My publisher asked for an end-of-the-year book selection. I suggested Wendy Hui Kyong Chun's excellent new book Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition and sent a few sentences for context. Read the full list of picks here.
I remember snickering when Chris Anderson announced "The End of Theory" in 2008. Writing in Wired magazine, Anderson claimed that the structure of knowledge had inverted. It wasn't that models and principles revealed the facts of the world, but the reverse, that the data of the world spoke their truth unassisted. Anderson's simple conclusion was that "correlation supersedes causation...correlation is enough." Wendy Chun's excellent new book shows the social and political shortcomings of a contemporary technical infrastructure built around correlation, including the algorithms driving social media, search, consumer tracking, AI, and many other things. As Chun argues, power today operates through likeness, similarity, and correlated identity ("homophily"). Tech bros hope that by ignoring difference they can overcome it. Yet for Chun the attempt to find an unmarked category of subjectivity will necessarily erase and exclude those structurally denied access to the universal. Correlation isn't enough. It ratifies the past rather than reimagining the present. Chun ends with an eloquent call to acknowledge "a world that resonates with and in difference."
https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/5227-verso-authors-pick-their-favorite-books-of-the-year