Thread by @cindyfsolomon

refuse the assumption that risk & harm associated w data practices can be bounded to mean same thing for everyone, everywhere, at every time; acknowledge how historical & systemic patterns of violence & exploitation produce differential vulnerabilities manifestno.com

refuse to be disciplined by data, devices & practices that seek to shape & normalize racialized, gendered & differently-abled bodies that track, monitor & surveil; commit to taking back control over the ways we behave, live, and engage with data and its technologies.

3. We refuse the use of data about people in perpetuity. We commit to embracing agency and working with intentionality, preparing bodies or corpuses of data to be laid to rest when they are not being used in service to the people about whom they were created.

refuse to understand data as disembodied & thereby dehumanized & departicularized; commit to understanding data as always & variously attached to bodies; vow to interrogate biopolitical implications of data w keen eye to all forms of embodied difference

refuse any code of phony “ethics” & false proclamations of transparency wielded as cover that let people who create systems off the hook from accountability or responsibility; commit to feminist data ethics explicitly seeking equity & justice by exposing how power works.

refuse expansion of forms of data science that normalizes a condition of data extractivism defined primarily by drive to monetize & hyper-individualize the human experience; resist the market-driven forces to commodify human experience.

6. We commit to centering creative and collective forms of life, living, and worldmaking that exceed the neoliberal logics and resist the market-driven forces to commodify human experience.

We refuse to accept that data and the systems that generate, collect, process, and store it are too complex or too technical to be understood by the people whose lives are implicated in them. We commit to seek to make systems and data intelligible, tangible, and controllable.

8. We refuse work about minoritized people. We commit to mobilizing data so that we are working with and for minoritized people in ways that are consensual, reciprocal, and that understand data as always co-constituted

refuse a data regime of ultimatums, coercive permissions, pervasive cookie collecting, & blocked access. Not everyone can safely refuse or opt out without consequence or further harm.

We commit to “no” being a real option in all online interactions with data-driven products and platforms and to enacting a new type of data regime that knits the “no” into its fabric.

10. We refuse to “close the door behind” ourselves. We commit to entering ethically compromised spaces like the academy and industry not to imbricate ourselves into the hierarchies of power but to subvert, undermine, open, make possible.

Our refusals and commitments together demand that data be acknowledged as at once an interpretation and in need of interpretation. Data can be a check-in, a story, an experience or set of experiences, and a resource to begin and continue dialogue.

Data can - and should always - resist reduction. Data is a thing, a process, and a relationship we make and put to use. We can make it and use it differently.