DataSpace Lecture Series: Life and Death in Data under an Authoritarian State // Mary F.E. Ebeling
Everybody is welcome!
Abstract:
Mary F.E. Ebeling
Powerful political actors in commercial health data, information and tech security companies collude with the Trump regime to track, criminalize, imprison and punish patients through their health data. American technofascists deploy both corruption without consequence and state violence to force the capitulation of medical institutions, legal firms, medical and clinical researchers, and third-party health tech companies to track patients through their data for purposes other than for their care, and to disclose health records to the authoritarian state.
The tech oligarchs whose companies build AI models fed with purloined health data actively collude with the American authoritarian state to accelerate the collapse of democracy in the United States. This high-speed race is fueled by citizens' stolen data, including private health information, used to destroy lives and disappear people. My discussion will delineate the circular connections between the warehouses being bought by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and converted into concentration camps to store human beings, and the building of AI data centers to concentrate and process their data held across various governmental departments into one large platform. These data under the control of technofascists are weaponized to surveil, track and kidnap people based on their stolen data in order to house them in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) concentration camps or deport them. Throughout my discussion I will highlight the various forms of resistance that ordinary Americans are undertaking to protect each other from the technofascists, including the strategies to shut down the concentration camps housing people and the data centers that store their data.
Mary F.E. Ebeling is Professor of Sociology and affiliate faculty in the Center for Science, Technology & Society at Drexel University, in Philadelphia, USA. She is the author of two books, Healthcare and Big Data (2016) and Afterlives of Data (2022), both of which address the biopolitics of the global economy in health data.
About the DataSpace Lecture Series: The DataSpace Lecture Series is a series of lectures aiming to convene scholars and academic voices on health data, data infrastructures and related concerns about representation, power, and political economy. The series is organized by the DataSpace Research Group in collaboration with the Centre for Medical Science and Technology Studies (MeST).
More information about DataSpace and the lecture series