How to opt out: Lessons from 14 years of evading surveillance capitalism

With Janet Vertesi, Associate Professor of Sociology, Princeton University

We are often told that we cannot live without Big Tech, but what happens when we try? In 2012, as Google, Facebook, and others were inaugurating the personal data economy, Janet Vertesi decided to take matters into her own hands.

Drawing upon her training as a sociologist of science, technology, and organizations, her extended ethnographic work with NASA’s robotic spacecraft teams, and her experience in critical human computer interaction design, Vertesi enacted her own technological lifestyle around creative, critical alternatives to counter the extractive data systems and naturalizing discourses of Silicon Valley. From this standpoint — what informatics scholar Geof Bowker long ago called ‘infrastructural inversion’ — she observed the rise of mass-scale surveillance technologies under the aegis of commercialization. She witnessed the co-construction of personalized systems and monolithic corporations that would eventually support the rise of AI.

In this talk, Vertesi describes how her “Opt Out Experiments” revealed the accumulating material political economy that undergirds our current sociotechnical landscape, the shifting sociotechnical construction of concepts such as “inconvenience,” “innovation,” and “friendship,” and ways to practically replace these misnomers with alternative guiding philosophies. Her experiments reveal techniques to fight back, providing a hopeful guide for how we might build a better future with each other and our machines.

Presented by BESI Technology Network

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About the speaker

Dubbed “Margaret Mead Among the Starfleet” by the Times Literary Supplement, Janet Vertesi is an associate professor of sociology at Princeton University, where she is also the associate director of the Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education. Her past decade of research, largely funded by the National Science Foundation, examines how distributed robotic spacecraft teams work together effectively to produce scientific and technical results. She is the author of Seeing Like a Rover: How Robots, Teams, and Images Craft Knowledge of Mars (Chicago, 2015) and Shaping Science: Organizations, Decisions, and Culture on NASA’s Teams (Chicago, 2020), as well as co-editor with David Ribes and others of digitalSTS (Princeton, 2019). A longstanding contributor to literatures in science and technology studies, critical computing, and computer-supported cooperative work, she is currently building a societally-responsible design program at Princeton. She also serves as an advisory board member for the Data & Society Institute and the Electronic Privacy Information Center.