The Only Data that Matters

Resistance under the new tech oligarchy

This article is about AI, and about data. And it’s about what the people in power consider to be valuable data, and what they consider isn’t.

Trump’s inauguration at the beginning of this week brought some of the most famous tech billionaires to the Capitol Rotunda to applaud his swearing in, including Shou Zi Chew, CEO of TikTok, the app that Trump “saved” for America. Or something.

All of these billionaire tech bros literally backing Trump and his administration sent an impossible-to-ignore signal to the world about who is really in power right now. Because out of all of tech billionaires amassed on the Inaugural stage, there was not a single woman.

There are female tech billionaires — 11 of them, to be exact. They are working, building things, amassing data, mostly through products that target women as their primary market, such as Canva and Bumble. But they were not invited to that stage.

Which tells us that women’s data still doesn’t matter.

If you’ve been on the Internet at all over the past 20 years, you probably know by now that all of your interactions on social media platforms have been and are being mined for data to build AI models. Meta has an AI model, Google has an AI model, of course there’s Open AI, etc., etc…