Emily Mast & Yehuda Duenyas
Autonomy: A position of agency and decision-making free of coercion. To end harmful data policies (e.g. forced permissions, cookie collecting, blocked access), the Feminist Data Manifest-No prescribes data autonomy. Taeyoon Choi’s Distributed Web of Care proposes an infrastructure of “autonomous nodes” that provides collective agency and individual ownership of data and code.
Biopolitical: The combination of the Latin bios (pertaining to living organisms) with politics was popularized by French philosopher Michel Foucault. Foucault foregrounds how life is governed, ordered, and administrated by state and institutional power, and chronicles how social control is internalized through social relations. Biopolitics pervades all interactions between persons and their governments—in public health, policy, law, economics, and social programs. Through close attention to how biopolitics is deployed, scholars and activists denaturalize normative notions of gender, race, sexuality, class, disability, and nationality (see Feminist Data Manifest-No, Roxanne, Coded Bias).
A blockchain is a decentralized ledger, secured using cryptography and stored in a digital database. It logs transactions in a time-stamped and verifiable system, as in its original development as a means to trade Bitcoin. In cryptocurrency trading, blockchain networks permit users to remain anonymous, and all transactions to be visible to the entire network. This structural openness, anonymity, and security enables blockchain technologies to circumvent conventional networks of law and finance, or to explore collective authorship and ownership (see HOW ARE WE).
A broadcast is a widespread transmission of information. The term originates in agriculture, describing a method of sowing seeds by casting them broadly. It now references the distribution of audio and visual content across printed, digital, and electronic matter (see Chiang).
An HTTP cookie (also known as a web cookie or browser cookie) is a small piece of data sent by a web server to a web browser. Cookies possess ID information specific to the user and their computer, and are utilized to organize and control user experience. Often pervaded by practices of coercive permissions, cookie collecting is part of the current data regime that reproduces the colonial “ruse of consent” (see Manifest-No).
Damage-Centred Research, a term coined by Unangax̂ scholar Eve Tuck, describes research on Indigenous and urban communities that portrays research subjects through relationships to harm, injury, trauma, and exploitation (especially in a well-meaning attempt to affect change by surfacing community pain). Tuck offers desire-centred research as an antidote, describing frameworks for recognizing and honouring the complexity and agency of lives and communities under study (see Manifest-No).
Deterritorialization refers to the separation or severing of relationships between cultural codes, behaviours, or practices from a particular location. Deterritorialization may not necessarily describe a dilution or depletion of culture—but often results in a reordering of how people behave, move through, and experience their relationships to space and culture. Globalization, capitalism, and mediatization are often described as deterritorializing forces (see Cochrane).
Distributed and decentralized are terms used among proponents of the distributed web, who build online infrastructures to resist the centralization of internet service providers. A decentralized network has additional nodes beyond its centre; a distributed network adds another level of connection between users, as in peer-to-peer (P2P) networks such as BitTorrent or Bitcoin. Recently, coders and programmers are working to build greater trust and care in P2P networks, with anti-oppression principles serving to counteract the toxic environments of the broader internet (see Choi).
Enterprise: A project, initiative, or undertaking requiring significant effort (see Pico); or a business. “Free enterprise” (capitalism or the “market economy”) derives from the latter definition, and suggests an economic system free of state interference. “Enterprise” is often used in optimistic terms, though its etymological roots in “to seize, take” and an “adventurous disposition” give pause to question what histories and ideologies it evokes (see Coded Bias, Pepi for a discussion of techno-optimism).
Forecast: An attempt to make a prediction about the future based on observable information from the past and present. Many forecasts (including economic ones) are constrained by existing data—meaning that they are often doomed to replicate and entrench past behaviours and assumptions (see Cochrane).
Landscape: The unique attributes of an area—either literally (e.g. topographical features), or figuratively (e.g. a model, pattern, structure, or movement). As a verb, landscaping refers to altering an existing area to enhance appearance and functionality. Historically, landscape planning is rooted in industrial motivations of colonial capitalism (see Davis & Todd in SDUK01, Devine in SDUK06). See Cochrane, who looks to activists and organizers to forecast the “landscape of the possible,” a shifting landscape of the future that realizes the present.
Network: A system of intertwined people or things—such as a spider web or the World Wide Web—often united by common principles or actions. Sometimes a networked approach elects a governing body to steward legislation, while other times it advocates for policy change, or empowers each member to be autonomous in its decision-making (see Cadotte in SDUK07(2)). As Taeyoon Choi asks: “What kind of network do we want for the future?”
Personhood: The condition and status of being a person, afforded a person’s rights and responsibilities. While personhood is typically closely related to humanness, patriarchal and white supremacist systems often withhold the legal status of personhood along race, gender, and ability lines (see Choi, Coded Bias). The subject of numerous moral and philosophical debates, criteria for personhood often include social, genetic, linguistic, and cognitive measures (see Chiang), and legal frameworks for personhood (i.e. environmental personhood) may be used as strategies in pursuit of recognizing and protecting non-human beings.
Polyvocal: Comprising multiple voices. In contrast to a singular voice, polyvocality provides diverse perspectives and multifaceted engagements that are informed by a variety of experiences and knowledges (see HOW ARE WE, Hockaday, Pepi).
Predictive policing is a technology developed by tech companies and marketed to police departments aimed at forecasting crime. In known cases it has been used in several US states, in China, and in several European countries. Predictive policing systems process past crime data through prediction algorithms to identify potential crime “hotspots.” Predictive policing has been roundly criticized for the opacity and racial bias of its algorithms; for its tendency to repeat existing biases within police forces; its non-disclosed rollout in some police departments; and its ineffectiveness as a tool of community outreach or crime prevention (see Feminist Data Manifest-No, Coded Bias).
Software: A set of encoded instructions that enables a computer to perform tasks. Software commonly describes the functional properties of a computer that do not refer to its physical parts (hardware). Hard and soft infrastructures are synchronistic and cannot act independently of one another: their layered existence, termed “The Stack'' by sociologist Benjamin Bratton, makes it possible to produce networks that are not only mutually confined, but geopolitical in nature (see Diamanti in SDUK03, Pepi).
Trust: A relationship, arrangement, or belief involving risk—i.e. a prediction about another entity acting with integrity in the future (see Hockaday). In law and policy, anti-trust regulations are geared at supporting market competition and constraining predatory monopolies—see, for example, recent lawsuits over Big Tech's domination of the digital ecosystem. In media and technology, trust is negotiated among many factors, including privacy, security, anonymity, consent, and transparency. (See HOW ARE WE, Manifest-No, Coded Bias).