From the Editors

As students of a course called Dark Data, we have spent the semester tracing the many ways our data is collected, trapped, monitored, abused, analyzed, lost, stolen, and manipulated by murky corporations and holders of internet infrastructure. Beyond class, our societies and governing bodies at large have also woken up to the depth of this reality. At the same time, our digital expanses are growing and spreading: online communities soothe the shortcomings of tangible ones, and reformers in the field make real, if incremental, progress towards more equitable tech. In other words, we have reached a time where technology has the potential to create other, more desirable worlds.

Imagination is a praxis of the mind, thought and will weaving collective realities. Rather than emphasize that the problems we spent months scrutinizing exist, we decided to use this zine to reimagine data and its implications. We venture into how data imagines us, and vice versa, so that we might reclaim the captor/captive narrative our technology has steadily built around us and forge alternative paths through a critical, intersectional lens.

Each of the projects in this zine engage with some kind of glitch and explore its other possible manifestations. They begin with a problem or question around data use and technology - teasing out the colonial histories of the internet; charting visuals of data dissolving our realities; using human philosophies to approach machine consciousness; weaving fabric microchip landscapes layered with AR; spotlighting perspectives on AI from the Majority World and reporting on the perils of the attention economy. Every project rejects the premise that these harms are hardcoded, and takes on the harder, brighter task of brainstorming another way out.

A Note on Working Conditions

This zine was originally meant to be the collaborative final project for PSAM 5752 Dark Data, a graduate course at Parsons School of Design, taught during the Fall 2022 semester. But on November 16th, the part-time faculty union at The New School initiated what became the longest adjunct strike in U.S. history. Over nearly four contentious weeks, the university administration refused to pay part-time faculty a living wage. Instead, they weaponized students' visas and educators' guilt while threatening to suspend pay and healthcare, amongst other neoliberal union-busting strategies. Meanwhile, student, parent and full-time faculty support for the strike was overwhelming - many withheld their labor in solidarity, bringing the flow of formal classes to a standstill.

Given the zine's intention to imagine other, more collectivist worlds, its creators stand in complete solidarity with the part-time faculty. We believe an academic institution is lit from within by its students and professors. In that spirit, we took the creation of the zine into our own hands, working together outside of New School systems and without professor oversight to complete what became a resilient, peer-led student project. Driven by a passion for sharp design and social advancement, we believe the zine actualizes Dark Data's intentions by not associating itself with an institution whose leadership failed us. A student occupation of the university, which sprang from the strike, is still ongoing; until it is resolved, the zine will stand on its own.