Rebecca Williams studies how data and technology shape power, and how we can resist surveillance and extraction while building systems rooted in collective care and self-determination.
Movements to reclaim power over technology are springing up, from Neo-Luddism to Permacomputing to Rewilding the Internet. Alongside these approaches, we must discuss how tech has atrophied the exact civic muscle we’ll need to reclaim power over it.
If the shadow of every ID check is permission, then the shadow of digital ID systems is the ability to deny permissions in more places, more often, and with less friction.
Co-authored with Cynthia Conti-Cook and published by the Surveillance Resistance Lab, this report examines the technologies, institutions, and incentives driving digital ID expansion and outlines urgent demands needed to protect human dignity.
Tech Shadow Work launches in 2026 as a periodic newsletter. Each issue follows the shadow of a technology or tech policy concept to uncover deeper questions of politics, power, and society.
Taught at the Pratt School of Information, this seminar introduced students to the foundations of information rights, the harms produced by information systems, and the creative and political strategies communities use to push back.
Published in Tech Policy Press, this piece shows how Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani can make New York a model for people-centered technology by resisting surveillance and investing in affordability, dignity, and justice.
Co-authored with Cynthia Conti-Cook and Pratika Katiyar and published in User Mag, this piece unpacks how age verification laws serve Big Tech profits and political theater while undermining rights for everyone online.
Hosted by the Brooklyn Public Library, this Burner Phone 101 workshop introduced participants to phone-related risk modeling, privacy-protective smartphone practices, the full spectrum of burner phone options, and when to leave phones behind entirely.
Co-authored with Cynthia Conti-Cook and Sawyeh Esmaili and published in Convergence Magazine, this piece describes how digital IDs (and expanding mDL programs) threaten to expand government power to police people’s movement and reproductive care.
Published by the Surveillance Resistance Lab, these resources include a live state-by-state status tracker, actionable organizing strategies, and a rights-based framework outlining key demands to resist digital ID systems.
The perfect accelerationist: a hydra of data, capital, and violence.
Published in Tech Policy Press, this piece explains how budget loopholes and cybersecurity authorities enabled the rise of DOGE’s parent agency, the U.S. Digital Service. It outlines how Congress could defund DOGE to reclaim oversight.
Check out my talk, "Digital Identity Crisis: How Digital ID Threatens Democracy, Safety, and Our Humanity—and Just Alternatives " which succinctly describes harms created by historic IDs and new harms created by digital IDs, ways to resist digital IDs, and how to begin thinking beyond IDs.
Self-expression, lifelong learning, and sublimating your technical day job with online art classes.
A series of paintings inspired by CAPTCHAs and what they get wrong.