My focus for this week’s blog is Cottom’s arguments about the political-economic and cultural implication of big data. I planned to center this in relation to my observation of the NYC public charter school system’s questionable deployment of data to govern educational decisions for vulnerable k-12 children.

However, in light of the Class-D felony indictment of one of three officers involved in the killing of Breonna Taylor (at the time of this entry), I feel Cottom’s argument is even more pronounced as we look at the role of big data in the case of Taylor.

For those unfamiliar, Breonna Taylor was a former EMT, lover of life, and constituent of Louisville, Kentucky killed in her home during a violent police raid.

Much like the 2015 death of Sandra Bland in police custody, the optics of Taylor’s death was rapidly reduced to a social media trend from desperately monetizable media accounts and private companies who saturated our pandemic-economy with seed grants in attempt to profit from her death and protests. The digital consumption of her death gave returns along the lines of clout, rebranding, and likely unreported income for certain companies and personalities that attach her likeliness to their digital profiles in a time of quarantine.

The largely hurtful trends I’ve seen include microscopic texts on random body-parts and objects, that when enlarged reiterate the fact she is dead, or playfully call for the ‘arrest’ of the officers involved. Other examples include clickbait captions and threads on Twitter, inappropriately copied from fandom accounts (‘stans’) who originally leveraged it to visibilize Taylor and dozens of related petitions across the country in the vain of justice. The popular application, Tik Tok, was also a hub for what can be perceived as deleterious to her case and mourning. 

But among the most disturbing include the seemingly unauthorized use of Taylor’s image to make murals and BLM merchandise that yet again, generate profit, and subtract from a path toward healing and the state naming its agent (and itself) as the transgressor. This is especially symbolic in an instance where a Black woman is the deceased in a potential case against the state (of Kentucky).

Around the same time of Bland’s death, a critical hashtag, #SayHerName, emerged across social media, inspired from philosopher and legal Black feminist , Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s Say Her Name campaign. It highlights the cases and nominal information that substantiate how Black women, girls, and femmes have and currently experience violence and fatality at alarming rates, in and from the state. It also unpacks how their stories become ambiguated in justice work with the priority on cismale counterparts by media.

As I consider this, and Cottom’s discussion on the de-prioritization of power-relations in the push for big data (and how that depreciates analysis), I see how terrifyingly connected it is to the indictment and treatment of Taylor’s life — and death — from the inception. Even in passing, Taylor is not appreciated as a person, but instead consumed as a unit of information for power and profit.

Rest in peace to Breonna Taylor, her life and legacy are not #trends.