Notes
1 Discord is an app that allows people to communicate about specific issues using dedicated servers. People can communicate on the app using either voice or text. It was originally intended to help online gamers talk to each other; it is now widely used for hosting discussions of many types, moderated and organized by communities. The “places” where these discussions occur and where the data that drive them are hosted are called Discord servers.
2 Courtney Shea, “‘At This Point, We’ve Probably Helped Thousands of People Book Shots’: Q&A with Joshua Kalpin of Vaccine Hunters Canada, the Viral Website for Vaccine Appointment Intel,” Toronto Life, April 15, 2021.
3 Anoush Rima Tatevossian, “Data Philanthropy: Public & Private Sector Data Sharing for Global Resilience,” UN Global Pulse, September 16, 2011.
4 Davey Alba, “Facebook Sent Flawed Data to Misinformation Researchers,” The New York Times, September 10, 2021.
5 Shea, “At This Point.”
6 For a growing list of examples, see the annex to René Mahieu and Jef Ausloos, “Recognising and Enabling the Collective Dimension of the GDPR and the Right of Access,” LawArXiv, July 2, 2020.
7 See also Yarden Katz, Artificial Whiteness: Politics and Ideology of Artificial Intelligence, New York: Columbia University Press, 2020; Jesse Daniels, “The Manifest Destiny of Computing,” Public Books, July 27, 2021; and Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, New York: Doubleday, 2007.
8 Aaron Perzanowskl and Jason Schultz, The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2016.
9 Jathan Sadowski, Salomé Viljoen, and Meredith Whitaker, “Everyone Should Decide How Their Digital Data Are Used—not Just Tech Companies,” Nature, July 1, 2021.
10 For example, see the work of Ruha Benjamin, Safiya Noble, Marissa Duarte, Joy Boulamwini, Deb Raji, Sabelo Mlhambi, and Jasmine McNealy. This syllabus from NYU’s Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies provides additional resources: CriticalRaceDigitalStudies.com/syllabus.
11 See Matt Prewitt, “A View of the Future of Our Data,” Noe¯ma, February 23, 2021.