A Historiography of Amnesia: Beyond Data, Big Tech and the (Re)Turn to Human Rights

Abstract According to Elizabeth Renieris’ Beyond Data, contemporary technology governance has become too data-centric. Renieris argues that technology governance must move beyond a narrow focus on ‘data’ and towards a focus on ‘people’. More precisely, she calls for a ‘return to the original human rights-based conceptualisations of privacy and data protection’. Reading Renieris’ argument as symptomatic of a wider tendency, I argue in this review essay that the turn to human rights in technology scholarship is structured by a crucial forgetting or what I call a ‘historiography of amnesia’. While this historiography makes available the argument that human rights can serve as the uncontested normative ground for technology governance, it also obscures the large body of critical human rights scholarship, such that the turn to human rights in Beyond Data is actually a turn to a nostalgic fantasy of an ahistorical, apolitical human rights past.