2022 in Review

Data & Society’s Top Reads

As we put the finishing touches on 2022 and get ready for our holiday break, we’re taking a moment to look back on some of our favorite ideas and publications of the year. Thank you for reading and being part of our community! We’ll be back with more in 2023.

Responding to the Complexity of Our Data-Centric World

This fall we launched Data & Society’s three-year strategy and the organizational priorities that will take us through 2024. “How societies choose to design and govern data-centric, predictive technologies — whether and how we rise to meet and find solutions to these critical moments — will determine our collective future,” wrote Executive Director Janet Haven, laying out the case for the urgency of our work.

Looking Back to Look Ahead

Marking a new chapter for Data & Society, this year Charlton McIlwain became our new board president. And our founder, danah boyd, announced that she was stepping down from her role as the organization’s board chair — and would step away from the board entirely when her current term ends and join D&S’s advisory group. To celebrate danah’s immeasurable contributions to Data & Society and the field at large, some of her many colleagues and collaborators from the organization’s earliest years reflected on her friendship, leadership, and ongoing influence.

An Untold History of the Digital Underground

Wearing Many Hats: The Rise of the Professional Security Hacker chronicled the largely untold history of the hacker-turned-professional. Researchers Matt Goerzen and Gabriella Coleman charted the movements of the digital underground during the 1990s to reveal what underground technologists, or “hackers,” did — technically, linguistically, and culturally — to establish their legitimacy as employable, trustworthy security experts.

Uncovering Emerging Approaches to Building Trust Online

What might be possible if trust was not merely a value claimed by powerful institutions, but understood and explored as a risky, imperfect practice? Launched this year, our Trustworthy Infrastructures program centers the work of people of color and members of vulnerable communities in producing new empirical research to shape the development of trustworthy infrastructures and the policies and regulations that govern them. As program director Sareeta Amrute wrote, “Establishing trust is a process, one that’s driven by people.”

ICYMI: Introducing their research under the program, postdoctoral fellow Tiara Roxanne explained how they will work with concepts of sacredity, Indigenous cosmology, and storytelling — and bring them into conversation with an evolving literature on trust and safety in digital infrastructures.

Toward a Mindful Digital Welfare State

What does it look like for welfare services to use digital technologies mindfully? Ranjit Singh and Emnet Tafesse curated a series that looked at examples in Jamaica, Catalonia, Australia, Lebanon, Brazil, Jordan, Kenya, Ghana, India, Norway, and Latin America and the Caribbean — aiming to make sense of novel investments in the datafication of statecraft, especially the work of bureaucracies in providing services to citizens.

Investigating How Tech is Transforming Work

Two reports focused on vulnerable workers’ labor conditions. Bounty Everything: Hackers and the Making of the Global Bug Marketplace, by Ryan Ellis and Yuan Stevens, illuminated the risks and insecurities for hackers as gig workers — and how “bug bounty” programs rely on vulnerable workers to fix their vulnerable systems. At the Digital Doorstep: How Customers Use Doorbell Cameras to Manage Delivery Workers, by Aiha Nguyen and Eve Zelickson, offered a window into the changing nature of delivery work as a result of increased doorstep surveillance, with an emphasis on Amazon’s fleet of gig workers and the popular Ring home security camera.

Untangling the Datafied State

Our emerging research agenda, The Datafied State, explores the growing impact of algorithms, automation, and surveillance across civic life, and the benefits and risks they pose to the public. To articulate this agenda, we hosted a series of Databites focused on three lines of inquiry: the public interest, the automated state, and race, surveillance, and resistance.

Assembling Accountability

Earlier this year, D&S’s Jake Metcalf, Brittany Smith, and Emanuel Moss wrote for Slate about how the proposed Algorithmic Accountability Act of 2022 “could give us all an opportunity to reclaim some power over the algorithms that control critical parts of our lives.” In pursuing ways of making algorithmic tools more accountable to the public interest, algorithmic impact assessments also have a vital role to play: Metcalf wrote about the urgency of developing methods for assessing algorithmic systems that center the public interest, and with Ranjit Singh, Emanuel Moss, and Elizabeth Anne Watkins, considered different types of algorithmic audits.

Challenging the Authority of Official Numbers

Scholars Dan Bouk, Kevin Ackermann, and danah boyd joined forces on a thought-provoking resource exploring the power of official numbers and public data. A Primer on Powerful Numbers: Selected Readings in the Social Study of Public Data and Official Numbers is a non-exhaustive syllabus that considers the influence institutions of authority have on how data and numbers are created, as well as how that information is used by the datafied state to make fundamental decisions about democratic policy and process.

Exploring AI in/from the Majority World

The histories, futures, and opinions of the majority of people have been written out of the story of AI systems and their impacts. Two D&S publications offered a corrective. A Primer on AI in/from the Majority World: An Empirical Site and a Standpoint, by Sareeta Amrute, Rigoberto Lara Guzmán, and Ranjit Singh, explored ways to think about data and AI in regions outside North America and Europe. And our anthology Parables of AI in/from the Majority World, curated and edited by Singh, Guzmán, and Patrick Davison, brought together twelve original stories about the everyday experiences of living with AI-based systems in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and South Asia.

Building Robust, Inclusive AI Governance

Grounded in a vision laid out by White House policy advisor Dr. Alondra Nelson (a former D&S board member) and co-authored by Suresh Venkatasubramanian, who joined our board this year, the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights stood as an impressive accomplishment and an urgent call to action. In a piece for Points, Janet Haven unpacked this framework for understanding AI governance as a civil rights issue, and outlined the next crucial steps for making the blueprint a reality.

ICYMI: Since her appointment in April, Haven has served on the National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee (NAIAC), bringing Data & Society’s perspective to bear on the critical work of building an inclusive, equitable AI policy agenda.