Feminist Data Manifest-No

# Feminist Data Manifest-No https://www.manifestno.com/

  *## The Manifest-No is a declaration of refusal and commitment. It

  refuses harmful data regimes and commits to new data futures.*

1. We refuse to operate under the assumption that risk and harm

associated with data practices can be bounded to mean the same thing for

everyone, everywhere, at every time. We commit to acknowledging how

historical and systemic patterns of violence and exploitation produce

differential vulnerabilities for communities.

1. We refuse to be disciplined by data, devices, and practices that

seek to shape and normalize racialized, gendered, and differently-abled

bodies in ways that make us available to be tracked, monitored, and

surveilled. We commit to taking back control over the ways we behave,

live, and engage with data and its technologies.

1. We refuse the use of data about people in perpetuity. We commit

to embracing agency and working with intentionality, preparing bodies or

corpuses of data to be laid to rest when they are not being used in

service to the people about whom they were created.

1. We refuse to understand data as disembodied and thereby dehumanized

and departicularized. We commit to understanding data as always and

variously attached to bodies; we vow to interrogate the biopolitical

implications of data with a keen eye to gender, race, sexuality, class,

disability, nationality, and other forms of embodied difference.

1. We refuse any code of phony “ethics” and false proclamations of

transparency that are wielded as cover, as tools of power, as forms for

escape that let the people who create systems off the hook from

accountability or responsibility. We commit to a feminist data ethics

that explicitly seeks equity and demands justice by helping us

understand and shift how power works.

1. We refuse the expansion of forms of data science that normalizes a

condition of data extractivism and is defined primarily by the drive to

monetize and hyper-individualize the human experience. We commit to

centering creative and collective forms of life, living, and worldmaking

that exceed the neoliberal logics and resist the market-driven forces to

commodify human experience.

1. We refuse to accept that data and the systems that generate,

collect, process, and store it are too complex or too technical to be

understood by the people whose lives are implicated in them. We commit

to seek to make systems and data intelligible, tangible, and controllable.

1. We refuse work /about/ minoritized people. We commit to

mobilizing data so that we are working with and for minoritized people

in ways that are consensual, reciprocal, and that understand data as

always co-constituted.

1. We refuse a data regime of ultimatums, coercive permissions,

pervasive cookie collecting, and blocked access. Not everyone can safely

refuse or opt out without consequence or further harm. We commit to

“no” being a real option in all online interactions with data-driven

products and platforms and to enacting a new type of data regime that

knits the “no” into its fabric.

1. We refuse to “close the door behind” ourselves. We commit to

entering ethically compromised spaces like the academy and industry not

to imbricate ourselves into the hierarchies of power but to subvert,

undermine, open, make possible.

*Our refusals and commitments together demand that data be acknowledged

as at once an interpretation and in need of interpretation. Data can be

a check-in, a story, an experience or set of experiences, and a resource

to begin and continue dialogue. It can - and should always - resist

reduction. Data is a thing, a process, and a relationship we make and

put to use. /We can make it and use it differently./*

If you’d like to read the full version of the Manifest-No, click here

https://www.manifestno.com/home.