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In this paper, we identify three responses evident in the dialogue regarding the emergence and development of data driven algorithmic governance. The first two responses, ones of access, inclusion and transparency, seek to remedy harms produced by the deployment of advanced digital technologies in public sector service provision. However, with a limited interest in contextualising these technologies relative to the social relations in which they are designed and deployed, these responses ultimately risk misidentifying the sources of harm, thereby reinforcing injustices. The third response, one of data justice, abolition and refusal, seeks to address the limitations to achieving social justice through prioritising digital access, inclusion and transparency. Offering a more transformative response to algorithmic governance, this third response focuses on fundamental questions regarding the deeply unequal power relations, structural inequalities and racism embedded in algorithmic systems, providing a critical repertoire of options for contesting and reconfiguring these relations. While the three responses do not constitute a chronology, we conclude with a discussion of the resurgent interest in refusal as a framework and method to intervene in harmful data-driven algorithmic systems. In so doing, we offer suggestions for how to collectively and institutionally operationalise refusal, alongside abolitionism and data justice, particularly in the area of social welfare provision, and to imagine and bring about alternative social, political and economic systems and relations that are radically transformative.

This chapter explores the question first posed by Susan Bickford in her book The Dissonance of Democracy concerning the absence of listening within Western political philosophy, and it argues that the increasing attention to freedom of speech is both a symptom and a cause of the corresponding attenuation of listening in the modern period. By closely attending to the arguments of John Stuart Mill’s ‘classic’ argument for freedom of expression in On Liberty, the chapter demonstrates how listening is simultaneously posited as foundational to freedom of speech and marginalized and relegated within liberal free speech theory from the outset. The chapter thus argues that the first, urgent task when conceptualizing an ethics and politics of reception and responsiveness is to push beyond the liberal communicative framework.