Anthropology and Artificial Intelligence. With Veronica Barassi

Our guest today is Professor Veronica Barassi. Veronica is an anthropologist and author of Data Child Citizen (MIT Press, 2020).

Veronica campaigns and writes about the impact of data technologies and artificial intelligence on human rights and democracy. As a mother, Veronica was becoming increasingly concerned about the data being collected on her two children by digital platforms. Her research resulted in the book as well as a TED talk, What tech companies know about your kids, that’s had over 2 million views. 

Since the publication of her book, she says there's been a huge acceleration in the datafication of children, partly due to the pandemic, and an increase in the ways in which AI technologies are being used to profile people.

Veronica explores what she believes anthropology uniquely brings to the study of data technologies and AI. She asks (and answers), “why would an anthropological approach be different from say, for instance, Virginia Eubanks, who uses ethnographic methodologies and has a real context-specific understanding of what's happening on the ground.” 

Turning to anthropology’s (late) engagement with AI, data, and algorithms, she says it used to be a niche area of research. But “we’ve actually seen a reality check for anthropologists because these technologies are…involved in deeply problematic and hierarchical processes of meaning-construction and power-making that there's no way that anthropologists could shy away from this”.

One of the best books “that really makes us see things for what they are ["in this current time we’re living in"] is David Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. Graeber “talks about how bureaucracy is actually there to construct social truth, but this type of bureaucratic work has been now replaced by algorithms and artificial intelligence”, a connection she tries to make in her article, David Graeber, Bureaucratic Violence and the Critique of Surveillance Capitalism.

We discuss how anthropologists can make their work both academically rigorous and accessible to the public, and she talks about her own personal experience of doing the TED talk and how she felt a responsibility to bring the topic of child datafication to a wider audience, campaigning, and raising awareness.

Veronica provokes anthropology scholars with a call to action given that one of her “major critiques of anthropology…is the fact that as anthropologists often shy away from engaging theoretically with disciplines that do not share their approach". And what does it mean when we say research is “not anthropological enough”? 

Lastly, Veronica suggests that, given machines must be taught basic concepts, like what is a child (“as anthropologists, we know that these concepts are so complex, so culturally specific, so biased”), what anthropology can do is “highlight the way in which these technologies are always inevitably going to get and be biased”. She ends on a note of excitement: “We're going to see such great research emerging in the next few years. I'm actually looking forward to that”.

Follow Veronica on Twitter @veronicabarassi. 

Read an edited version of our conversation together with reading list.

Transcript

Dawn Walter: [00:00:04]

So, welcome Veronica. I want to start with your book, Child Data Citizen. You wrote it because, as an anthropologist and a scholar of media and communication, you were interested in understanding the human experience, the datafication of childhood, and your book has highlighted the data collection and profiling of children, which matters because data-driven decisions are being made that impact children's lives in ways that we can't even possibly imagine yet. 

So I wanted to know since the book was published, have you seen any concrete actions and either how the social media companies collect data or even how governments protect our rights? 

Veronica Barassi: [00:02:10]

Oh yes, well actually, I've seen different types of transformations so much so that over the last year I was contracted to write a new book that I wrote in Italian. So I'm going to look at the translation of it, but which is called The Children of the Algorithm, and this is partly for two reasons. I was brought to the idea that I needed to write something new. The first reason was that I still had a lot of data from the Child Data Citizen project that didn't fit in the first book, and a lot of reflections and theoretical consideration of how children were being datafied. But the second reason was, of course, the pandemic and because the pandemic, from what I've seen, accelerated massively processes that were already in place, so it didn't bring anything really new, but it really accelerated aspects and processes that were already in place. And like, to give an example, I after five years of researching children and datafied citizens, and I had to, and I had no choice, I had to create a Google Classroom account from my daughter.

So there was this situation in which families were thrown in, and most of the times we didn't have a choice and it happened really fast, especially because governments and schools institutions in general implemented those transformations more rapidly and more extensively than they had done before. 

So that was the those were the two major transformations. But then also what we had seen it was a third type of transformation in very short period of time which was an expansion in the ways in which the AI technologies were being used to profile people and again going back to the education sector, but also thinking about the workplace, we have seen the use of different types of software's that were analysing facial features to decide on whether what was happening at home, right? 

And this in schools has been an issue, in universities, especially if we think as an example, the use of Proctorio which was a software used to make sure that students didn't cheat during exams. And but of course, it was a massive social, political, and critical implications in the use of these technologies, so, so yes, a lot of changed and this would be the negative sides. The positive sides I think is that the debate about algorithmic bias, the adequacy of these technologies, and also the importance of protecting children's rights has expanded and also we saw some key steps such as the white paper by the European Union for the regulation of artificial intelligence. So, yes, so that was kind of. It was kind of a new world that was happening over the last couple of years. So I decided to start again and write about it, yeah.

Dawn Walter: [00:05:38]

Will the book be in English as well?

Veronica Barassi: [00:05:40]

Well, I'm looking at the moment to translate in English and I just published it. So, it was published in November 2021, and I was kind of doing all the aftermath of the book publishing in Italy so which is a lot of work so I didn't have yet the time to translate it in English.

Dawn Walter: [00:06:01]

Yeah, I will look forward to that. So can you and articulate for our listeners, some of whom might not be anthropologists, what you believe anthropology uniquely brings to the study of data technologies and AI, and why we need more anthropologists working in this space?

Veronica Barassi: [00:06:17]

This is actually very fascinating question and it's quite funny, I don't know if I am allowed to say it but Dawn you sent me the questions beforehand, like over a week ago. And I was reading over the questions, and this was the question, right? For me was like, how am I gonna answer this? So why, why would an anthropological approach be different from say, for instance, Virginia Eubanks, who uses ethnographic methodologies and has a real context-specific understanding of what's happening on the ground, right? 

And my answer to that, that is, first of all, I had the great luck in my life that over the last year of my PhD I was supervised by David Graeber, and I was his teaching assistant for two years. And I think most of the things that I identify with anthropology, I identify with David, in many ways, like I've always thought, if I have to think about what the values are, I think those are the values that I would be looking for in an anthropologist, right? But also I'm thinking about those other great inspirations in my, never met, but actually in my career, Tim Ingold, and there is a particular article from, I think it was dated 2014 if I'm not wrong, but don't quote me on that. I think it's either between 2011-2014 where Ingold questions what is ethnographic.

And he gets really frustrated about the fact that the many times, we, as anthropologists, get this, we review articles or, or funding bits in which we read things like, oh, this project is gonna entail ethnographic interviews and you're thinking, well, I don't know what makes an interview ethnographic, and what doesn’t it make it ethnographic.

So all these kind of debates about what anthropology does I think I am very much inspired by this two figures and ways of thinking. And to be honest my belief is that there is a fundamental difference. And after years and years that I've been working across the disciplines because I built my career in media studies or communication studies, whatever, but I have my PhD in social anthropology, after many years that I’ve been struggling with these questions, I am, I can tell you that, I think that is really what makes anthropology unique is that, in other disciplines like sociology political science, media studies, ethnography is often, too often, used as a method and as a method that usually it is about exploring the qualitative dimension of life. 

It's how people negotiate that has a lot of similarities to the ways in which it is used in anthropology, but anthropology, ethnography is not only method, it is an analytical perspective. You ask your question through your ethnographic engagement and many times, especially once you advance in your career, that level of ethnographic engagement that you might have had when you were a PhD student it's very difficult to get because we don't have the time to go away for a year. I have two daughters, I direct an institute, there's no way that I can actually do a year of ethnographic fieldwork. 

And so anthropologists usually do is they use their analytical, ethnographic lens in everyday life. And I think that that's what makes us unique apart, from the theory. I mean anthropological, like often when we use those analytical lens we also engage with anthropological theory that has been fascinated and culturally-specific, and it’s rich in the engagement with the problems that surface from everyday life. 

So for instance agency of personhood like that's what that was one of the, anthropology of personhood was one of the theory that really inspired me when I was thinking about how we were datafing citizens or anthropology of value. So I think that's what makes anthropology unique. And that's the very positive side of anthropology.

Dawn Walter: [00:10:53]

Your book concludes with a call for collective action for our rights, for data justice. And I wonder what you think are the most pressing areas for further research by anthropologists in this space. So where should we be focusing our gaze in your opinion? 

Veronica Barassi: [00:11:07]

Well, at the moment that the real problem is that the one with these topics, like artificial intelligence and data and algorithms, I think you're seeing, even more so I would say, then when internet technologies developed, we are seeing much, much more anthropological engagement. The Royal Anthropology Institute, for instance, to whom I submitted an abstract for this June, they are doing an entire conference on artificial intelligence. So which I thought oh my, I mean, seriously, I trained as a social anthropologist, I was doing my PhD between 2006 and 2009. 

And when I was doing my PhD, I was very much engaged with the key questions about media anthropology or digital anthropology at the time. And it was a very small niche of anthropologists working in that field, the media anthropology network, the EASA anthropology network, that was launched by John Postill in 2005 and I chaired the seminars for many, many years, I resigned last year because I had done it for too long, but anyway, but there were a lot of media anthropologists around the world but media anthropology was still something that anthropologists were not really engaging with was with AI and data. 

We’ve actually seen, I think, a reality check for anthropologists because these technologies that filtered and are so many dimensions of social life, they have also become agents in many ways and involved in deeply problematic and hierarchical processes of meaning construction and of power-making that there's no way that anthropologists could shy away from this. I mean, there was no way that they could, and I actually, to be honest, I'd, you know, I'm thinking about the people which have always worked on these topics, but there's so many people, there's so many anthropologists are picking up from an ordinary understanding or really expanding it theoretically, that’s very interesting. 

And Boellstorff, for instance, in 2013, published an article, which I'm super fond of, on big data where he traces back, and this is very interesting, he traces back this idea of the algorithm, and how anthropology relates to algorithm, to Lévi-Strauss and where he talked about ethnography and ethnographic algorithm because effectively through ethnography you’re effectively, ethnographic method, that’s what we do, right? 

So there's so much, I think, in anthropological theory that we can learn, and again, apart from that, ethnographic method, which is important, but really inventive anthropological theory that we can learn about this current time that we're living in. Obviously, I'm biased but one of the best books, that really, I think, makes us see things for what they are and, is David Graeber, the Joys of Bureaucracy [The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy], published in 2016. 

In 2021, just after he died, I wrote an article, a long article on surveillance capitalism, which is an homage to David, and it's published in the Annals of the Fondazione Einaudi, where other like prominent anthropologists have published and it was, strangely enough, the journal, the special issue, it was in honour of Sahlins, then felt that I was like, so I was asked to write this article about David and I wrote how his theory of bureaucracy, violence, and value enables us to understand surveillance capitalism. 

And I draw specifically on that book, the Joys of Bureaucracy, and it's fascinating because, you know, obviously David Graeber was not looking at the rise of surveillance capitalism as something that had just happened, you know, like he plays with history, always played with history, so he traces back, back to the rise of corporate bureaucracy, and then in the fascinating, it's very fascinating to read to his theory in the light of what happened in the last couple of years. 

And he talks about how bureaucracy is actually there to construct social truth, but effectively, this type of bureaucratic work has been now replaced by algorithms and artificial intelligence, and I tried to make that connection in my article [David Graber, Bureaucratic Violence and the Critique of Surveillance Capitalism], try to really show why it is important look at anthropology and why on the other hand anthropology engage with this reflections about what's happening, and what has happened over the last couple of years.

Dawn Walter: [00:17:04]

Your book and TED talk are fantastic examples of how anthropologists can make their work both academically rigorous and accessible to the public (outreach). I saw a Tweet the other day that said anthropology needs to get over the idea that writing for the public is something to be ashamed of and also that such writing lacks scholarly rigor. Why do you think anthropology has such a problem, is it unique to anthropology, and what can we do to change this?

Veronica Barassi: [00:17:31]

It's a very difficult question in the sense that, I can just talk about my personal experience, I did like I did the TED talk and and I did try to push the Child Data Citizen findings out there a bit more than I used to do in my research, you know, like, I'm thinking about things that I wrote on time and temporality or very theoretical that nobody really wanted to read and I'm just looking but but it's not, it's also true.

But I did it because I kind of thought I thought that it was my responsibility, I thought that you know, I had to do something. I saw that things, and especially in countries at the time, I used to live a bit of a strange biography in the sense that I was based in London, but my husband was relocated to Los Angeles at the same time as we had the one-year-old little girl. And so we kind of started living this crazy life between London and Los Angeles, because I didn't want to live a give up my tenured, permanent position at Goldsmith and he didn't want to give up his job. So we were kind of a bit stuck in this family situation, but and that's how I brought the Child Data Citizen. That's why I wrote Child Data Citizen across two cities, it was not like only one country. 

But what I was seeing it was that, especially in countries like the UK and the US, the datafication of citizens was exposing society to all sorts of inequality, of systemic bias, of injustice, and I thought that, yeah, that and as many others scholars around me, I was most certainly not alone, I thought that around us, there was a lot of scholars that were doing really interesting work. 

But that it was important to get the message out there in the form of, like really campaigning and raising awareness. And that's how it happened really. That's how I got to do the TED talk. The other thing that I realized very quickly, both in the US and the UK, but in Europe as well, also now in Italy, it was that I was, I was lucky enough to have a research question that people had not thought about it. Many people are not thought of, of course, the experts in children rights were already working on some of this, but it was in the broader society it was something that it was not very much thought. 

And when we were talking about children and data, we were mostly talking about sharing thing, the so-called parents that share information on social media, and I thought that it was so individualistic their approach that, that blaming parents for a very, very, very tiny practice out of the world of data collection that that I thought, yeah, that I needed to commit and try to become more public. 

And to be honest, I think, maybe I'm biased, so, but maybe because I do come from, I did most of my studies, and then I was faculty as well at Goldsmith, although, in a different department and the University of London and maybe I was really lucky to meet anthropologists like David Graeber, but I'm thinking of so like Brian Morris or I'm talking about like a lot of anthropologists that I met in that department were actually active in some way, or were trying to be and it was all about reaching, you know, becoming famous or public about really engaging the topic publicly. And I thought, I thought, you know, like I'm thinking about, that did a lot of work on health. And so there was clearly maybe, yeah, it's cool or I need to be more active in society and I, yeah, I owe that a lot to where I come from academically. 

Dawn Walter: [00:21:46]

I think it's so important for anthropology is to engage with the public. I often feel frustrated because I think that we've got so much accumulated knowledge and wisdom across the discipline, you know, and I wish we would just share it with the public a bit more and yeah, share our knowledge, you know, you know.  And I think David Graeber is a perfect example of, you know.

Veronica Barassi: [00:22:13]

He didn't do it, I don't think, he did it deliberately in a sense that he saw himself as being an activist, but the way which Graeber influenced public discourse, it's like the reach that that had, like his book, like it was very public and it was like people from all, all areas of the political spectrum were reading it. And I think that that's, I think that's great. And I think that that's what anthropology should do, you know.

But it is true that within the discipline, to go back if I'm not going too long, but within the discipline we tend to believe that if you actually are public then the type of knowledge that you’re producing is thin or that you're objectifying your findings, or that you are, which to certain degree is true, I mean, to be honest, like summarizing what three four years of ethnographic work in 10 minutes TED talk, it is, like we can’t lie to ourselves, it’s true and it's happening. But we can live with both. It's not that, if I do a ten minutes TED talk then I can't dwell, like I do in this last book that I wrote on profiling and categories and Mary Douglas, we can still do that. And I think, you know, the world that has to can only improve from again, that type of anthropological lens. And to say this also it’s like very important.

Dawn Walter: [00:23:57]

Before we go is there anything you want to leave us with that we haven't covered today?

 Veronica Barassi: [00:24:02]

So one, if I may say, one of my major critique of anthropology, we actually have a journal that is called Critique of Anthropology, but one of my major critiques of anthropology for young scholars is the fact that as anthropologists often shy away from engaging theoretically with disciplines that do not share their approach. 

There is a good reason behind that, which is that I think anthropology particularly as a discipline is particularly ferocious with its disciplinary boundaries because we are smallish discipline, because we do have a unique perspective, because anthropology departments, there are not many anthropology departments in the world or many other anthropology academic position in the world, so a lot of anthropologists just go off into all sorts of departments, from Human Geography to social sciences to, I don't know. 

And so there is a commitment of those that have to flee from the traditional anthropological department in maintaining that sense of identity, that sense that we are doing high-quality research, that has a different dimension to it, you know, that has something different and we all know that it has something different. 

So there is a positive element to this critique, or a justifiable element to this critique. And, but over the years, I often am personally encountered often a great deal of anthropological snobbism. And a great deal of, oh no, we don't talk about this.

Mind you, for someone who was co-supervised by someone in media communication, someone in anthropology, I used to struggle because every time that I brought back a chapter, that was completely decent chapter, I would get ‘this is not anthropological enough’, so that I remember that from my PhD days. This is not anthropological enough, it’s not true. 

Now, the moment I'm visiting professor in Münster, and I teach on a course on visual anthropology and it's quite interesting because we talk about what is anthropological enough, what makes something anthropological enough. So the last thing that I would say to people, to students, read, read plenty, read as much as you can even if you think that the. 

So if you're interested in a particular topic, especially like artificial intelligence, you're gonna come across so many books that are really high quality, but do not share an anthropological sensibility and but it's important to engage with those books. It's important to see what's out there and not be shy and not be snob if you want to know, not be critical or pre-emptive from the beginning and treat it as an anthropological experiment in the sense, go through those books to understand really what our cultural values at the moment, why as a society are we talking so much about artificial intelligence. 

The other aspect, when we think about artificial intelligence, and I, that I think it's important for the new general generations of anthropologists in the making is that we never had this. We never had machines that we actually had, I mean, we had some forms of it, but not to this level, and not in this situation where we are actually, we have to teach these machines to read our world. We have to teach them basic concepts, like what is a child, what is a woman, what is…And obviously, as anthropologists, we know that these concepts are so, so complex, they are so culturally specific, they are so biased. 

And so, and this is something that I think anthropology is really dare to do, is to, to highlight the way in which these technologies are always inevitably going to get and be biased. There's nothing that we can do about it. There's no way to fix them. There's no way. But we'll see what we can do is to limit that bias, or engage in a proper conversation about, you know, what type of definitions and categories we are teaching these machines. So and I hope, you know, we're going to see such great research that will emerge in the next several years. I'm actually looking forward to that.

Dawn Walter: [00:29:08]

That would be amazing, be amazing to see what comes out, definitely. Yeah. But thank you so much Veronica. It's been wonderful talking to you. 

Veronica Barassi: [00:29:16]

Thank you for having me.