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In the most recent exclusive Fall Recruiting Consortium, wealth management and data companies were overwhelmingly offered as promising employers to soon-to-be graduates from Connecticut College and five other elite private institutions. Not one week earlier, a session run by Conn alumni to recruit current students was advertised via Conn’s automated career notification system for Cervello, a company dedicated to “data management and business analytics.” Earlier in the semester, promotions for Infosys, a digital consulting firm, were also sent out via the same system.
Connecticut College consistently provides platforms for jobs in finance and data analytics. Given the very real, long-term damage work in these fields can do, it seems the College has a responsibility to provide students with the tools needed to engage in these jobs with a critical eye. Is Conn sufficiently enabling students to analyze how the jobs they are considering are complicit in structural racism and exploitation of the poor?
The stakes of this question are high. As an example of just how dangerous it can be to engage in work without thinking intentionally about its contribution to unequal power relations, consider Brittany Kaiser. Kaiser was an employee at Cambridge Analytica (CA), a data company whose rise is shown in the 2019 documentary film The Great Hack. Kaiser worked at CA (a subsidiary of the Strategic Communication Laboratories Group) for three years before casting herself as a whistleblower after the company’s collapse in 2018.
Cambridge Analytica’s collapse was brought on by the reporting of Carol Cadwalladr (reporter for The Guardian and The Observer) which revealed that CA had used data and psychometrics—essentially en masse personality testing to predict human behavior using digital data analysis—to sway elections. The two elections CA worked for that drew the most outrage in the UK and US were the 2016 Trump campaign and the Leave.eu campaign in the 2016 Brexit referendum.
According to The Great Hack, CA used Facebook apps to mine personality data on users to then generate personality profiles on voters. The company used these personality profiles to identify who could be influenced (referred to as “the persuadables”) and then would target those individuals with custom-designed advertisements in order to convince them to act in the way that would best benefit the campaign CA was working for. Kaiser, a former senior executive at Cambridge Analytica, was part of designing and assessing the tools CA used to sway elections by targeting just a fraction of the voting population. According to The Observer newspaper, CA “harvested 87 million Facebook profiles without the users’ knowledge or consent” (and Kaiser has warned that the number is likely even higher.)
Kaiser eventually came forward to cooperate with public inquiries into Cambridge Analytica’ and Facebook’s actions, but as she explains in an interview in January of this year, Kaiser’s original intentions were far from what her involvement in CA might indicate. Speaking on how she came to work for the now infamous data analytics company, Kaiser said: “I have always been a political and human rights activist. That’s where I came from, so it was really easy to snap back into that kind of work. I actually was in the third year of my Ph.D., writing about prevention of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, when I first met the former CEO of Cambridge Analytica, Alexander Nix.
“My Ph.D. ended up being about how you could get real-time information, so how you could use big data systems, in order to build early-warning systems to give people who make decisions…real-time information so that they can prevent war before it happens. Unfortunately, no one at my law school could teach me anything about predictive algorithms, so I joined this company part-time in order to start to learn how these early-warning systems could possibly be built.
”In one of my first meetings with [Alexander Nix], he showed me a contract that the company had with NATO in order to identify young people in the United Kingdom who were vulnerable to being recruited into ISIS, and running counter propaganda communications to keep them at home safe with their families instead of sneaking themselves into Syria. So, obviously, that type of work was incredibly attractive to me. And I thought, ‘Hey, data can really be used for good and for human rights impact. This is something I really want to learn how to do.’”
As her statement shows, Kaiser was approaching data analytics from a place of good intentions. Many have already made clear that having good intentions does not necessarily result in doing good, and certainly does not prevent one from doing harm. What Kaiser’s story shows is not only the continued truth in these warnings, but also the need for education to prepare young people eagerly looking to make positive change in the world to continually evaluate what purpose their actions are de facto serving.
Kaiser is likely representative of many young people: she was a well-intentioned person looking to do good in the world. Thus we should all pay close attention to this case, because it contains lessons for all students.
Why did it take the collapse of Cambridge Analytica in 2018 for Kaiser to see her actions as harmful? The answer lies in a failure to think through how one’s work fits into, aligns with, or disrupts structural power dynamics. By not asking what her work was accomplishing in the world and whether that matched her moral values, Kaiser has produced harm for years to come.
What Kaiser’s story shows is that not thinking through who one’s work is benefitting and at whose expense, can be very dangerous. People need to have the tools to see the potential dangers of their work no matter what field or job they enter, and the students at Conn are no exception. Is Conn’s curriculum sufficiently preparing its students to think critically about the relationship between power and knowledge, and to consider their role in this relationship? In order to produce consistent learning towards this end, Conn first needs to support its faculty in seeing knowledge not as a preformed solid that professors pass down unaltered to blank-minded students, but as something conditioned by and rendered “correct” by power.
The college’s Power, Knowledge and Practice Pathway (formerly Power and Knowledge) is an example of exactly this kind of work. According to Conn’s website, this Pathway “prepares students to analyze how relations of power condition the ways in which knowledge is produced. Students will reflect on the practices through which disciplines across the humanities, social sciences, arts and sciences produce knowledge that supports, normalizes or unsettles practices of power.” As needed as this learning is, only those students in the Pathway or with an exceptional professor will encounter this thinking. With fourteen different Pathways and four Centers to choose from, only a select few students will encounter this sustained, in-depth line of inquiry.
Brittany Kaiser’s story emphasizes how important it is both to understand the ways in which power and knowledge mutually construct one another, and to develop tools for critical self reflection that asks, ‘how am I complicit in producing unequal power relations?’ The College should do more than provide one Pathway to this end. Thinking that moves between structural and particular aspects of power-knowledge, that continually reflects on the work one does in terms of unequal power relations is the thinking that Conn must make central in its curriculum. Without this, it seems irresponsible to provide a platform for student employment at wealth consulting firms and data analytics companies.•
