Abolish Big Data

Abolition is a process, not an end goal. It is the rejection of prisons as the “answer” to the most pressing social problems. And this process of Abolition begins in our minds — in our organizations, our academic institutions. It is a new way of understanding the world. It is about chipping away at oppressive institutions rather than helping them live longer. It is about pushing critical consciousness, gaining more resources, building larger coalitions, and developing more skills, more empathy.

Big data is more than a collection of technologies, a vast amount of information and different types of it. It is more than a revolution in measurement and prediction. It has become a philosophy, an ideological regime, about how decisions are made and who makes them. It has given legitimacy to a new form of social and political control that has taken the digital artifacts of our existence and found new ways to use them against us.