Whether it’s an ad for shoes we Googled once that pops up on every website we visit, or being asked for our social security number when we call our dentist, having our personal information tracked and recorded can seem like part of the fabric of life in the 21st century. But who’s collecting all this data, and what is it being used for?
Anita Say Chan argues that these are hardly modern questions. In her new book, “Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future,” Chan traces the roots of data mining and manipulation back more than a century — and sounds the alarm about its dangerous origins.
Chan joined The Show to discuss.
Full conversation
ANITA SAY CHAN: Eugenics, as, as I outlined in the book, was really the kind of foundation for so many of the kinds of population management techniques that rely on datafication from, you know, our AI driven biometric ID systems to criminal databases, even our passport systems, which all require a kind of version of datafying human populations. All of those systems were very much owed to eugenicists from over 100 years ago.
SAM DINGMAN: In order to create a pretext for this datafication, there first needs to be a perception that there is some significant problem that would require the collection of all this data to solve, and you go back as far as 1883, and a guy named Francis Galton.
CHAN: Francis Galton was the father of eugenics, and in 1883 was when he first termed the movement as eugenics and called this program that he had for being able to essentially, as he thought, predict which populations could be predicted to be genetically predisposed to unfitness, mental, moral and physical unfitness. He's credited with also founding statistical regression, which is again sort of the foundation for all of our predictive methods and that we see in our data economy today.
Galton's obsession with numbers and counting was very much driven by his own anxieties, that the partition elite of the West would slowly be degraded because of these sorts of new proximities and new forms of diversification, global diversification, and so from the get-go, he was doing things like trying to correlate the number of talent and genius, to the elite families of Europe, counting things like in who's whose dictionaries from England and from France, and trying to essentially use those patterns to make arguments that the well born breed the well born.
DINGMAN: Yeah, but that classic canonical text, the who's who dictionary.
CHAN: Correct, yes, right, exactly, exactly, yeah, yeah.
DINGMAN: But as you were just pointing out, I mean, I think one of the contextual things that's important here is what else was happening in history at this time. We're talking about the beginning of industrialization and in the late 19th century American society really remaking itself in the post-Civil War context, and so you can see where people like Galton, who had this kind of patrician identity that they felt needed to be protected from all these new factors might want to come up with a supposedly data driven set of systems that would reify that status. If we move forward about 100 years in history, that backdrop that we have been discussing is what informs a lot of the datafication environment that we find ourselves in now. And one of the people who you really locate a lot of the blame for this on is Peter Thiel, who in 2009 talked about how it was important to make the world safe for capitalism.
CHAN: Yeah, I mean, if people are not familiar with or hadn't heard about him, he's a venture capitalist, a funder, co-founder of PayPal, investor in any number of different companies, from Facebook, to Airbnb, Spotify, but since 2009, he was quite clear that he no longer saw a kind of compatibility between democracy and that is democratic policy and the evolution of tech.
DINGMAN: Well, and I mean, you know, if we go back to his quote, you know, make the world safe for capitalism, that makes it sound like, you know, we're safeguarding some sort of fundamental American value, but actually what he's talking about is maintaining an economic environment that allows him and and other folks in in the tech industry to continue to enrich themselves.
CHAN: Yeah, you see it every time he speaks. It really is for him a deeply ingrained kind of moral cause that from his point of view, the world is fundamentally unequal. People are fundamentally unborn, unequal, but there is no point trying to, enable some version of, of social mobility, and that it irresponsibly takes resources away from the people who should be empowered, the cognitive elite, the Silicon Valley elite. I mean, it's a deeply, deeply problematic and dark kind of vision, but that is exactly the kind of vision and why, the attacks that we see the institutional attacks that we're seeing today, are, are really as bold and as radical as they are. This has been a kind of experiment that they have been waiting to have for quite a long time.
DINGMAN: Yes, and, and you know, we should say here that Elon Musk, who is making a number of the institutional attacks that you were just referring to, is very much philosophically in line with Peter Thiel. And I guess I just wanted to ask you, Anita, I mean, I get the sense very much that the argument that you're making in this book is that the metrification of all avenues of life is very easy to spin as mere data collection and, you know, valuable information by powerful interests, but it's also very easy to use the warped conclusions that that metrification can lead to as a precursor for a majoritarian or even an authoritarian state. Is that a concern that you have?
CHAN: Oh, absolutely. And this is why, you know, Sam, your early question about the existential risk that eugenicists from the 19th century were posing as the backdrop to necessitate the kinds of radical policies they were asking for. Sterilization, remaking of immigration law, they used the kind of backdrop of existential risk as a means to be able to get those policies further. So too, when we're looking at what's happening now in the government, under this kind of experiment that we're seeing happening, it is very much a kind of imperative for of exceptionalism, precisely because of this kind of backdrop supposedly of wanton waste, that will lead or that it has been leading as MAGA-ites have claimed to a kind of existential risk to the nation.
DINGMAN: If we go back to the Peter Thiel quote of the idea of making the world safe for capitalism. You know, if you phrase it that way, it's a, it's much harder to make an argument against it much in the same way if you say, oh, it's just the Department of government efficiency, which leaves out, of course, efficiency in service of what?
CHAN: Right, exactly. Elon Musk has had any number even prior to his endorsement of Donald Trump, has had any number of on the record statements saying that he believes civilization is on the demise and has been on the record for talking about at length with other Silicon Valleyites about how Silicon Valleyites should have more babies. So he has a strange pro-natalism, and he connects us to the idea that if we don't have more babies, as he says, if we, as in Silicon Valleyites, don't have more, more babies, civilization will fall. It's such weird outdated language like it feels very out of almost like out of the blue for a modern audience, but it is straight out of Galton's 1863 publications.
