Life After Data, October 6, 2026 | Program
Approx. 9:30am-10:35am
The Shadows of Artificial Things | David McNeill
“The Shadows of Artificial Things” argues that the threat datafication poses to human intellectual, moral and political freedom predates modern technology. The talk draws from Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” to explore how data-driven understandings of human possibility render genuine emancipation unthinkable.
“You best protect your neck”: A tale from the de-datafying Paris Commune (2068) | Ibrahim Bechrouri
“You best protect your neck”: A tale from the de-datafying Paris Commune (2068) presents a fictional tale set in a future Paris Commune that has liberated itself from mass data collection and surveillance capitalism to argue that de-datafication requires dismantling capitalism, policing, and the modern state together, not just changing tech policy.
Am I Human? The Moral Costs of Being Rendered as Data or the Subjective Counterfeit | Dr. Breauna Spencer
“Am I Human? The Moral Costs of Being Rendered as Data or the Subjective Counterfeit” argues that data systems don’t just represent people, they actively shape them into “moral subjects” through constant classification and behavioral feedback. Draws on intersectionality theory to show how these moral judgments land unevenly across different populations, often reinforcing existing inequality.
Beyond the Data Double: Reclaiming Human Complexity | Nina Simone Edwards
“Beyond the Data Double: Reclaiming Human Complexity” argues that treating people as profiles, scores, and predictions flattens human complexity into administratively convenient categories. Drawing on Black feminist thought and critical information science literature, she proposes a different model of knowledge—one centered on context and human agency rather than data points.
Erasure as Infrastructure: De-Datafication, Platform Governance, and the Politics of Absence | Ifat Gazia
“Erasure as Infrastructure: De-Datafication, Platform Governance, and the Politics of Absence” argues that platforms govern people not just by collecting data but by strategically hiding and omitting it, drawing on ethnographic work with displaced Uyghur communities and platform narratives from Kashmir and Palestine.
Approx. 10:50am-12:10pm
A Brief History of Work, and What Comes Next | Chris Miciek
“A Brief History of Work, and What Comes Next” traces the roots of modern data-driven management back to ancient Greco-Roman ideas about work and hierarchy, arguing that, by deconstructing our a priori assumptions of work, we position ourselves to disentangle work from datafication.
The Afterlife of Worker Data[fication] | Seema N. Patel
“The Afterlife of Worker Data[fication]” explores what happens to low-wage workers’ data after it’s collected, tracking how it gets reused and monetized far beyond the workplace where it originated.
Out of the Shadows, Into the Databases | Anil Kalhan
“Out of the Shadows, Into the Databases” examines the surveillance and datafication-related dilemmas arising from efforts to extend legal status to unauthorized migrants. On the one hand, unauthorized migrants—who are often described as “living in the shadows”—already live in a world “beyond data” in significant respects. On the other hand, the consolidation of immigration surveillance as a mode of governance, along with the increasingly restrictive forms that legalization proposals have taken, create the risk of a separate set of harms arising precisely from these efforts to ensure legal recognition.
What Remains of the Carceral State? De-datafying Criminal Justice Through Democratic Accountability | Itay Ravid
A Call for the Mass Deletion of Criminal Legal Data | Kylin Puck Lo
“A Call for the Mass Deletion of Criminal Legal Data” asks whether movements should demand outright deletion of criminal legal data rather than transparency, and discusses how criminal legal data reveals the perils of visibility and data governance.
AI and the ‘Humanization’ of War | Anna Feuer
“AI and the ‘Humanization’ of War” argues that AI broadly threatens humanization by destabilizing the conventional dichotomy between the collectivist and individualist models of armed conflict, thereby creating barriers to the establishment of individual responsibility for international crimes and enabling mass targeting by aggregating individuals on the basis of algorithmic characteristics.
Approx. 12:40pm-1:25pm
Why, How, and When to Abandon the Internet | Justin Hendrix
“Why, How, and When to Abandon the Internet” invites Tech Policy Press’s global audience to leave voice memos explaining in their own voices how they would answer the following question: What would it take to build a movement to abandon the current internet entirely and start over? The talk will be one part synthesis, one part hearing from exemplary voices, and one part inviting the audience to participate.
Dedatafying Georgetown | Paul Ohm
“Dedatafying Georgetown” tells the story of a professor’s stint as a university administrator, trying (and not always succeeding) to resist datafication from inside the machine, here at our host university. Georgetown has seen repeated datafication pushes, from pandemic era contact tracing and classroom recording policies to the broader McKinseyfication of the university via its in-house, ominously named consulting unit, BDOG (business design and optimization group). This talk surveys the small wins and more frequent losses of trying to preserve the friction in the system and asks what dedatafication can look like from the inside.
Can Universities Innovate Without Data? Rethinking the Smart Campus | Lucy Zhang
“Can Universities Innovate Without Data? Rethinking the Smart Campus” examines how “smart campus” technology reshapes universities around continuous data collection and algorithmic optimization, and asks what university innovation could look like if institutions were built to minimize data.
Reanimating Research Narratives: Storytelling, Nature, and Power | Suzanne Maguire
“Reanimating Research Narratives: Storytelling, Nature, and Power” draws on the experiences of academic librarians, who have witnessed how dominant narratives have impacted research behaviors. Students, faculty, and librarians tend to view inquiry as solely data retrieval, removed from the intersections of relationship, nature, and power. What results is research that is disembodied, extractive, impersonal, and deficient/inadequate. This talk asks how we can challenge these narratives of datafication in research and inquiry.
Pencils Out: Study Abroad, Archival Research, and Creative Writing Pedagogy | Melanie Dusseau
“Pencils Out: Study Abroad, Archival Research, and Creative Writing Pedagogy” makes the case that in-person archival research and study abroad remain essential, irreplaceable experiences for creative writers in an age of AI-generated plots and characters.
Approx. 1:35pm-2:20pm
The Walls We Have Built Around Ourselves: How Scotland Datafied its Literature Exams | Dr. Alexander Thompson
“The Walls We Have Built Around Ourselves: How Scotland Datafied its Literature Exams” traces how Scotland’s literature exams shifted from deeply personal, creative writing prompts to standardized, metric-driven testing starting in the 1990s. Argues this “datafication” wasn’t inevitable and that a more human exam system worked well for over a century before it was dismantled.
Education for the Attention Liberation Movement | Peter Schmidt
“Education for the Attention Liberation Movement” describes how the Attention Liberation Movement, a grassroots initiative reclaiming human attention from data-driven capture and commodification, has developed a set of techniques for collective study that actively push back against the machinic monetization of human attention. The author argues that these new educational frameworks are necessary to build a human-centered future in which people are equipped for the condition of freedom.
Reverse Contradictionary and the Pedagogies of Postdigital De-Datafication | Mario Hibert
“Reverse Contradictionary and the Pedagogies of Postdigital De-Datafication” develops on artistic project called Reverse Contradictionary (Ćosić, IOCOSE, & Joler, 2025) that invents words and contradictions to disrupt how AI language systems process meaning, framing the project as both cultural critique and a teaching tool for imagining futures beyond data-driven language.
Collage as Anti-Datafication Praxis | Katie Conrad
“Collage as Anti-Datafication Praxis” offers material collage as an artistic and pedagogical response to datafication. The talk suggests how collage re-centers the material and refigures both “data” and “information” in ways that recenter intent, communication, and active meaning-making and reclaim “value” from algorithmic interpretation.
Approx. 2:40pm-3:45pm
Slurry-as-a-Service: A Modest Proposal on Scalable Pluralistic Alignment for Nutrient Optimization | Rachel Hong
“Slurry-as-a-Service: A Modest Proposal on Scalable Pluralistic Alignment for Nutrient Optimization” describes a world in which an automated decision-making system selects which people to convert into nutrients, justified by claims of techno-inevitability and the necessity for optimization. This talk will present the use of satire as a method to argue against ongoing attempts of datafication that supposedly quantify human values.
Data Refusal as Boundless Annihilation of Data Models | George Fletcher
“Data Refusal as Boundless Annihilation of Data Models” draws on feminist and decolonial theory to develop a technical framework for what it would mean to build systems that refuse to collect or process data as an act of justice.
Unlearning Is Not Forgetting: Why De-datafication Cannot Wait for the Right Algorithm | Jianing Zhu
“Unlearning Is Not Forgetting: Why De-datafication Cannot Wait for the Right Algorithm” argues that “deleting your data” from a company is easy, but once that data has trained an AI model, actually removing its influence is a much harder, largely unsolved problem. The only real solution is to never have your data collected in the first place.
De-datafication in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: partial infrastructures, limited data capture, and an empirical demonstration of the possibility of de-datafication | Narcisse Mbunzama
“De-datafication in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: partial infrastructures, limited data capture, and an empirical demonstration of the possibility of de-datafication” uses the Democratic Republic of Congo as a real-world case where digital datafication remains incomplete, since labor, finance, and land management still run largely through trust networks and cash, and argues this is proof that societies can function and even thrive without total data capture.
The Limits of Datafication: Why Public Institutions Cannot Be Reduced to Information Systems | Marc T.J Elliott
“The Limits of Datafication: Why Public Institutions Cannot Be Reduced to Information Systems” argues that datafication’s real danger isn’t just collecting too much data; it’s redefining public institutions as systems built to optimize information above all else, and that de-datafication is fundamentally an institutional challenge, not a technical one.
Beyond Data: Building Civic Infrastructure for a Post-Datafied Democracy | Ellina Yin
“Beyond Data: Building Civic Infrastructure for a Post-Datafied Democracy” draws on the author’s work with local governments and communities navigating the rapid expansion of AI data centers to argue that our challenge is not merely to reduce our dependence on data, but to ask what civic infrastructure we must build so that our political future is no longer mediated primarily through data, but through people.
Approx. 3:55pm-4:45pm
Yes, and? And what else is true? Ways of being and knowing among the Swahili | Latifa Mbarak
“Yes, and? And what else is true? Ways of being and knowing among the Swahili” explores how the Swahili community understands identity and knowledge through lived practice, physical objects, and language rather than through extractable data, by drawing on the author’s own upbringing and interviews with family to reflect on ways of knowing that resist categorization altogether.
The People v. The Cloud | Jenna Ruddock
“The People v. The Cloud” examines how community resistance to hyperscale data center projects goes beyond opposing new construction or AI more broadly, and argues that these struggles are creating spaces for imagining collective, regenerative futures that exist in stark opposition to the future tech billionaires are selling.
The Next Reconstruction: De-Datafying Democracy | Dr. Nathalie Maréchal
“The Next Reconstruction: De-Datafying Democracy” argues that datafication and surveillance capitalism have been central drivers of US democratic decline and rising authoritarianism, and offers rhetorical strategies and a concrete policy agenda for a future government to dismantle that system and rebuild rights-affirming relationships between people and data.