All My Friends Are Fictional’s Reviews > Machine Readable Me: The Hidden Ways Tech Shapes our Identities > Status Update

“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.“