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.

Her latest book Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future is forthcoming with U. of California Press.

The insidious legacy of eugenics lives on in the techno-surveillance, algorithmic authoritarianism, and data-driven discrimination of Big Tech. This book explains how it happened and why we need to fight back.

Predatory Data illuminates the throughline between the 19th century's anti-immigration and eugenics movements and our sprawling systems of techno-surveillance and algorithmic discrimination. Predatory Data reveals how the AI-driven and market-based models of Big Tech are built on data that exploit women and immigrant groups, amplifying social hierarchies and AI's predictions of majoritarian outcomes as the most probable and “ideal” futures. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Cognitive Elites, IQ & Techno-Eugenics

Silicon Valley’s obsession with intelligence - and fantasy of creating a “superior” form modeled on their self-image as cognitive elites - has its roots in eugenics. The talk on Techno-Elites, IQ and Eugenics delivered at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication at the Annenberg School of Communication in October 2023 makes this connection, drawing from Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future.

Books

Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future

Networking Peripheries: Technological Futures and the Myth of Digital Universalism

Periferias en Red: Futuros Tecnologicos y el Mito del Universalismo Digital

Talks & Presentations

10.17.23

Annenberg School of Communication
University of Pennsylvania

See Program

7.14.24

Special Interest Group for Computing, Information & Society (SIGCIS)
Santiago, Chile

See Program

7.31.24

Leibniz-Center for Contemporary History
Potsdam, Germany

See Program

10/31/24

Inference in Machine Learning Workshop
London, UK

Program forthcoming

1/7/25

Towards a Multidisciplinary Vision for Culturally Inclusive Generative AI
Schloss Dagstuhl

See Program

TBA

Women in Science Lecture Series
U. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

See Schedule

“We need to empower new imaginaries and freedom dreams for a future that is not driven by the survivalist fantasies and paranoid anxieties of White, Western techno-elites.”