Why are we so afraid of No?
How inviting and embracing refusal can lead to transformative power shifts in data-driven systems and beyond.
sᴍᴀʟʟ ᴜᴘᴅᴀᴛᴇ: After a long year of finding new creative ways of working and starting my data rights education project Local Data Futures, I’ve started accepting contributions to sustain this newsletter! You should be able to remain as a free subscriber and still access all posts, comments, and chats, but if you have the means to back my voice as a writer in this space, I would deeply appreciate your investment!
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“Ya dijimos No, pero el Si está en todo.”
- “No” from the album Sirens
In the recent election, we witnessed a mass refusal of the status quo. Masses of people who are committed to the rights of all people to live full, dignified lives free of colonial violence, genocide, and exploitation refused to support a candidate who could not say the same.
Refusal matters. So many national nonprofits that I’ve worked with on data and technology policy have good values on paper: to work toward everyone’s well-being, to bring about more equity or transparency. But unless refusal is part of our value systems, we miss the transformative moments that actually allow us to upend bad practices and replace bad processes with better ones.
Over and over again technocrats look for new words to describe practices that are supposed to invite “community members” into design and bring about general well-being (think: co-design, co-creation, building with and not for). Yet, after using one of these words for a while, we have to move on and find new ones because the thing that’s supposed to happen doesn’t happen. At best, there is marginal input from community participants but it still doesn’t feel right.
Why is this? I’ve been in countless workshops and design sessions where people throw their hands up to the sky, like “What magic words do we need to say to get these people to feel they have an equal say?” All the while, obvious relationships of power are in the room with us, ones that could only get exposed by raising the issue — raising a challenge — to the system of power itself.
According to research by Chelsea Barabas in her paper “Refusal in data ethics: Re-imagining the code beneath the code of computation in the carceral state,” refusal as a practice can be considered a form of resistance or a practice of re-centering the margins. Re-centering the margins means stepping out of the frame of endless momentum and inevitability, and instead stopping to look around at the scenery, taking into account perspectives that may have been discarded by the roadside.
As long as I’ve been designing civic processes in community, I’ve held the principle that the person who holds power in a project is the one who can stop it from going forward.
Many collaborations between institutions and communities that I’ve been a part of have involved “co-design” so that governments could be more sure that what they decide to build would actually be beneficial to and needed by communities. I was a supporter and designer of many of these processes starting early in my career, before I understood what real community power could look like, but I observed and learned from those experiences.
It’s possible that being in so many largely fruitless co-design processes and watching them fail to “empower communities” time after time after time was really what radicalized me. In many of these processes, I saw “community members” saying no. I saw them repeatedly, persistently rejecting the work, and I saw governments and their allies going ahead regardless.
In a lot of these cases, the ways that people refused our proposed processes were… I’ll say, creative. Sometimes people would repeatedly skip meetings; sometimes they would lie and go behind our backs to try to stall the work; sometimes they would start outright competing projects; sometimes organizational partners would invite community stakeholders to voice things that they felt they couldn’t say; and sometimes they would outright raise the issue of power dynamics and bias negatively shaping the design process and hope for a legitimizing response.
In all the times I have seen people through their words and through their actions refuse working with a local government entity, I have never seen a local government actually halt their data or technology project. I have never seen a local government admit, “Maybe this wasn’t the right direction. We’re going to go back to the drawing board and do something different.”
My takeaway from this was that governments and institutions are not actually interested in co-design or anything like it — that’s why none of the language works. Real co-design requires sharing power. What governments really want is so-called constructive input, feedback, or (in their ideal world) total validation of their efforts with just a few cosmetic changes!
But I am here to say: If a project doesn’t stop when the community doesn’t want it, then the community does not hold actual power.
The key to unmasking this blind spot is to understand why we experience so much fear and avoidance around refusal. For each of us, this internalized bias might look different.
For some, it might feel counterproductive or antagonistic for people to simply refuse what you see as an innovative opportunity. To those I would ask: Why is productivity your main concern if the goal of your work is supposedly to make your community better?
For others, it might feel scary to start from scratch, to let go of months and years of effort to abandon something and move in a new direction. To those I would ask: Have you had other experiences where letting go of a bad thing allowed you to find something ten times better? Why would this be different?
Designing for refusal can create the pathways that the people you serve might need to actually express themselves. Creating space for a Hard No can be the fertile ground that allows new possibilities to spring up in its place. It’s by touching in with the people who refuse that we’ll find the answers that we’re looking for, both in design and I think in life.
Designing for refusal is the most powerful tool for social change that is also consistently the least prioritized in civic design processes.
Functionality for refusal in data and technology systems mostly looks like opt-out functions and opportunities for meaningful consent. But many times, even these basic functions are hidden away from people, making it difficult to exercise these rights.
In a scan of projects that apply anti-extractive methods of data governance conducted by the Mozilla Foundation’s Data Futures Lab, only about 19 out of 149 have projects were found to provide “Easier management of data about own person/community/group” as the primary benefit, which would include being able to delete or remove information.
That’s not to say that others don’t provide this benefit but that actual direct control over personal/community information in data systems is rarely the top priority. Often when competing priorities emerge, people make choices that expose their true values.
And even if consent and ability to opt-out are functions that are desirable under an alternative data governance paradigm, failing to prioritize these functions in design processes shows that people don’t understand their transformative potential.
It’s through this quiet acquiescence and preferential bias toward moving forward despite, instead of making intentional choices because, that implicitly replicates the same power dynamics that all of us seem to be now talking about upending.
One of the most impactful and life-altering principles I’ve come to appreciate through dedicated study of abolitionist frameworks is that in order for new possibilities to be born, some things need to die. This concept comes from a deeply spiritual place but also directly from the natural world all around us.
In order for a forest to experience new growth, some old growth needs to burn. In order for gardens to thrive, they need to be fertilized with compost, dead-alive material. Our current earth systems, dominated by capitalism, are trapped in a life/death paradigm instead of making way for life/death/life cycles which, at the point of death, urge us to trust in the coming of something new.
We refuse to accept refusal, we refuse to accept the Hard No, because it frightens us from a place deep within our bodies that I believe is situated right next to our fear of dying.
Long-term, I hope that we don’t always have to be in this place of outright refusal. I believe that mutual trust can be a starting point for the more collaborative forms of design and participation that we hope to see in the world. But we have to acknowledge that we, at least in the US, are not currently at that point.
“No” is the last refuge of someone who has been pushed out of places of systemic power. It is a starting point for new forms of collective power.
I’m speaking now to people who are actively refusing abusive and oppressive systems of power. Your No is valid. Your No is needed.
Indigenous data sovereignty paradigms rely on a right to refusal to protect Indigenous people from abuses of data fueled by ongoing systems of colonial extraction, as described in this paper by numerous authors called “Indigenous Peoples' Rights in Data: a contribution toward Indigenous Research Sovereignty.” This resource also outlines Indigenous Peoples’ fundamental rights to use data for self-determination, for reclamation of cultural identities, for jurisdictional control over data flows, for data uses toward collective good, and toward digital autonomy and consent.
For more information on how to incorporate refusal into design of data-driven systems, you can also refer to Jonathan Zong and J. Nathan Matias’ paper “Data Refusal from Below: A Framework for Understanding.” This resource can help answer difficult questions that will arise when you start trying to incorporate refusal into the design of your data systems, specifically outlining data constituents’ common experiences around autonomy, time, power, and cost.
I share these resources not only because I want to acknowledge the work that has already been done on this subject, but because I want to show that there are already people trying to guide us in the direction of making these observations about the politics of refusal into something real and transformative.
Implementing refusal as a practice, especially as a designer or decision-maker of data-driven systems, is the first step out of the dark abyss of not understanding, of repeating mistakes over and over again. And as a data constituent, organizing mass refusal is a lever toward systemic change.
As you begin to observe where refusal shows up in your life or your work, and as you start to respond differently to it, I hope that you will also share your observations. I hope that we will together start to learn how leaning into someone else’s refusal can help us move to different sides of our issues, to find new pathways forward.
All of us can also start practicing refusal when we encounter people, practices, or systems that don’t align with liberatory values. We just have to! Adelante!
LINKED THINKING
“No” by Sara Ahmed, Feminist Killjoys
“No” by Nicolas Jaar, Sirens
“To Build a Better Future, Designers Need to Start Saying ‘No’” by Chelsea Barabas, OneZero
I want to extend a special thank you to researchers and public intellectuals who publish their work for free with open access. My work would be impossible without you :)