McIlwain, journalist Julia Angwin, and civic technologist Catherine Bracy.

For the second installment of the 'Understanding AI' series, researcher Tamara Kneese spoke with environmental justice researcher Sanjana Paul and critical social scientist Jasmine McNealy about the environmental toll AI development is taking on local water supplies, energy systems, and communities around the world.

In this opening session of the 'Understanding AI' series, social scientist Alice E. Marwick hosted a grounding conversation about how AI technologies are reshaping daily life with artist Mimi Ọnụọha, journalist Meredith Broussard, and computer science professor Suresh Venkatasubramanian.

On December 11, Climate, Technology, and Justice Program Director Kneese discussed the findings of her report with Eliza Pan, co-director of Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, in a conversation moderated by Khari Johnson, technology reporter at CalMatters. Together, they explored the stakes of tech-focused climate work — and how it gets done.

On October 23, in a book talk moderated by Data & Society Director of Research Alice Marwick, cybersecurity technologist Bruce Schneier and data scientist Nathan E. Sanders unpacked their book 'Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship.' Together, they discussing the ways AI is changing every aspect of democracy while making the case that we can harness the technology to support and strengthen these systems.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not magic or sentient; it does not even describe one coherent set of technologies. In two new books, Emily M. Bender, Alex Hanna, and Karen Hao explore how AI instead serves as a powerful marketing tool for tech giants who have a product to sell and profits to rake in. On June 6 — in a conversation moderated by Tamara Kneese, director of Data & Society’s Climate, Technology, and Justice program — these authors explored AI’s impact on our environment and society, and the motivations of the tech elite that build and shape it.

On May 6, 2025 at The Greene Space in New York City, Dr. Julián Posada and Aiha Nguyen set the stage for Data & Society’s online workshop “What is Work Worth? Exploring What Generative AI Means for Workers’ Lives and Labor.” Drawing on interviews with Venezuelan data workers as well as peer research and accounts from the field, Dr. Posada’s keynote highlighted three stories that illustrate the socioeconomic conditions enabling generative AI’s development and deployment.

This live fireside chat was co-organized by Data & Society and Tech Workers Coalition during SF Climate Week 2025 at Tamarack, a community space located in Oakland, California. The live discussion features Tamara Kneese in dialogue with tech journalist, Alexis Madrigal, and internet researcher, Xiaowei R. Wang. The speakers reflect on the relationship between current discourses around the environmental impacts and histories of resource extraction across the AI supply chain. How are communities grappling with the material, environmental impacts of digital technologies from an international, historical perspective? How do we build solidarities of understanding between knowledge workers and directly impacted communities?

On April 10th, Anita Say Chan, author of Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future (UCP 2025 and open access), joined Émile P. Torres and Timnit Gebru for a discussion of the 21st century eugenics revival in big tech and how to resist it in a conversation moderated by Trustworthy Infrastructures Program Director Maia Woluchem.

In this episode of Computer Says Maybe, host Alix Dunn speaks with Data & Society Labor Futures researchers Aiha Nguyen and Alexandra Mateescu, who recently authored Generative AI and Labor: Power, Hype, and Value at Work. They discuss how automation is now being used as a threat against workers, and how certain types of labor are being devalued by AI — especially (shocking) traditionally feminised work, such as caregiving.

Physical and digital infrastructures have raised tensions around the world, seeding land disputes, climate effects, and disrupting social fabrics. Yet they are also intertwined with myths of progress, transformation, and speculation. What does this friction reveal? How can the stories we tell about infrastructures illuminate problems and lead us toward solutions? What do these stories say about where power lies and how it shifts? How might they help surface connections across nations, communities, and cultures?

What exactly is generative AI (genAI) red-teaming, what strategies and standards should guide its implementation, and how can it protect the public interest? In this conversation, Lama Ahmad, Camille François, Tarleton Gillespie, Briana Vecchione, and Borhane Blili-Hamelin examine red-teaming’s place in the evolving landscape of genAI evaluation and governance.

In time for this year’s RightsCon, Data & Society Policy Director Brian J. Chen joins Alix Dunn of Computer Says Maybe for a conversation about the process of advanced chip manufacture, its entanglement with US economic policy, and the colonial making of Taiwan’s chip supremacy.

Code Dependent spans stories from across the globe and calls attention to the voices of ordinary people as they navigate the everyday challenges of living with data-driven systems and work to reclaim their agency. In the process, author Madhumita Murgia invites a deeper reflection on these systems and how they interact with human ethics and judgment. Learn more in this Data & Society Network Book Forum.

Foreseeable Futures, held on September 26, 2024, was a celebration of Data & Society at 10, where we celebrated our first decade with our incredible network of alumni, friends, and supporters.

In this Databite discussion, Mukogosi spoke with Dr. Mary Fleming and Ijeoma Uche about the facts and future of data-driven maternal care for Black patients. Reckoning with the decline of Black maternal health amid advancements in clinical technologies, they discussed the implications of an increasingly data-driven response to the Black maternal health crisis.

Data & Society’s report, Doing the Work: Therapeutic Labor, Teletherapy, and the Platformization of Mental Health Care, written by Livia Garofalo, explores how these new arrangements of therapeutic labor are affecting how therapists provide care and make a living in the US. By focusing on the experiences of providers who practice teletherapy and work for digital platforms, our research examines the fundamental tensions that emerge when a profession rooted in clinical expertise, licensing, and training standards meets the dynamics of platformization, productivity incentives, and algorithmic management. In this conversation, we reflected on how technology is changing the conditions of how therapists do their work, on the consequences for the present and future of therapeutic labor, and on how this might be changing our understanding of therapy itself.

The Formalization of Social Precarities podcast explores platformization from the point of view of precarious gig workers in the Majority World. This conversation was moderated by Aiha Nguyen and Murali Shanmugavelan featuring the voices of Ambika Tandon, Ludmilla Costhek Abílio, and Ananya Raihan. You will also be hearing the experience of two platform workers interviewed for this project: Fatema Begum from Bangladesh and Nicolas Sauza from Brazil. Their voices are narrated in English by Data & Society staff members Iretiolu Akinrinade and Rigoberto Lara Guzmán, respectively. This podcast was edited by Sam Grant.

Predominant narratives that cast workers as replaceable hide the ways in which workers are actively responding to generative AI. Many build new skills and tools to their advantage while others sabotage, counteract and otherwise circumvent these systems. The relationship workers have with technology is much more dynamic, contested and layered. Narratives that cast workers as replaceable, for example, obscure the active and complex ways that workers are responding to generative AI. While many build new skills and use these tools and systems to their advantage, others sabotage, counteract, and otherwise circumvent them. In this conversation, Livia Garofalo, Jeff Freitas, Quinten Steenhuis and Data & Society host Aiha Nguyen explored the ways that workers reshape their relationship with generative AI tools – and as a result, with work itself.

In a conversation moderated by D&S Principal Researcher Sareeta Amrute, panelists Chelsea Peterson-Salahuddin, Irene Solaiman, and Jason D’Cruz discussed how practitioners, theorists, and community members approach the fraught issue of trust inside and outside institutions. Together, they considered how legacies of racism, dehumanization, refusal, and opacity inform trust — how it operates, and fails to operate, in data-centric spaces. They also discussed trust’s typical framing as a normative construct, as well as the meaning of mistrust and its consequences for vulnerable communities.

Queer people have long been rendered invisible by data systems: survey questions that impose gendered binaries, inquiries that dismiss queer subjects as unimportant or insignificant, and ahistorical erasures of queer life that push queer experiences and knowledge further into the margins. Yet visibility also comes with risk. Digital and biomedical surveillance, personal data breaches, and privacy concerns arise when indications of queerness, real or otherwise, are present and unprotected in datasets. The threat imposed by interlocking systems of anti-queer violence and oppression seeds movements away from visibility and towards fugitive tactics of refusal — a kind of strategic invisibility. On February 15 in a conversation moderated by Data & Society Research Analyst Joan Mukogosi, Nikita Shepard and Harris Kornstein discussed this problem of data in/visibility as they explore it in their contributions to Queer Data Studies, an anthology edited by Patrick Keilty featuring essays that examine, from a range of disciplinary approaches, how data impacts queer subjects. Together, Shepard, Kornstein, and Keilty broke down the dichotomy between visibility and opacity of queer subjects in data, and engaged in the generative practice of thinking about data from and through queerness.

In labor parlance, “recognition” is the pathway by which workers become a union. In what other ways can we recognize the value of work — beyond the form it takes? With artists and models finding that generative AI reduces them to their image, their words on a page, notes in a song, and even their measurements, how does this emerging technology diminish the value of workers and their contributions, and how might we recognize it? In this discussion, Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo, Şerife (Sherry) Wong, Sara Ziff, and Aiha Nguyen pry open the black box of generative AI and consider what is lost or appropriated in the process of extraction.

Developers claim generative AI will have sweeping impacts that transform work as we know it, creating new opportunities for workers and unleashing dramatic waves of creativity. But this technology will not affect everyone equally: Societal biases and embedded hierarchies that inform who and what type of work is valuable will also influence how generative AI is rolled out and who benefits from it. In this first conversation of a three part series, John Lopez, Milagros Miceli, and Russell Brandom join Data & Society's Labor Futures Program Director Aiha Nguyen to interrogate these layers of issues around Generative AI technology; consider how it scaffolds on previous economic models, structures, and modes of employment; and explore its impacts on workers across the globe.

When people die, they leave behind not only physical belongings, but digital ones. While they might have had specific wishes for what happens to their online profiles and accounts after their deaths, preserving these digital remains is complex and requires specialized forms of care. Because digital remains are attached to corporate platforms — which have control over what online legacies look like and how long they continue — people’s digital afterlives are not necessarily the ones they would have chosen for themselves. On November 16, Tamara Kneese and Tonia Sutherland came together for a conversation about their books, which both foreground death as a site for understanding the social values and power dynamics of our contemporary, platform-saturated world. The conversation between these two authors was moderated by Tamara K. Nopper, senior researcher with Data & Society’s Labor Futures program. Together, they explored death as a site of contestation and transformation.

On October 30, the White House issued its long-awaited executive order on artificial intelligence. We’re heartened by the order’s focus on some of AI’s most pressing real-world harms, and especially encouraged by its commitment to apply mandatory rights-protecting practices to the federal government’s use of AI, drawing heavily from the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights. A key issue now will be implementing the order’s directives, and addressing the need to put money and people quickly into action across the federal government to advance a very ambitious plan on a short timeline. Our November 7 at 11 a.m. ET during a special LinkedIn Live event featured analysis of the AI executive order with Data & Society’s Executive Director Janet Haven, Policy Director Brian Chen and two coauthors of the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights: D&S Senior Policy Fellow Sorelle Friedler and Brown University Professor and D&S Board Member Suresh Venkatasubramanian. They offered their impressions of the order, considered the implications of guidance from the Office of Management and Budget, and reflected on what’s next for policy and the field.

As AI presents technical and engineering innovations, the systems present fundamental risks to people, their families, and their communities. Public participation in AI will not be easy. But there are foundational lessons to apply from other domains. Author and legal scholar Michele Gilman’s latest policy brief, Democratizing AI: Principles for Meaningful Public Participation, builds on a comprehensive review of evidence from public participation efforts in anti-poverty programs and environmental policy that summarizes evidence-based recommendations for how to better structure public participation processes for AI. To discuss the policy brief, we invited Michele Gilman to be in conversation with Harini Suresh, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Brown University, and Richard Wingfield, Director of Technology and Human Rights at BSR. This conversation was moderated by D&S Participatory Methods Researcher, Meg Young, and D&S Policy Director, Brian Chen.

As a tech platform and a company, Uber has become emblematic of an economic shift toward precarious, low-wage gig work and declining labor standards, which has unfolded under the guise of innovation. But an overlooked dimension of Uber’s rise is how the company capitalized on deeper tensions at the heart of urban politics. In Disrupting DC: The Rise of Uber and the Fall of the City, authors Katie Wells, Kafui Attoh, and Declan Cullen tell the story of Uber as a political force, revealing how DC became a testing ground and eventual “playbook” for the company’s consolidation of power across the nation and the globe. During our September 21 Network Book Forum, co-authors Katie Wells and Kafui Attoh discussed their book with M.R. Sauter in a conversation moderated by Data & Society researcher Alexandra Mateescu.

2022-23 Race and Technology Fellow Lindsey Cameron discusses what drew her to her work, the convenings and connections the program has made possible, and where she'll take these ideas next with Fellowship Director Sareeta Amrute.

2022-23 Race and Technology Fellow Christina Harrington discusses what drives her work, the convenings and connections the program has made possible, and where she'll take these ideas next with Fellowship Director Sareeta Amrute.

In a book talk on March 21, Soundararajan joined Data & Society Principal Researcher Sareeta Amrute to discuss her incisive and urgent work The Trauma of Caste: A Dalit Feminist Meditation on Survivorship, Healing, and Abolition, including critical questions about caste in technology.

Data & Society’s report Essentially Unprotected is based on interviews with 50 people who worked in grocery, warehousing, manufacturing or meat and food processing during the pandemic. The report highlights their experiences and efforts to manage the confusing and often terrifying challenges of the in-person pandemic workplace. In this conversation featuring Angela Stuesse and Irene Tung, Amanda Lenhart and Livia Garofalo examine the social, economic, and regulatory environment that laid the groundwork for serious information gaps surrounding infections. We will explore how technology contributed to the collection of data and worsened workers’ stress and frustration — and, in select cases, facilitated information-sharing that protected workers’ privacy and addressed their fears. Read the report : https://datasociety.net/library/essentially-unprotected/

Desde hace mucho tiempo, el activismo en América Latina ha combatido - y en algunos casos ganado - la batalla por la libertad reproductiva. Dada la reciente revocación de Roe vs Wade, la “ola verde”, el color asociado con el movimiento para el aborto legal, seguro y gratuito que originó en Argentina y se ha expandido al resto del continente, ha llegado a los Estados Unidos. La revocación y penalización del derecho a abortar ha reanimado el debate sobre la autonomía, sobre el propio cuerpo y la información reproductiva personal, especialmente en este nuevo panorama de dataficación. En esta conversación, Livia Garofalo, investigadora con el equipo Health + Data de Data & Society, hablará con Eugenia Ferrario, activista feminista de las Socorristas en Red en Argentina y Rebeca Ramos Duarte, abogada y directora de El Grupo de Información en Reproducción Elegida (GIRE) en México para reflexionar sobre la importancia del cuidado y la libertad reproductiva. Ponemos en el centro de este evento el concepto de “cuidado” concebido como ética y práctica de relaciones solidarias y sus manifestaciones digitales. Este Databite fue interpretado por Claudia Alvis y Valeria Lara.

With the repeal of Roe v. Wade in the US, the “green wave” — a color associated with the movement for safe and legal abortion that started in Argentina and spread to the rest of the continent — has reached American shores. With it have come debates about bodily autonomy and, in an increasingly datafied landscape, ownership of personal reproductive information. In this conversation, Livia Garofalo, researcher with Data & Society’s Health and Data team, spoke to Eugenia Ferrario, a feminist activist and educator with the abortion care network Socorristas en Red in Argentina, and Rebeca Ramos Duarte, a lawyer in Mexico and director of El Grupo de Información en Reproducción Elegida, about the significance of reproductive freedom and care in the current climate. In both English and Spanish, this conversation centers cuidado (which means “care” in Spanish) as both the means and an end to providing safe abortions, connecting activists, and understanding how the “digital” can facilitate and impede reproductive liberation. This Databite was interpreted by Claudia Alvis and Valeria Lara.

When an Amazon package arrives at your doorstep, it’s a non-event. Rarely do we pause to wonder about the workers involved, including the original merchant who shipped our purchase or the delivery driver who ferried it to our porch. This is no accident: logistics that appear seamless and impersonal are ones Amazon can manage at a distance. Having an army of hidden intermediaries also allows Amazon and other giant retail enterprises to set a grueling gold standard for retail interactions. Edward Ongweso and Moira Weigel joined us for “Power and Retail at the Digital Doorstep,” a conversation hosted by Data & Society’s Labor Futures initiative, about the hidden relational dynamics that shape how we shop today. With a pair of D&S reports on the changing nature of commerce as our starting point, we will discuss the experiences of two crucial but often overlooked workforces — third party sellers and delivery drivers — in an effort to trace emerging networks of control and power in retail.

2021-2022 Fellows Chaz Arnett, Tamara K. Nopper, and Murali Shanmugavelan, and Postdoctoral Researcher Tiara Roxanne reflect on their experience at Data & Society during the second year of a global pandemic in this conversation with Principal Researcher and Fellowship Director Sareeta Amrute. Through honing methods, expanding frameworks of understanding, developing curricula, curating panels, and swapping recipes, the cohort shares how they build their own intellectual and interpersonal community situated beyond the larger contexts of institutions and identities.

A Primer on AI in/from the Majority World is a curated collection of over 160 thematic works that serve as pathways to explore the presence of artificial intelligence and technology in the geographic regions that are home to the majority of the human population. Instead of assuming that knowledge and innovations move out of the so-called centers of Europe and the United States to the rest of the world, thinking from the “majority world” (a term coined by Bangladeshi photographer Shahidul Alam) means tracing emerging forms of knowledge, innovation, and labor in former and still-colonized spaces. “Majority world” defines a community in terms of what it has, rather than what it lacks. The outcome of a deep collaboration between Sareeta Amrute, Ranjit Singh, and Rigoberto Lara Guzmán (and informed by a range of feminists, Indigenous thinkers, anti-caste scholars, and Afro-futurists), this primer is the latest in a collection of research from Data & Society that reframes current understandings of AI and data-centric technology from a majority world perspective.

On August 11, 2022 Dan Bouk discussed his latest book, Democracy's Data: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them, with Dr. Alex Hanna, Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute. The conversation was moderated by Data & Society People and Culture Manager, Ronteau Coppin. The census isn’t just a data-collection process; it’s a ritual, and a tool, of American democracy. Behind every neat grid of numbers is a collage of messy, human stories—you just have to know how to read them. In Democracy’s Data, the data historian Dan Bouk examines the 1940 U.S. census, uncovering what those numbers both condense and cleverly abstract: a universe of meaning and uncertainty, of cultural negotiation and political struggle. He introduces us to the men and women employed as census takers, bringing us with them as they go door to door, recording the lives of their neighbors. He takes us into the makeshift halls of the Census Bureau, where hundreds of civil servants, not to mention machines, labored with pencil and paper to divide and conquer the nation’s data. And he uses these little points to paint bigger pictures, such as of the ruling hand of white supremacy, the place of queer people in straight systems, and the struggle of ordinary people to be seen by the state as they see themselves. The 1940 census is a crucial entry in American history, a controversial dataset that enabled the creation of New Deal era social programs, but that also, with the advent of World War Two, would be weaponized against many of the citizens whom it was supposed to serve. In our age of quantification, Democracy’s Data not only teaches us how to read between the lines but gives us a new perspective on the relationship between representation, identity, and governance today.

Join author Emily Martin (Professor Emerita, Department of Anthropology, NYU), panelists Iretiolu Akinrinade (Research Analyst, Data & Society), and Noelle Stout (faculty member, Program in Advanced Teaching and Research, Apple University), and host Emanuel Moss (Join Postdoctoral Scholar, Data & Society, Cornell Tech) for a conversation around Experiments of the Mind: From the Cognitive Psychology Lab to the World of Facebook and Twitter. Experimental cognitive psychology research is a hidden force in our online lives. We engage with it, often unknowingly, whenever we download a health app, complete a Facebook quiz, or rate our latest purchase. How did experimental psychology come to play an outsized role in these developments? Experiments of the Mind considers this question through a look at cognitive psychology laboratories. Emily Martin traces how psychological research methods evolved, escaped the boundaries of the discipline, and infiltrated social media and our digital universe. Martin recounts her participation in psychology labs, and she conveys their activities through the voices of principal investigators, graduate students, and subjects. Despite claims of experimental psychology's focus on isolated individuals, Martin finds that the history of the field--from early German labs to Gestalt psychology--has led to research methods that are, in fact, highly social. She shows how these methods are deployed online: amplified by troves of data and powerful machine learning, an unprecedented model of human psychology is now widespread--one in which statistical measures are paired with algorithms to predict and influence users' behavior. Experiments of the Mind examines how psychology research has shaped us to be perfectly suited for our networked age.

Nice White Ladies: The Truth About White Supremacy, Our Role in it, and How We Can Help Dismantle it, by D&S 2018-2019 Fellow Jessie Daniels, and hosted by Principal Researcher & Race and Tech Program Director Sareeta Amrute -- Named a Best Book of 2021 by Kirkus An acclaimed expert illuminates the distinctive role that white women play in perpetuating racism, and how they can work to fight it. In a nation deeply divided by race, the “Karens” of the world are easy to villainize. But in Nice White Ladies, Jessie Daniels addresses the unintended complicity of even well-meaning white women. She reveals how their everyday choices harm communities of color. White mothers, still expected to be the primary parents, too often uncritically choose to send their kids to the “best” schools, collectively leading to a return to segregation. She addresses a feminism that pushes women of color aside, and a wellness industry that insulates white women in a bubble of their own privilege. Daniels then charts a better path forward. She looks to the white women who fight neo-Nazis online and in the streets, and who challenge all-white spaces from workplaces to schools to neighborhoods. In the end, she shows how her fellow white women can work toward true equality for all.

Tamara K. Nopper and Chaz Arnett in conversation with Raúl Carrillo and Alyx Goodwin This panel focuses attention on how datafication processes are related to social control and surveillance, whether policing and the criminal punishment system or credit scoring systems and monitoring the use of cash. State power is expanded through the widening net of surveillance and the use of tools of automated detection and enforcement, which maintains racial and class hierarchies. Our panel also examines how communities and organizations are resisting the datafied state and its particular impact on Black and people of color communities, including efforts to regulate data collection, politically organize against harmful data initiatives, or propose policies that attempt more ethical data processes.

Ranjit Singh, Researcher at D&S, in conversation with Joanna Redden, Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Information & Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario and the co-director of the Data Justice Lab, and Michele E. Gilman, Venerable Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Faculty Research and Development at the University of Baltimore School of Law and director of the Civil Advocacy Clinic. The automated state is one that seeks to replace human workers with machines. There are three general motivations. One, the desire to leverage computational speed to handle rote and routine work more efficiently. Two, the desire to improve the accuracy, fairness, or consistency of decision-making in light of human fallibility. Three, the desire to depoliticize decision-making (or appear to) by placing it out of reach of human discretion. These motivations, however, raise distinctive concerns about oversight and the ability to seek recourse in the case of errors or bugs in decision-making. What does interacting with systems, interfaces, and datasets require of people interfacing with the Datafied State? What literacies are necessary? What room is there for voice? What does automation look like in practice? Who is rendered invisible when showcasing success in automating state practices? About Data & Society Data & Society is an independent nonprofit research organization. We believe that empirical evidence should directly inform the development and governance of new technology. We study the social implications of data and automation, producing original research to ground informed, evidence-based public debate about emerging technology. About the Series The Datafied State is an emerging research agenda that seeks to explore the relationship between datafication and public administration. It is concerned with the proliferation of data sources, infrastructures, and computational techniques adopted across the public sector. The processes through which governments procure, develop, implement, and legally mandate the use of digital and computational systems are increasingly blurring the boundaries between what is considered public and private. So, how datafied is the state today? How can we find out?

Jenna Burrell, Director of Research at Data & Society, in conversation with Anne Washington, Assistant Professor of Data Policy at NYU, and Deirdre Mulligan, Professor in the School of Information at UC Berkeley. Part one in a series of three Conversations on The Datafied State. The role of government is distinct from the private sector. Governments serve the public and prioritize values beyond market fit and return on investment. Governments interface with advocacy groups, unions, and other publics and not just individuals. In their approach to solving problems using computational, data-driven systems, governments have an opportunity to model responsible, accountable, and accessible tech. But what exactly would it mean for that tech to be in “the public interest,” and how are such publics constituted?

In this conversation, 2020-2021 Faculty Fellows Meredith D. Clark and Shaka McGlotten reflect on their experience at Data & Society during a global pandemic. Moving through molasses invokes the challenges of adapting to the existential and emotional fatigue of incessant telepresence interfaces, performative intellectual labor, and the need to balance a professional career amidst ongoing collapse. The talk offers insights on how Queer, Black scholars can move through institutions without forsaking authenticity. It makes a case for productivity refusal as a generative tactic for self-preservation. Molasses as a decelerator medicine for the slow, somatic surrender our bodies need. Molasses also alludes to the thick absurdity of online discourse with its noxious disinformation feeds and the inevitable co-optation of Black vernacular content creation. Despite these traps, one can cultivate community in platform mediated digital spaces. Often, the virtual sense of belonging is enough to get by.

Data & Society AI on the Ground Program Director Jacob Metcalf hosts a conversation with experts on the emerging regulations in the EU, US, and Canada, and asks how impact assessment practices can effectively account for the harms caused by algorithmic systems.

Sareeta Amrute and Emiliano Treré discuss the relationship between data and racial capitalism.

Laura Forlano and Ranjit Singh discuss infrastructures that data interacts with and flows through.

Ellen Pao hosts a conversation with Yang Hong and McKensie Mac about their new report on remote workplace harms.

Deb Raji and Arthur Gwagwa discuss AI and automation across different geopolitical contexts.

Amanda Lenhart hosts Aden Van Noppen and Charlotte Willner for a conversation on designing healthy technologies for young people.

Shaka McGlotten and Chris Ramsaroop discuss the history of human labor being quantified as data.

Artist Mimi Onuoha and data journalist Lam Thuy Vo discuss data collection practices and their consequences with host Natalie Kerby.

“Becoming Data” is the third season of of Public Books 101 co-produced by Public Books and Data & Society.

Data & Society and the Ada Lovelace Institute co-host a discussion about the next frontier of COVID-19 roll-outs: vaccine passports.

How is technology radically changing our lives as citizens and participants in democratic governments? Data & Society and Stanford PACS present this special book launch with Robyn Caplan, Lucy Bernholz, Rob Reich, Seeta Peña Gangadharan, and Archon Fung.

In this talk, Scientist and Researcher David Robinson and Data & Society Senior Researcher Alex Rosenblat discuss a healthcare algorithm as a case study for algorithmic governance.

Michele Gilman joins Professor Meredith Broussard in a conversation on enhancing the digital literacy of poverty lawyers to better advocate for social justice and the low-income communities they serve.

Data & Society Sociotechnical Security Researcher Moira Weigel hosts author Tim Hwang to discuss the way big tech financializes attention. Weigel and Hwang explore how the false promises of adtech are just one example of tech-solutionism’s many fictions.

How does political misinformation—and outright lies—get amplified on social media and tech platforms?

Does the current metrics-driven news landscape emerge from, and potentially reinforce historical racial inequality? Angèle Christin, author of the new book "Metrics at Work: Journalism and the Contested Meaning of Algorithms" and Joseph Torres, author of the classic "News For All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media" (co-authored with Juan González) analyze racial divisions in media-making and its interplay with data-centric technology. This conversation is hosted by Data & Society Founder and President danah boyd.

Historian Jill Lepore discusses her new book "If Then" with Data & Society Founder and President danah boyd. This talk is co-presented with Brooklyn Public Library.

Data & Society Researcher Robyn Caplan moderates a discussion with Alexander Macgillivray and Nicole Wong on the professionalization of Trust and Safety teams and their influence in the current media and tech company landscape.

This Fellows Talks Databite showcases our 2019-2020 fellows cohort: Michele Gilman, Anita Say Chan, and Dan Bouk.

A Q&A with André Brock, author of "Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures," led by Data & Society’s Director of Research Sareeta Amrute.

André Brock gives a talk on his book, "Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures," with Data & Society’s Director of Research Sareeta Amrute.

Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein discuss their new book "Data Feminism," with Data & Society’s Director of Research Sareeta Amrute.

Sasha Costanza-Chock discusses her new book "Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need," which re-imagines how design led by marginalized communities can become a tool to help dismantle structural inequality, advance collective liberation, and support ecological survival.

Blind Accessibility Advocate Chancey Fleet and Artist Taeyoon Choi discuss network building and activism opportunities in the context of COVID-19.

This talk by Yeshimabeit Milner, founder & executive director of Data for Black Lives, serves as a call to action to reject the concentration of Big Data in the hands of a few, to challenge the structures that allow data to be wielded as a weapon of immense political influence. To abolish Big Data would mean to put data in the hands of people who need it the most.

Anna Wiener discusses her debut book, "Uncanny Valley," which details her experience navigating the new digital economy.

Jasmine McNealy presents her talk "An Ecological Approach to Data Governance."

Joe Mulhall, senior researcher at European anti-extremism NGO HOPE not hate, explores how the international far-right is leveraging the current climate crisis, with a special focus on networked disinformation and exclusive new polling research conducted across six countries around the world.

Data & Society welcomes The Workers Lab Co-Founder and CEO Carmen Rojas; Entrepreneur and Author Rachel Schneider; and Professor, Researcher, and Activist Tamara K. Nopper to discuss the intersection of fintech and credit and benefit systems for low-wage workers with Data & Society Labor Engagement Lead Aiha Nguyen. Rojas and Schneider both focus on the financial challenges facing precarious low-wage workers–including “gig” workers–and how these workers might need different benefits than have traditionally been provided, like retirement. Nopper offers insight into the world of credit scoring and data, analyzing how fintech “innovation” intersects with race, class, and gender wealth gaps. Nguyen is an organizer who works to bridge research and practice, expanding understanding of technological systems’ impact on work. Together, they discuss questions such as: How will current and projected income volatility in the gig economy change available workplace benefits? What role could fintech play on the future of work? Can workers be a part of shaping that future? What data will low-income working families need to share in order to have access to capital–and will it be worth it? Dr. Carmen Rojas is the Co-Founder and CEO of The Workers Lab, an organization that invests in experiments and innovation to build power for working people in the 21st century. For more than 20 years, Carmen has worked with foundations, financial institutions, and non-profits to improve the lives of working people across the United States. Carmen currently sits on the boards of the Marguerite Casey Foundation, Neighborhood Funders Group, General Service Foundation, JOLT, Certification Associates, and on the Advisory Boards of Fund Good Jobs and Floodgate Academy. Carmen holds a Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning from the University of California, Berkeley and was a Fulbright Scholar in 2007. Rachel Schneider is the Omidyar Network Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Aspen Institute Financial Security Program and co-author of The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty. Rachel’s research has been featured in the nation’s top publications, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and many others. Though she began her career as an investment banker at Merrill Lynch & Co., Rachel credits her commitment to the potential for innovative finance to solve major social problems from her days as a VISTA Volunteer (now AmeriCorps). She holds a J.D./M.B.A. from the University of Chicago, and a B.A. from UC Berkeley. Tamara K. Nopper has a PhD in Sociology and her teaching and research focuses on the intersection of economic, racial, and gender inequality, with a particular emphasis on entrepreneurship, banking, globalization, urban development, and money and surveillance. Her publications have examined immigrant entrepreneurship, minority business development, the globalization of ethnic banking, and Asian American communities. Her current work looks at Korean immigrant entrepreneurship and post-Civil Rights era minority politics.

Data & Society welcomes Mike Ananny and Tarleton Gillespie for a conversation with Kate Klonick about the underlying decisions that impact the public’s access to media systems and internet platforms. In "Networked Press Freedom: Creating Infrastructures for a Public Right to Hear," Mike Ananny offers a new way to think about freedom of the press in a time when media systems are in fundamental flux. Seeing press freedom as essential for democratic self-governance, Ananny explores what publics need, what kind of free press they should demand, and how today’s press freedom emerges from intertwined collections of humans and machines. His book proposes what robust, self-governing publics need to demand of technologists and journalists alike. Tarleton Gillespie’s "Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media" investigates how social media platforms police what we post online—and the way these decisions shape public discourse, cultural production, and the fabric of society. Gillespie provides an overview of current social media practices and explains the underlying rationales for how, when, and why “content moderators” censor or promote user-posted content. The book then flips the way we think about moderation, to argue that content moderation is not ancillary to what platforms do, it is essential, definitional, constitutional. And given that, the very fact of moderation should change how we understand what platforms are. Mike Ananny is an associate professor of communication and journalism in the Annenberg School at the University of Southern California (USC), a faculty affiliate with USC’s Science, Technology, and Society initiative, and a 2018-19 Berggruen Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Tarleton Gillespie is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research New England and an affiliated associate professor at Cornell University. He co-founded the blog Culture Digitally. His previous book is the award-winning "Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture." Kate Klonick is an assistant professor at law at St. John’s University Law School and an affiliate at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, Data & Society, and New America. Her work on networked technologies’ effect on the areas of social norm enforcement, torts, property, intellectual property, artificial intelligence, robotics, freedom of expression, and governance has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, Maryland Law Review, New York Times, The Atlantic, Slate, The Guardian and numerous other publications.

Journalist Sarah Kessler discusses her new book "Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work." Kessler shares her analysis of the perils and promises of the platform gig economy in conversation with Data & Society’s Alex Rosenblat, researcher and author of the forthcoming book "Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work" (October 23, 2018) and Aiha Nguyen, Social Instabilities in Labor Futures Engagement Lead. One in three American workers is now a freelancer. This “gig economy”―one that provides neither the guarantee of steady hours nor benefits―emerged out of the digital era and has revolutionized the way we do business. High-profile tech start-ups such as Uber and Airbnb are constantly making headlines for the “disruption” they cause to the industries they overturn. But “disruption” introduces new challenges to employees and job-seekers who seek to navigate platform policies, ensure workplace safety, and hedge against instability. Join us for a timely discussion on the quest to find meaningful, well-paid work as technology increasingly destabilizes and transforms the future of labor. Sarah Kessler is a journalist based in New York City. She is the author of Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work and an editor at Quartz. Previously, she covered the gig economy as a senior writer at Fast Company and managed startup coverage at Mashable. Her reporting has been cited by The Washington Post, New York Magazine, and NPR. The Future of Labor research initiative at Data & Society seeks to better understand emergent disruptions in the labor force as a result of data-centric technological development, with a special focus on structural inequalities. Its team recently released the report Beyond Disruption: How Tech Shapes Labor Across Domestic Work & Ridehailing–as featured in the New York Times, NPR All Things Considered, and The Nation.

Claudia Haupt discusses competing frameworks for regulating speech on the web. Claudia Haupt is a 2017-18 Data & Society Fellow and a resident fellow with the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. She previously taught at Columbia Law School and George Washington University Law School. Prior to that, she clerked at the Regional Court of Appeals of Cologne and practiced law at the Cologne office of the law firm of Graf von Westphalen, with a focus on information technology law.

Matthew L. Jones speaks about key illiteracies surrounding metadata, the hacking of our court system, and the possibility of ethics at scale. Jones is a 2017-2018 Data & Society Fellow who studies the history of science and technology, with a focus on early modern Europe and on recent information technologies. He is completing a book on computing and state surveillance of communications and is working on a historical and ethnographic account of big data, its relation to statistics and machine learning, and its growth as a fundamental new form of technical expertise. Jones is currently a James R. Barker Professor of Contemporary Civilization at Columbia University’s Department of History.

Tamara K. Nopper's talk at Future Perfect explains how credit agencies such as FICO use narratives of credit as personal responsibility to justify increased data surveillance of consumers. Reasoning that sources of "alternative data" such as social network usage are a response to discriminatory practices, these agencies are selling financial freedom at the cost of racial injustice. Future Perfect is a gathering at Data & Society that brings together individuals from a variety of world-building disciplines (from art and fiction to architecture and science) to explore the uses, abuses, and paradoxes of speculative futures. Tamara K. Nopper has a PhD in Sociology and her teaching and research focuses on the intersection of economic, racial, and gender inequality, with a particular emphasis on entrepreneurship, banking, globalization, urban development, and money and surveillance. Her publications have examined immigrant entrepreneurship, minority business development, the globalization of ethnic banking, and Asian American communities. Her current work looks at Korean immigrant entrepreneurship and post-Civil Rights era minority politics.

In "Algorithms of Oppression", Safiya Umoja Noble challenges the idea that search engines like Google offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities. Data discrimination is a real social problem; Noble argues that the combination of private interests in promoting certain sites, along with the monopoly status of a relatively small number of Internet search engines, leads to a biased set of search algorithms that privilege whiteness and discriminate against people of color, specifically women of color. Through an analysis of textual and media searches as well as extensive research on paid online advertising, Noble exposes a culture of racism and sexism in the way discoverability is created online. As search engines and their related companies grow in importance—operating as a source for email, a major vehicle for primary and secondary school learning, and beyond—understanding and reversing these disquieting trends and discriminatory practices is of utmost importance.

Cambridge Analytica and their parent company SCL Group hit the headlines recently when, after their work on the Trump campaign, reporting exposed misuse of Facebook data linked them to ‘Brexit’, unethical conduct in international elections, and revealed their relationship to defense contracting. Dr. Emma Briant has spent over a decade researching SCL and Cambridge Analytica. She drew on substantial contacts she developed in her work on defense propaganda (Propaganda and Counter-terrorism: Strategies for Global Change, Manchester University Press, 2015) to research an upcoming book, What’s Wrong with the Democrats? Media Bias, Inequality, and the Rise of Donald Trump (co-authored with George Washington University professor Robert M. Entman) and academic publications on the EU referendum. In this talk, Briant discusses her analysis of the company’s activities in each of these areas, how she gained such unique access to key executives who worked on the campaigns, as well as the implications of the key evidence she recently submitted to several public inquiries in the UK.

Real Talk about Fake News | Nabiha Syed in conversation with Claire Wardle and Joan Donovan: "Fake news” isn’t exactly new: Tabloids have long hawked alien baby photos and Elvis sightings. Many have thus argued that fake news—propaganda, misinformation, and conspiracy theories—have always existed, and therefore requires no new consideration. When we agonize over the fake news phenomenon, though, we are not talking about these kinds of fabricated stories. What we are really focusing on is why we have been suddenly inundated by false information—purposefully deployed—that spreads so quickly and persuades so effectively. This is a different conception of fake news, and it presents a question about how information operates at scale in the internet era. In this Databite talk, Nabiha Syed explores how existing First Amendment theories fail to adequately explain our digital information economy, and how that theoretical incoherence leaves users and social media platforms ill-equipped to deal with “fake news” and other “bad” speech online. Nabiha also offers several factors to be considered in any systemic theory that can help move us beyond the troubled status quo.

Virginia Eubanks speaks about her most recent book Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor. Eubanks systematically shows the impacts of data mining, policy algorithms, and predictive risk models on poor and working-class people in America. The book is full of heart-wrenching and eye-opening stories, from a woman in Indiana whose benefits are literally cut off as she lays dying to a family in Pennsylvania in daily fear of losing their daughter because they fit a certain statistical profile. The U.S. has always used its most cutting-edge science and technology to contain, investigate, discipline and punish the destitute. Like the county poorhouse and scientific charity before them, digital tracking and automated decision-making hide poverty from the middle-class public and give the nation the ethical distance it needs to make inhuman choices: which families get food and which starve, who has housing and who remains homeless, and which families are broken up by the state. In the process, they weaken democracy and betray our most cherished national values.

K Sabeel Rahman-The informational, economic, and political influence of the dominant tech platforms — Google, Facebook, and Amazon in particular — has become a central topic of debate. K. Sabeel Rahman argues that these firms are best understood as the core infrastructure of our 21st century economy and public sphere. The infrastructural power of these firms raises a range of policy questions. What exactly about these firms (e.g., their accumulation of data, their gatekeeping functions, their control over vital public and economic functions like retail delivery or online speech) is “infrastructural?” How should these infrastructural functions be governed and regulated, in light of both their economic and political influence?

Andrew Guthrie Ferguson discusses his book, The Rise of Big Data Policing, that critically examines data-driven surveillance technologies and their legal impact on everyday policing. Andrew Guthrie Ferguson is professor of law at the University of the District of Columbia's David A. Clarke School of Law. He is a national expert on predictive policing, big data surveillance, and the fourth amendment.

WTF? can be an expression of amazement or an expression of dismay. In today’s economy, we have far too much dismay along with our amazement, and technology bears some of the blame. In this combination of memoir, business strategy guide, and call to action, Tim O’Reilly, Silicon Valley’s leading intellectual and the founder of O’Reilly Media, explores the upside and the potential downsides of today’s WTF? technologies.

Kate Klonick talks about her recent article, "The New Governors: The People, Rules, and Processes Governing Online Speech", which provides one of the first analysis of what private online platforms are actually doing to moderate speech under a regulatory and First Amendment framework. It argues that to best understand online speech, we must abandon traditional doctrinal and regulatory analogies, and understand these private content platforms as systems of governance operating outside the boundaries of the First Amendment. Kate is currently a doctoral candidate at Yale Law School.

Joanna Radin discusses the writing of Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton. Although Crichton is most famous for imagining an island of dinosaurs, metaphors in his non-fiction articles about computers that are even more terrifying. This talk was presented for the event Future Perfect. In a moment when the future increasingly feels like a foregone conclusion, Future Perfect brought actors from a variety of world-building disciplines (from art and fiction, to law and science) together to explore the uses, abuses, and paradoxes of speculative futures. Curated by Data & Society artist-in-residence Ingrid Burrington, Future Perfect was an experimental one-day, invitation-only conference originating from insights of the institute’s regular Speculative Fiction Reading Group. Joanna Radin is Assistant Professor of the History of Science and Medicine at Yale where she teaches feminist and indigenous STS and the history of biomedicine and anthropology. Before receiving her PhD in History and Sociology of Science at UPenn she studied science communication at Cornell and worked as a risk communication specialist. She is the author of Life on Ice: A History of New Uses for Cold Blood, (University of Chicago Press, 2017) and a co-editor of Cyropolitics: Frozen Life in a Melting World (MIT Press, 2017). Radin is currently writing a book about science fiction, subjectivity, and biomedicine.

Ruha Benjamin's presentation entitled "designer and discarded genomes: experimenting with sociological imagination through speculative methods" uses speculative field notes to explore the antecedents and implications of the current era of genetic engineering. This talk was presented for the event Future Perfect. In a moment when the future increasingly feels like a foregone conclusion, Future Perfect brought actors from a variety of world-building disciplines (from art and fiction, to law and science) together to explore the uses, abuses, and paradoxes of speculative futures. Curated by Data & Society artist-in-residence Ingrid Burrington, Future Perfect was an experimental one-day, invitation-only conference originating from insights of the institute’s regular Speculative Fiction Reading Group. Ruha Benjamin is Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, author of People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier (Stanford University Press), and 2016-17 fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study. Her work examines the social dimensions of science, technology, and medicine with a particular focus on the relationship between innovation and inequity. She earned her PhD in Sociology from UC Berkeley, completed fellowships at UCLA’s Institute for Genetics and Society and Harvard’s Science, Technology, and Society Program, and has received grants and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, National Science Foundation, Ford Foundation, and California Institute for Regenerative Medicine among others. Her work is published in numerous journals including Science, Technology, and Human Values; Ethnicity & Health; and Annals of the American Academy of Social and Political Science.

Suchana Seth speaks about different definitions of fairness in the context of machine learning. Suchana Seth is a physicist-turned-data scientist from India. She has built scalable data science solutions for startups and industry research labs, and holds patents in text mining and natural language processing. Suchana believes in the power of data to drive positive change, volunteers with DataKind, mentors data-for-good projects, and advises research on IoT ethics. She is also passionate about closing the gender gap in data science, and leads data science workshops with organizations like Women Who Code.