[Ray Kyooyung Ra, Core #3/5, Blog #6/15] Data, Surveillance, and Imagination

A keyword that I gleaned from some of the readings this week was ‘surveillance,’ which I discuss in my post as a particular type of surveillance that is predicated on what Hyejoo also pointed out as “regressive temporal desire” in Wendy Chun’s analysis of Big Data: “Correlation’s eugenicist history matters… because when correlation works, it does so by making the present and future coincide with a highly curated past” (52). I read the approaches to framing data surveillance in Chun’s chapter and Couldry and Mejias’ article with a slightly different inflection from Hyejoo's. For me, their implication was a quite radical one: it is not just the use and collection of data that result in racism and colonialism but, rather, the very concept of data that we recognize today is an extension of the rationales of racist eugenics, colonial modernity, and naturalized exploitation.

It is not regressive temporality that I saw here, but rather, the continuation of a timeline more far-reaching that we are inclined to conceive. As Marisol highlighted in their post, writers like Simone Browne have highlighted how surveillance through data collection is grounded in anti-Blackness, arguing that the transatlantic slave ship’s design as a mobile prison predates that of the Panopticon, which has become an emblematic model of internalized surveillance within the field of surveillance studies. Abolitionist scholars like Angela Davis, while I cannot say she has ever talked about data, have talked about data-esque construction of discriminatory assumptions and information in their own vocabulary: racialization of prisons – and crime itself – becomes an extension of ‘abolished’ slavery to exploit Blackness and Black bodies for their labor. Racialization of crime, or “correlating” a specific eugenic group to the possibilities of crime, itself is based on the same mechanisms that inform data collection and their usage.

But when Big Data enters the equation, this mechanism of racist and eugenic correlating becomes explicit. In the above example of the Edmonton Police Service using DNA phenotyping to create an approximate model of a sexual assault suspect, we see what Chun meant by correlations forming discriminatory categories: “Using DNA evidence from this investigation, Parabon produced trait predictions for the associated person of interest (POI). Individual predictions were made for the subject’s ancestry, eye color, hair color, skin color, freckling, and face shape. By combining these attributes of appearance, a "Snapshot" composite was produced depicting what the POI may have looked like at 25 years old and with an average body-mass index (BMI) of 22. These default values were used because age and BMI cannot be determined from DNA. […] It is important to note that DNA phenotyping composites are scientific approximations of appearance based on DNA, and are not likely to be exact replicas of appearance. Environmental factors such as smoking, drinking, diet, and other non-environmental factors — e.g., facial hair, hairstyle, scars, etc. — cannot be predicted by DNA analysis and may cause further variation between the subject’s predicted and actual appearances.” Based off a vague witness description of the assaulter being “5’4”, with a black toque, pants and sweater or hoodie” and “as having an accent,” data has ‘found’ its suspect.

While I nitpicked a small part of Hyejoo’s post to begin my own, I fully agree with her assessment on the importance and the power of imagination that can disrupt such extensive timeline of racism and colonial modernity. As Couldry and Mejias implied, the knowledge of the working of data surveillance can be internalized but, at the same time, be made known to the “John” in question (Cheney-Lippold). Then how can the Johns of the world imagine tactics to evade data surveillance? How do we imagine ourselves rejecting data colonialism, or more specifically, the forms of resource appropriation and social order that contemporary data practices represent? (Couldry, Mejias) How can we evaluate imaginative practices of sousveillance that can produce alternative bodies of data that racist societies refuse to, such as protesters uploading videos of police brutality on social media? Or taking the practice even further to cartographical imaginations by constructing an actual map of police violence?