Status Updates From Machine Readable Me: The Hi...

“Historian and activist Aviva Chomsky […] thoroughly breaks down how the creation and use of the labels of 'undocumented', 'illegal immigrant', or 'illegal alien' have been fully shaped by the political context at the time to […] dehumanise parts of the population dependent upon the specific type of xenophobic politics at the time - for example, anti-Asian, anti-Black, or anti-Mexican, among others.”

“There have been many moments of huge societal transformation and 'moral revolution', and there's no reason to believe that there can't be another one in our lifetimes. […] We cannot keep building and fortifying borders and walls, gathering biometric data to police and surveil those most at risk, policing movement, destroying the environment, without literally making this entire planet uninhabitable.”

“Researchers have various ways of describing the violations that arise from the misuse of data about us. […] Tricia Wang refers to it as violations of our digital personhood, defining personhood as 'the agency to determine one's own life decisions and outcomes.' Researcher Anja Kovacs thinks about […] the 'capacity to engage in the autonomous management of our bodies, selves and lives as we see fit.'”

“In this day and age, innovation has become synonymous with digitisation. But what if we had a more nuanced approach to innovation? What if the most innovative approach would be to recognise that not everything should be digitised, and to understand the limitations of data gathering and of technology?”

“[…] Nigerian-American artist and educator Mimi Onupha's work has delved into the way that absences shape our systems — the data that we don't collect, the way that certain aspects of collated subjects cannot be measured or quantified or datafied, and what that says or changes about the way that our systems work and our lives are shaped.”

“Nobody can be expected to give informed consent when they're seeking urgent humanitarian assistance. If you're hungry, without food, thirsty for water, without a home or don't know where you […] are going to sleep that night, the very idea that you could make an informed decision about something as abstract as your biometric, personal data, is more a cruel joke than it is the legal basis for processing data.”

“Research has shown that when it comes to technology, and more specifically to digital identification systems, how people feel about the data collection is just as important as what data is collected. When it comes to biometric data being taken, with a lack of thought and respect for someone's dignity and preferences, the whole process contributes to a removal of agency from people […].”

“As journalist Giacomo Zandonini notes in the New Humanitarian, ‘for prospective migrants at the Makalondi border post, their data is likely to travel a lot more freely than they can.’”

“But it's not just through the creation of databases or digital systems that technology can play a role in cementing an identity that we might not want or deserve. Pieces of data that we generate ourselves can also be misinterpreted to build a picture of us that we might disagree with, thanks once again to a combination of misunderstanding of technology, human bias, and technical illiteracy.”

„The move to digitising our identities, or digitising more data about our identities, makes this fluidity much harder. Digital data adds a rigidity to our identities as far as machines are concerned, a permanence, forcing a framework upon a personhood that we might not agree with, let alone personally identify with. This can be really problematic for many reasons.“

„Until race- or ethnicity-based discrimination has been entirely eliminated, there's a clear need for this kind of data to be collected - to be able to highlight where those inequities are, and, ideally, to suggest interventions and systemic changes that can be made to address them.“

„What might be a fight for self-determination for one community […] might be a target on the backs for another community, one that they want to get rid of at all costs. Solidarity is needed in all such situations, recognition of the differing forms of oppression at play, and support in resistance, even if that support manifests itself in drastically different ways in different contexts.“

“John Perry Barlow declared ‘our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions' in his seminal 'A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.'’ In actual fact, all we've ended up with is more fixation upon our borders, translated into online systems. We’re not distributing identities or ignoring them, let alone creating new ones where everyone is equal no matter where they're from.”

“Turkish author Orhan Pamuk wrote […] ‘a passport is not a document that tells us who we are but a document that shows what other people think of us.’ It's easy to forget how incredibly artificial and man-made those borders that influence passports - and these documents, or digital ID systems - really are. In the digital world, the answer to where we're from is synonymous with what passport you hold.”

“For Palestinians, it means that in certain circumstances like applying for a visa […], the closest option they're offered for their country of origin is Israel, a country that has violently occupied their land for decades. […] that occupation exists digitally too, co-opting their identities and leaving them with no option but to select the nationality of their occupiers instead of their own.”

“He [James C. Scott] notes that states (and other large institutions) gather data on large populations to make them 'more legible.' In his eyes, the driving purpose behind gathering all this data isn't necessarily in the best interests of the people whose data it is, but rather for people in power […] to help themselves to make decisions as according to their values and priorities, not their citizens.”

“Legal identity is often withheld by governments not for a lack of proper system, but because of societal bias or discrimination. Any digital identification systems that are established without actively addressing those biases will simply replicate that discrimination, thus not really addressing the core issue at all.”

“Ghanaian-American philosopher and academic
Kwame Anthony Appiah calls this the 'Medusa Syndrome, writing that ‘what the state gazes upon, it tends to turn to stone.’ He describes this inadequate but somewhat inevitable strategy that the nation-state adopts as the only way a state has of making its people legible or, in other words, of watching its population. But watching is not the same as seeing.”

“Technology and data don't exist in a vacuum - they’re designed and implemented in societies that are shaped by politics and culture. […] Structural inequalities, where there are systemic disparities in how power or resources are allocated based not on an individual's actions, but on how the very system is designed and built.”