How to critically analyze data

A new how-to offering for paid subscribers.

This is a moment for collective action and proactively building toward alternative futures. Tech power continues to concentrate. Unbridled technologies continue to shape our social and political lives, and exacerbate existing inequities. All the while, narratives of ‘AI innovation’ and ‘AI acceleration’ are crowding out stories of real harm, happening right now. Those with power offer only a narrow set of potential AI futures, foreclosing alternative paths.

The path from the present moment to radically different futures isn’t clear. When everything feels inevitable and the next step isn’t obvious, we need guides. Guides that help us identify hidden power dynamics in a system. Guides that help us anticipate technology’s impact on disparate communities. Guides that help us critically analyze data and technology. Guides that help us develop strategies that maps backward from the future we want to create.

Today, I’m launching Untangled Guides — a new ‘how to’ offering for paid subscribers that will help you interrogate the system you’re trying to change, and align your actions, decisions, and strategies to the future you want to create. They will be short, sweet, and chockfull of actionable insights and practical approaches.

Here are a few I have in the hopper:

• How to critically analyze technology

• How to identify the frames and metaphors that hide power

• How to anticipate technological shifts in power

• How to anticipate technology’s impact on different communities

• How to take interdependent (not independent!) action

• How to think and act ecologically

• How to anticipate different community uses of technology

• How to anticipate technology’s impact on culture

• How to avoid the ‘scale’ trap

• How to avoid the ‘efficiency’ trap

• How to avoid the ‘transparency trap

• How to envision alternative futures

• How to map and measure backwards, not forwards

• How to map complex systems and anticipate emergent dynamics

• How to set directional goals, not targets and outcomes.

The first guide launches today: How to critically analyze data. Let’s get started, shall we?

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Overview

Data are made by you and me. We interact and transact with one another. We do things out in the world. We engage with institutions. We click and scroll online. Right, data are never raw, nor are they neutral or objective. They’re descriptive and diagnostic of the practices and behaviors of people interacting with one another and institutions at a moment in time. To put a pin on it, data aren’t predictive, they are socially constructed and historically content.

This matters because when we accept the premise that historical data can somehow predict the future — and all AI systems accept such a premise — we encode historical social biases in the present, and bring them with us into the future. We become trapped in a feedback loop of our own making, exacerbating existing inequities along the way.

I started with this Guide because step one of imagining an alternative future is reconsidering what data can tell us, and what it can’t.