At the turn of the 20th century, the anti-immigration and eugenics movements used data about marginalized people to fuel racial divisions and political violence under the guise of streamlining society toward the future. Today, as the tech industry champions itself as a global leader of progress and innovation, we are falling into the same trap.

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. Predatory Data is the first book to draw this direct line between the datafication and prediction techniques of past eugenicists and today’s often violent and extractive “big data” regimes. Torres and Gebru have also extensively studied the second wave of eugenics, identifying a suite of tech-utopian ideologies they call the TESCREAL bundle.

Anita Say Chan

Anita Say Chan, PhD (she/her) is a scholar and educator dedicated to feminist and decolonial approaches to technology. She is an associate professor of information sciences and media, and founder of the Community Data Clinic, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. A Data & Society affiliate, Chan is the author of Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future and Networking Peripheries: Technological Futures and the Myth of Digital Universalism.

Timnit Gebru

Dr. Timnit Gebru (she/her) is the founder and executive director of the Distributed AI Research Institute. In 2020 she was fired by Google, where she was co-lead of the ethical AI research team, for raising issues of discrimination in the workplace. She also co-founded Black in AI, a nonprofit that works to increase the presence, inclusion, visibility, and health of Black people in the field of AI, and is on the board of AddisCoder, a nonprofit dedicated to teaching algorithms and computer programming to Ethiopian and Jamaican high school students. Gebru was named one of Nature’s ten people who helped shape science and one of TIME’s 100 most influential people. She is currently writing The View from Somewhere, a memoir and manifesto arguing for a technological future that serves our communities instead of one that is used for surveillance, warfare, and the centralization of power by Silicon Valley.

Émile P. Torres | @xriskology

Émile P. Torres is a philosopher and historian whose work focuses on existential threats to civilization and humanity. They have published on a wide range of topics, including machine superintelligence, emerging technologies, and religious eschatology, as well as the history and ethics of human extinction. Their most recent book is Human Extinction: A History of the Science and Ethics of Annihilation.

References

• ‘WTF: The Rise of the Broligarchy’ Political Education Series | MediaJustice
• Reclaim the Streets (a UK-based “direct-action network for global and local social-ecological revolution(s)”)
• Hull House – “a pluralistic space for data solidarity…a century old feminist settlement house from the turn of the century where immigrants and feminist researchers who were not accepted into the 19th-century Academy” pushed back on Social Darwinism and created feminist data. [referenced and described by Anita Say Chan]

Readings

• Anita Say Chan, Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future, University of California Press (2025) [Open Source]
• Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres, “The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence”, First Monday (2024), doi.org/10.5210/fm.v29i4.13636
• Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, Back Bay Books (2024)
• Emily Badger and Sheera Frenkel, “How Musk and Trump Are Working to Consolidate Government Data About You”, New York Times (2025)
• Dan McQuillan, Resisting AI: An Anti-Fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence, Bristol University Press (2022) [referenced by Timnit Gebru]

Curation and Production: Iretiolu Akinrinade

Production Support and Post-Production: Tunika Onnekikami

Web Support: Alessa Erawan

Design: Surbhi Chawla

Editorial: Eryn Loeb

Additional support provided by Data & Society’s engagement and accounting teams.