Anita Say Chan, PhD (she/her) is a scholar and educator dedicated to feminist and decolonial approaches to technology.

She is a Professor of Information Sciences, and founder of the Community Data Clinic at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a Research Fellow at the Charles Babbage Institute.

Her latest book Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future was published in 2025 with the U. of California Press.

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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 how we can reclaim tools to fight back.

Predatory Data illuminates the throughline between the 19th century's anti-immigration and eugenics movements and our sprawling systems of tech-enforced profiling, anti-pluralist disinformation, and algorithmically-amplified mono-culture. It unnpacks how the AI-driven predictions and models of Big Tech are built on radically pro-segregationist data methods that were created to amplify social hierarchies and majoritarian outcomes as the most probable, “ideal” future.

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

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Networking Peripheries: Technological Futures and the Myth of Digital Universalism

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

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Talks & Presentations

10/3/25

People > AI Event w/ Dylan Blaha, Candidate for IL Congress, The Literary Bookbar
Champaign, IL

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9/26/25

BSides Bloomington Cybersecurity Conference Keynote
Bloomington, IN

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9/24/25

Disrupted Science Podcast - Interview w/ Kent Anderson & Joy Moore

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3/6/25

Humphrey Forum, Charles Babbge Institute, U. of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN

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3/20/25

Margaret Morrison Distinguished Lecture in Women's History, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA

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4/10/25

Data & Society Research Institute Book Event w/ Timnit Gebru & Emile Torres

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1/7/25

Towards a Multidisciplinary Vision for Culturally Inclusive Generative AI
Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany

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7.14.24

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

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7.31.24

Leibniz-Center for Contemporary History Keynote
Potsdam, Germany

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5/14/25

Design@Large Speakers Series, The Design Lab, UCSD - San Diego, CA

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4/18/25

Critical Computing Group, Georgia Institute of Technology - Atlanta, GA

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04/03/26

Race, Media and Justice Annual Lecture - The Media School, University of Indiana - Bloomington, IN

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03/24/26

Digital Studies Initiative, University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI

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03/06/26

Technocracy Conference, Unit for Criticism & Interpretive Theory - University of Illinois
Urbana, IL

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02/13/26

Keynote, “Love Data” Week, Milner Library, Illinois State University -
Bloomington, IL

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10/06/25

Possible AI’s Institute, Crea, Hong Kong, China

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10/23/25

Center for American Studies and Research, American University of Beirut - Beirut, Lebanon

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5/15/25

Science & Justice Research Lab, UCSC -Santa Cruz, CA

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“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.”