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Bouvard on AI Data Gathering and Identity Politics

Dennis Bouvard · X / Twitter · Jul 08, 2026 · 1 min read

I don't see academic critics of AI and current data practices yet seeing the relationship between new modes of information gathering they fear will have deleterious effects on those othered along racial gendered, national, sexual, ableist, etc., lines and the very politicization

of those categories whereby they seek to express and mobilize resentment against sovereign orders; categories which are themselves simply the results of previous modes of gathering data useful for the state and turned political as ways of extracting resources and power from that

very state. Very sophisticated analyses only minimally approach a glimpse of the possibility that these very complaints about new information regimes "othering" just provides more data to those regimes rather than participating in some process of providing better categories and

therefore better data. Why should the litany of race/gender/sexuality/ability/nationality etc. provide the template for examining the limits of current operations other than the knowledge production regimes within the academy itself?

@truepeers Yes, but there's a centrifugal pull away from leftist critique in a lot of contemporary work while the gravity of the DEI categories drags them back into orbit. I wouldn't be surprised to see someone go ex-orbital, with some degree of knowingness.

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