I am a Mellon-SFU Data Fluencies Fellow at the Digital Democracies Institute, and a Ph.D. candidate at Simon Fraser University. My dissertation is about the relationship between social theory, intelligence, desire, and mimesis in contemporary late fascist politics. I teach critical data studies at Simon Fraser University.
My most recent work is Algorithmic Authenticity, which investigates the role that authenticity plays in contemporary information disorders. Fact-checking’s effectiveness is one of the fictions at the core of liberal democracy. Trump’s entire sideshow shtick notwithstanding, the idea usually ran that journalists just got the facts right when politicians occasionally lied. That’s not true, and the emergence of populist forms of threat with tenuous relationships to the truth isn’t historical news either. In response to this moment, we looked at the concept of algorithmic authenticity as a vector for these questions surrounding truth, fact, and digital subjecthood. You can find a copy, open access, here.